I recently came across two articles on rituals and particularly on how rituals should interact with missions. I found these articles to be really interesting. I have for a while now believed that God can and does use ritual, myth and symbolism to speak in a very deep way to his people and these articles spoke more to that belief.

Here are some quotes from this article that I really enjoyed:

“To neglect ritual is to ignore a holistic way of deepening people’s faith in Christ. It also ignores the fact that the human person is a ritual being. Ritual brings order to communications; builds a sense of security and belonging, and opens people to a sense of the sacred.”

“Since ritual works on the trans-rational level it generates wholeness because it engages the whole person and in the active engagement through myth and symbol, gesture and movement transformation occurs.”

Here is a link to the second article

This second article was much more scientific and talked about research that biogeneticists have done on ritual and how people relate to rituals. Very interesting. I really liked at the end though when the discussion turned to “Two Threats to Ritual”. The article commented that those two threats were “an ideology of intimacy” and individualism.

I found both of these very interesting and will definitely be thinking more about the role of ritual and symbolism in the life of faith communities…

Rejoicing in the journey -
Beth Stedman

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