Remembering Marva Dawn, a saint of modern worship

When a mentor saw that I was struggling with worship in our fledgling ward, he gave me a copy of Marva Dawn’s Achievement Without Dejection: A Theology of Worship in This Urgent Time. I wondered what a Lutheran and historical worship lover would have to say to a community whose traditions were more from indie rock shows than any church.

It turns out that the work of Marva Dawn, who died last month at the age of 72, was life-giving. Like many of my generation, I began my ministry feeling that there was something unsatisfactory about the experiences I had grown up with, and Dawn invited us to reconsider much of what had been put aside in the decades before.

I have no doubt that some of the credit for renewed interest in the hymnody and liturgy over the past two decades can be attributed to Dawn’s response to church trends of the 1980s and 1990s, including the worship and worship movement emerging from places like The Vineyard dates back to and the Willow Creek-led “seeker-sensitive” movement.

Dawn wrote in Reaching Out that many of the changes the Church accepted – aesthetically, stylistically, and technologically – were made uncritically. She could see that these changes in the culture of the church were also changes in the nature of the church as the congregations turned into “mega-corporations rather than Christian communities.”

At the height of the Wars of Adoration, churches fought against the transition from choirs, organs, and hymn books to lobbands and overhead projectors. Proponents of contemporary worship beat the drum of evangelistic opportunity while traditionalists fought for the church’s connection to church history and the riches of the hymn book.

But Dawn tried to achieve the purpose of worship itself: an encounter with a transcendent and living God. Traditionalists could miss this point by idolizing their traditions. Proponents of contemporary worship might miss the point by centering the individual. It was on this last point that her voice was most prophetic and even bitterest. She saw the roots of much of contemporary worship in the broader cultural movements of the 20th century, particularly the dominance of technology, consumerism, and narcissism.

Shifting the narcissistic individual as the center of worship experience challenged pastors and worship leaders to maintain their churches. The message of the gospel and God himself were instrumental in fueling the good feelings of the church members. The feeling that the church was participating in a transcendent encounter with God was lost.

“The difficulty for churches is to find worship practices that invite boomers to experience the truth of God without the self-absorption that distorts them,” wrote Dawn. “How can we impart God’s revelation to those who consider their self-discovered experiences superior to the truths conveyed by the Church’s creeds?”

In Reaching Out and its follow-up, A Royal “Waste of Time”: The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World, she called pastors and churches to stop thinking about worship, what she could do for the church and Return to see it as a sacred invitation to honor God with our words and our lives. A story she told in a lecture summed up her attitude well. A congregation approached them after a service to complain about one of the hymns the church was singing. “It’s okay,” she told them. “It wasn’t really about you anyway.”

Songwriter Sandra McCracken told me, “Marva Dawn was the first writer to teach me that the songs we sing together actually help us practice unity in diversity. She writes about what it should be like when we all love every third song in a service. Knowing each other’s story stimulates our affection to look beyond our own preferences. “

After many years of reading Dawn’s letter, it would provide another significant revelation. It came about at a symposium at Calvin University when I first met her. I confess that after reading it as such a powerful and prophetic voice, I expected some kind of presence from John the Baptist: wild-eyed, wild. Instead, I met one of the gentlest and most joyful people I have ever met. She had a big smile, deep attention to every person she spoke to, and softly spoken tenderness. I once heard Dallas Willard talk about meeting elderly Saints who “lived in another world among us.” That description was a wonderful fit for Marva Dawn.

Dawn’s joy came in the midst of a life of struggles with pain and illness. She faced battles with cancer, chronic pain, blindness in one eye, a liver transplant, and problems with one foot that made walking difficult or impossible. She often wrote about her suffering, especially in her book “Feeling good when we are sick: Wholeness and hope despite ailments”. Wellness as it has defined it does not lie in the recovery of our body from illness, but in finding a different kind of wellness in the pursuit of God and in the promise of resurrection.

This pursuit led her to a productive life of writing and teaching. Dawn holds a ThM from Pacific Lutheran Seminary, an MDiv from Western Evangelical Seminary, an MA in English from the University of Idaho, and an MA and PhD in Christian Ethics from the University of Notre Dame. She served as a teaching fellow at Regent College, Vancouver, teaching about the nonprofit Christians who were equipped for the ministry, Christians around the world.

She has authored more than 20 books in her life on topics such as Sabbath keeping, calling to service, good suffering, and sexuality. Her book Powers, Weakness and The Tabernacling of God won the Christianity Today Book Award in 2002.

“Marva was a prophet for our time and a saint in our day. She wrote passionately about worshiping God and the rest of God. She has neither crushed her words nor forced herself on others. She was lively, winked, and joyful in a wonderfully infectious way, ”said David Taylor, professor of theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. “She was our own Protestant ‘little flower’, frail in body but beautiful in soul, and now royally wastes her time in God’s presence. Those of us in the field of liturgical study and in positions to lead the worship of the Church owe her a great debt. “

In an interview with her publisher, she was asked what she would like to be reminded of as an author. “I’m just trying to convey what I’m learning from God,” she said. “I pray that people in my books will encounter God and grow in wisdom to lead a real Christian life.”

Dawn died on April 18, 2021 in Vancouver, Washington with her 32-year-old husband Myron Sandberg and brother Glen Gersmehl by her side. A memorial is planned for this summer if COVID-19 restrictions allow.