The People’s Faith: The Liturgy of the Faithful in Orthodoxy by Nicholas E. Denysenko (review)

Nicholas Denysenko has become a leading voice among liturgical scholars, particularly from the Eastern Church. He has published numerous studies—on the blessing of water at Epiphany, on Chrismation, on liturgical reform after Vatican II and its impact on the Eastern Church, on architecture and liturgy, on the contemporary history of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and an edited volume on icons and the liturgy—as well as significant articles on a range of liturgical issues. An especially fine pair in Worship focused on belonging as expressed in texts of the divine liturgy. It is important to note that he is a trained musician, has performed with several professional choral groups, and has been the choir director of two cathedrals. He is an ordained deacon in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).

The present volume is singular in being an examination of how the people of God, that is, laity and clergy, actually experience the liturgy. As a sociologist of religion and a priest, I applaud this effort to interview and converse with both clergy and laity about how they celebrate liturgy, understand the worship life of the church, and connect it to their lives. Denysenko’s fascinating exploration comes through extended interviews with members of four parishes, and his methodology is taken from the work of real masters of observation of liturgical performance and life such as Mary Ann Kelleher, as well as Marke Searle, Nathan Mitchell, and Kevin Irwin. In this work, he also joins the well-regarded approach of Nancy Ammerman, Robert Orsi, David Hall, and Ricky Manolo in their studies of religion in practice, as well as the work of Mary McGann, Sally K. Gallaher, and Amy Slagle, among others.

Denysenko’s work is groundbreaking when it comes to its focus on people’s understanding of how they worship—the sacraments, the liturgy and its language, their own practices regarding confession, personal prayer, and the liturgical year as well. He constructed focus groups and conducted interviews in four parishes that represent something of the diversity of American Orthodox churches. The parishes were from the Greek Archdiocese, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, and the Orthodox Church in America. He also attempted to attend to the regionalism of the country and the church, examining parishes from the East and West Coasts as well as the Midwest.

Further, Denysenko pursues this look at popular perception of liturgy against the backdrop of his other studies on liturgy and renewal. The first component of this work is an overview with commentary on the liturgical practices of the Orthodox churches in America, looking both at the schools of liturgical theology as well as surveys of pastors’ accounts of how liturgy is celebrated in actual parishes. Special attention, of course, is given to Alexander Schmemann’s groundbreaking work both in the study of liturgy as well as in actual liturgical renewal and reforms he urged and practiced. Also examined are the efforts of Alkiviadis Calivas at the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Calivas’s work is not well known but is striking in its grounding in pastoral experience (as he was pastor of two large churches for twenty years) and its concern with bridging liturgy and life, the church and the world, even more emphatically than other liturgical scholars. In order to be comprehensive, Denysenko looks at the liturgical maximalists, that of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in particular. Lastly, no review of liturgical study and renewal would be complete without consideration of the magisterial work of Robert Taft, and Denysenko does this most effectively.

The solicitation of clergy thinking on the liturgy when coupled with the focus groups and interviews with parish members yields a rich look at how liturgy is experienced and understood. Such a focus on “lived religion,” that is, on liturgy not just in theological and rubrical texts but as experienced in celebration, is a breakthrough for Eastern Church liturgical...