Let Us Touch

Person-to-person contact at the average American church service is almost as rare as it is in a movie audience. Parishioners begin to nod drowsily as the minister begins the sermon; collective prayer and singing masks the reality that most worshipers are atomistically locked in their own private thoughts. Worried about this failure to interact, a few avant-garde theologians are experimenting with new, nonverbal techniques as potential ways of restoring some sense of community in worship. A striking example of this trend took place at the recent assembly of the World Council of Churches in Uppsala, Sweden, where Wilbert H. McGaw Jr. presided over a series of what he calls "touch-and-tell" services that used physical contact as a stimulus to prayer.

An Episcopal layman, McGaw is a staff member of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He also heads an experimental worship program involving 14 Southern California Protestant ministers and two Roman Catholic priests who use touch-and-tell techniques in their own services and gather periodically to compare the results.

All Join Hands. At Uppsala, Mc Gaw held his services at a small pre- fabricated chapel outside the main assembly hall. Initially, he asked the worshipers, mostly curious clergymen and youth delegates attending the conference, to divide themselves into circles of six, join hands and pray or meditate. Each person was then asked to explain what the moment had meant for him. In the next phase, the worshipers one by one stood in the center of the circle, closed their eyes, and let themselves fall backward; they were caught and passed from one member of the group to another. "The purpose," explained McGaw, "is to find out how much they will trust themselves in the hands or arms of others, to be supported in a comfortable, loving way, to be handled gently." Afterward the participants sat down and again gave their impressions of the experience. "A lot of people begin to own up to the fact that it is hard for them to give love, affection and support to others," McGaw said. "Others surprise themselves at how Christian and giving and risk-taking they can be."

In the third and last phase of the service, each participant was told by McGaw to rise, gaze into the eyes of his fellow group members, and "reach out and touch them in any way--a handshake, a hand on a shoulder, even an embrace." After 30 seconds they were to tell each neighbor in the circle "what they honestly admire, respect and perhaps even love in him." McGaw described the touch-and-tell, which was interspersed with appropriate Bible readings, as "a different form of sermon."

Strength by Contact. Tactile liturgy is taking hold in several other areas of the U.S. Boston's Arlington Street Unitarian Church held a service this spring in which members of a local theater workshop, eyes closed and feigning blindness, moved through the pews to be helped along by parishioners' hands. A seminarian at the Chicago Theological Seminary, Kent Schneider, recently designed a service for his own wedding that turned into a chain of personal contact. After kissing each other, both bride and bridegroom kissed another member of the wedding party on the cheek, and the cycle was continued until every person in the church had been bussed.

The symbolic significance of touching has always been recognized by religion. The "kiss of peace" has been a part of Christian liturgies since at least the second century and has recently been revived, in the form of a handshake, by an experimental service of the Episcopal Church. The "laying on of hands," in connection with baptism, ordination of ministers, or the reception of new members into a church, is an accepted Protestant tradition. The notion of God's touch infusing strength is reflected throughout the Bible. Jesus himself, McGaw notes, responded to calls for help with "a glance, a word or a touch."

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