청년예배의 예전적 요소의 필요성과 확대에 관한 연구 - 기독교대한감리회 청년예배를 중심으로 -

Abstract

The Protestant Church in Korea has made serious and sincere effort to transform the form of worship since 1980’s. This effort has given birth to three emerging forms of worship. The first is a praising worship or an open worship which has been influenced by a free form of spiritual-presence-centered worship. The second is liturgical worship that has been influenced by the worship reformation movement for communion recovery movement, which aimed at the recovery of traditional liturgy. Lastly, the third is the traditional preaching-centered worship of Korean Protestant Church, which has derived from the forms the missionaries in the past taught. It has been a tidy cultural stream to have open worship in the form of praising worship for youth or young people. It does not stop at trying to introduce some change into traditional form of worship. Further, it has become a trend to replace the traditional form with different forms and styles of worship. The reasons for this are accommodation with the sentiment of the young generation and cultural adaptation to the change of the age. However, its real effect seems to only seek for the numerical growth of the youth members by satisfying their emotional and cultural needs. This is another form of standardization of the form of worship in a way to relegate worship to a meeting with its own special forms and styles by reason of only satisfying the emotional and cultural sentiments of young generation. The introduction of liturgical elements into the youth worship prevent it from demoting worship to social meeting. The essential elements of the worship tradition of Korean Protestant Church as well as youth worship are the liturgy of the Words and the liturgy of the Communion. These should include ‘entrance,’ ‘Word’(God speaks), ‘communion’ or thanksgiving’ and dismissal or sending, as Robert E. Webber shows in his traditional fourfold pattern of liturgical worship. As a result of surveying some representative worship services for young people in Korean Methodist Church, these open worships commonly lack a clear form of entrance and miss communion. They are full of modern cultural apparatus, which reflects the age of the youth and the characteristics of the times. There is an urgent need to integrate two cultures of worship. For that purpose, one needs both to find a way to preserve the traditional elements of worship in order to keep the holiness of worship abundant and to be sensitive to the cultural needs of young generation. It does not mean that we have to automatically or forcefully insert or add the traditional elements to open worship. In order to generate an integrated form of worship for youth as well as the older, there needs studies and discussion between worship leaders and theologians.