Biographically Anchored Liturgies as a Starting Point for Liturgical Formation

Abstract

The liturgical professional development project for pastoral workers and clergy in the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart has been developed in collaboration with the Department of Liturgical Studies at the University of Tübingen. The concept of biographical learning is the innovative element that explores a new type of liturgical formation (Bildung) where the learning content explores the participant’s unique biography of learning, faith development, and theological education and the impact of these on their understanding of the liturgy and their liturgical practice. The learning process aims to equip professional pastoral theologians to reflect on and be responsive to the liturgical–pastoral contexts in which they work. The Department of Liturgical Studies provides the learning structure and context, while the diocese provides the teaching space and enables the participants to attend. The learning outcomes are unrelated to a specific professional or employment structure or associated with a points system, management, or career progression process. The project provides a learning process rather than a program of learning, distinguishing itself from many traditional approaches to liturgical formation. The challenge for the teaching team is to provide the participants with conceptual or theoretical material to reflect on their biographical narrative of theology and then apply this concept of biographical learning in their specific and diverse pastoral contexts. As part of the biographical learning process, participants contribute to “feedback loops” to the diocese and the teaching team. This paper does not address the competency framework for career development, employment assessment, or learning comprehension. All evaluations of professionalism, role attainment, career development, and competency are employment matters and are the purview of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart. However, the learning process provides participants with frameworks for self-assessment and feedback loops to evaluate the teaching team, the process, and the content.

1. Introduction

Liturgy is not an isolated reality that can be considered independently of ecclesial, theological, and social frameworks (see Deeg and Plüss 2021). What applies to liturgy also applies to liturgical formation (Bildung), both as education for the liturgy (information about liturgy through a group process, exercises in liturgical rooms, etc.) and formation through the liturgy (the impact of learning by doing or through experience). Within a complex, pluralistic context, the structure and content of the learning process interweave the liturgy and a person’s biography into the leitmotif for contemporary liturgical education (see Winter 2021).

The context of the process outlined below is post-academic or post-informational in that providing more information about the liturgy through instruction is not the primary goal or vision. The primary goal is to enable participants to recognize how they go about “doing liturgy”, the influences they bring to bear on their understanding of liturgy (what they accept as liturgically acceptable or not), and how these influences impact the liturgical and pastoral life of others.

The questions regarding liturgical formation also exist in a particular context and can only be meaningfully formulated, discussed, or answered in relationship to the place (in the sense of the social–cultural context) where the liturgy is celebrated. Biographies are not context-less. Each person’s biography is formed and informed through the context of their experience. Biographical or “life-world” (Lebenswelt) approaches anchor liturgy as a cultural phenomenon and biographical life-worlds anchor a professional theologian’s approach to liturgy. The concept of liturgical formation offered here explores the interconnection between biography, culture, and context as the basis of post-informational liturgical formation.

The project’s innovative aspect lies in its content and structure. Developed by the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart and the Department of Liturgical Studies at the University of Tübingen, it is in the third year of its initial phase. This article outlines the structure of this initial phase and the process used to design and deliver it.

The participants are employed lay pastoral theologians and ordained clergy of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart. All are professional theologians with at least three years of theological education and practical training. Each participant regularly presides at or manages pastoral and liturgical services or is engaged in liturgical education, such as sacramental preparation programs.

Consequently, the learning content and the learning process reflect the context and experience of the participants. It seeks to expose and then explore the participant’s biography of learning, faith development, and theological education as sources of learning for them that show them how these elements of their biography work as an influencer on how they (as practitioners) think about liturgy and what they view as acceptable or unacceptable liturgical practice. The liturgical formation offered through the process is reflective. As such, it is responsive to the internal dynamics of the participants and the pastoral contexts they serve.

1.1. Phase One: The Conceptual Phase

In the initial stages, the challenge was to develop a professional development process that does not use a programmatic approach with a prepackaged set of liturgical information. The conceptual challenge was to articulate what an open-ended structure of liturgical formation might look like and what shape its learning content would take. In short, (1) what would a participant learn and what would be their “takeaways” after the process, and (2) what would the diocese gain from this professional development process?

After initial discussions between the diocese and the department in mid-2021, the cooperation contract was signed in December 2021. At a retreat day in March 2022, members of the diocese’s Liturgical Training Team and the Institute for Continuing Education met with the department’s teaching team to decide and agree on the thematic focal points, the desired competencies, and the timetable for the project. In the second half of 2022, various educational formats were piloted with selected participants to see which type of learning format best suited the biographical approach and the outcomes wanted by the diocese.

On the second retreat day in January 2023, the thematic framework and modularization of the training concept were finalized. At this time, the department’s teaching team presented a comprehensive concept for the initial three-year training process that began in April 2023. Between April 2023 and December 2023, various teaching formats were used. Each format was assessed independently by the participants, the diocese, and the training team so that the training team could calibrate the current process and assess if an ongoing, cyclical, modularized model for pastoral professional development of this type was possible. The model for an ongoing process was presented to the diocese in December 2023.1

1.2. Point of Innovation: A Biographical Approach to Liturgical Formation

The innovative approach uses the sociological term biography (Wohlrab-Sahr 2015). The biographical approach allows participants to engage with their own life stories as the basis of their liturgical learning and practice framework. It also offers them avenues for integrating this approach into their liturgical and pastoral work, especially in their interactions with those who use their professional help and rely on them for liturgical instruction, formation, and worship.

Thus, the entire program has a different underlying logic than what is typically favored in liturgical education (both online and face-to-face), where liturgical education adheres to a classical model orientated toward the delivery of predetermined liturgical subjects, an example of which is the liturgy distance learning course (Liturgie im Fernkurs) in Germany, where the context of the learning is transferable across multiple contexts and not determined primarily by the context of the learner.2

1.3. Content Leitmotif: Liturgy, Biography, and the Significant Other

According to Wohlrab-Sahr’s model, individuals develop a biographical identity that is a communicative relationship to the self where “biographical narratives are an indispensable means of establishing temporal and factual connections, i.e., continuity and coherence” (Wohlrab-Sahr 2015, p. 93). In this model, biography emerges and dynamizes through communication with significant others (individuals and a collective). Here, one learns to view oneself “from the outside.” Through reproduction and transformation, a structure emerges representing an individual’s personhood. Indeed, given a certain degree of stabilization, a biographical reality emerges over time as individuals increasingly become subjects in their life-worlds.

A significant other may be an individual actor, such as a religious advisor, friend, or family member, or a collective actor, such as a parish, theology faculty, or diocese. When the significant other influences a professional’s formation and practice, their influence changes the practitioner’s understanding of their work and the purpose and shape of liturgical education and practice.

In the long term, this process contributes to group beliefs and community identities, which also serve as significant others for individual subjects. A significant other can be a collective, such as a church community or ethnic or social group. Thus, we all belong (simultaneously or successively) to several biographically relevant groups that influence us and to which we also contribute.

In a pluralistic context, individuals “decide” which affiliations they will adopt as relevant to their biography and those they will reject through the construction of narratives of meaning that construct “a more or less coherent order out of the dissonant, isolated, and random” (Bausenhart 2014, p. 63). Paul Ricœur speaks of “narrative identity” (Ricoeur 2013) that results from the story we tell ourselves that “revises and changes under the impression of new experiences” (Haker 2000, p. 182).

Although significant others change throughout an individual’s lifetime, a central relational core develops in an individual’s identity. This relational core is a malleable reality open to change and development. The idea of a biographical, relational core speaks to the stability of an individual as a subject but not in an essentialist way or in the sense of being (Wesen or Sein). The biographical core is not a given notion (religious or philosophical) but a sociological concept of personal biography that exists and changes over time through different influences. The concept of the significant other and an individual’s biographical core are dynamic.

Faith communities are also significant in that they are a particular narrative community that passes on the texts of the biblical and liturgical canons through the diversity of their historical reception and contemporary contexts. These contexts build within a community a biographical core that is often exemplified in their practice of liturgy and characterized in their liturgical formation processes. Liturgy (as both prayer and explanation) becomes the context of action where individuals and groups (as actors with agency) are enabled to influence the behaviors of others through their adoption of a role (“zitierende Rollenübernahme”, Häßling 1997, pp. 2–10).3

What is decisive for the specific profile of religious and especially biblical–Christian faith communities is that they offer a comprehensive interpretative option for human life beyond the irrevocable end of our spatial–temporal existence. Essentially, communities of Christian faith provide the promise that biographical identity is accepted by the biblical God, with all its fragmentary nature, and that it will experience a genuine wholeness through the promise of eternal completion. Furthermore, this Christian worldview demands that the promise to an individual be made fruitful in their biographical identity through celebrating the liturgy and caring for others. In this place, liturgy comes to life in charity and mercy.

In pastoral situations, individual biographies meet and impact each other. Those who receive pastoral care also have their biography and significant others who frame, inform, and influence their response to the pastoral worker’s presence and work.

A person can invite a pastoral worker into a professional conversation based on their positive experience of the Catholic Church, pastoral workers, or clergy. Similarly, a person can refuse to engage in a professional conversation based on their negative experience of pastoral workers, clergy, and the Church. In this respect, the application of Wohlrab-Sahr’s model of the significant other and the individual biography is the innovative aspect of the work presented here because it forms the basis of the learning process, the context of professional development, and the framing of the learning content in a dynamic context where the facilitator’s biography and the participant’s biography interact.

Therefore, the foundation of the liturgical formation applied in this specific (ecclesiastical) field of action is an established sociological biography model. The concept of biography is applied to the liturgical formation of (1) the pastoral professionals who develop a conceptual framework that influences their liturgy practice and (2) the individuals with whom the professional comes into contact in their pastoral roles.

The innovative approach taken here offers three unique opportunities:

• To work collaboratively in an interdisciplinary process between a diocese and an academic institution.
• To approach learning, formation, and content creation through a culturally sensitive and contextually applicable lens.
• To create a flexible, responsive, and dynamic formation process that is responsive to the needs and context of the participant.

2. Contemporary Liturgical Formation

2.1. Brief Historical Context

“The idea sits, like a pair of glasses on our nose, and what we look at, we see through them. It never occurs to us to take them off”, writes Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations §103). Categories such as “liturgy” and “education”, as with other historically orientated terms, need to be more closely analyzed regarding the conceptual history to which they have become central considerations. Therefore, preliminary remarks are essential because they set the scene for constructing the liturgical formation program offered here (Huber and Döll 2023; Winter 2019). It is also important to note that the project’s structure, purpose, and outcomes relate to the German word Bildung, translated throughout as development and not as learning or education.

The authoritative lens (in Wittgenstein’s sense) through which liturgy, with its related topics and complexity, is viewed is that of the Latin Rite or Roman Catholic Church and in particular the lens of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) of the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical reform it initiated (Baldovin 2008, 2017, 2022; Stuflesser 2011, 2014). Given the complexity of ritual and liturgical practice, further differentiation is necessary regarding the actual form of Catholic liturgy and what might constitute in each context a “catholic-influenced worship landscape” and what a “catholic-influenced worship landscape” might look like from an international or global perspective. All liturgical landscapes are created through personal, local, national, cultural, and international forces. How a particular cultural liturgical practice is interpreted locally will necessarily differ from how it might be interpreted from an international or global perspective. The differentiation between these two perspectives should be addressed, but neither does the focus of this paper allow for an extensive investigation of both perspectives.

Similarly, university liturgical studies in the Roman Catholic tradition (and research influenced by it) have positioned themselves, at least in the German-speaking world, writes Benedikt Kranemann, in a liturgical science that “initially focused […] its interest almost exclusively on the internal Church and was primarily concerned with church-ordered liturgy. Phenomena such as lack of faith, indifferentism, loss of tradition, and atheism were barely or insufficiently recognized, although they indirectly impacted the Church’s worship. Liturgical science thus contributed to an ecclesiastical self-affirmation whereas its task should have been to analyze the situation critically, combined with the search for criteria for theologically legitimate, diverse forms of liturgy that bring faith into dialogue anew” (Kranemann 2022, p. 378). Since the Vatican Council announced its desire for a new experience of liturgical prayer and a deeper understanding of liturgical formation, liturgical science has, writes Kranemann, been in a continual search of this desideratum.4

By and large, liturgical formation has been subsumed into liturgical education, which has become the delivery of information that sustains internal ecclesial cohesion. Liturgical information has replaced the need for liturgical formation, with the consequence that Bildung has become education and information, not formation.

The impact of information and education has framed how we understand the objective to deepen “more and more the Christian life among the faithful, better adapting the institutions subject to change to the needs of our age, promoting whatever can contribute to the unity of all who believe in Christ, and strengthening whatever can help to call all into the bosom of the Church”. Adaptation and unity are delivered as information, not as formation, in much of the post-conciliar liturgical science and practice (Stuflesser 2022; Larson-Miller and Stuflesser 2016).5

Sacrosanctum Concilium’s goals noted above appear initially to be achieved first through an internal process of change and secondarily through an external change “by renewing and cultivating the liturgy”, which “daily builds up those who are inside the holy temple [and] … marvelously strengthens their powers to proclaim Christ”, and the Church is presented “to those who are outside as a sign that is established among the nations.” At first glance, this appears to negate Kranemann’s thesis. The internal/external dynamic is, at first glance, complex. However, when one considers the text in its historical context and adjusts for this, it becomes possible to argue that liturgical formation must also provide the impetus for the life of the faithful to become an expression and revelation of “the mystery of Christ and the very essence of the true Church” and so the faithful become the bridge between the internal and the external.6

The faithful, as the bridge between the internal and the external, expresses the deepest symbolic character of the Church and SC’s principle of “full, conscious, and active participation” of all the baptized (see Knop 2013, 2015), a principle that articulates the overall doctrine of SC. Active participation is “most strongly observed in the renewal and promotion of the sacred liturgy since it is the first and indispensable source from which Christians are to draw a truly Christian spirit” (SC14). Such a comprehensive participatio is also the goal of liturgical formation and to be “conscientiously pursued by pastors in all their pastoral work through proper instruction”, and they too must allow themselves to be “deeply imbued with the spirit and power of the liturgy” and “become teachers in it” (SC14).

The principle of active participation carries within it an energy that reaches far beyond the scenario where people “did things” at Mass to a foundationally conscious participation in liturgy related to the concrete realities of life and the sociocultural contexts and dynamics that shape them. Like their corresponding interactions, these realities of life and influences are constantly in flux, as seen in the ever-accelerating individualization and collectivization driven by choice, in the processes of globalization, and in the new forms of regional or local orientation, where the profound processes of change or the disintegration of political systems and in the increasingly existential phenomena of crisis that also has a planetary dimension. All this must be considered within the conception of the liturgy and included in an overall concept of liturgical formation, to which we will return shortly.

2.2. Liturgical Formation Becomes Education

Church historian Ines Weber (Weber 2021) highlights the paradigmatic position in the history of ideas of platonic thought (427–347 BC) and describes the notion that Bildung (education) is the liberation from false or provisional perceptions.

Education leads people who engage with it to a place of maturity or formation. In the Christian tradition, Meister Eckhart’s (1260–1328) understanding is significant because the human person—in the best-case scenario—can be remodeled throughout their life by education because they are, according to the creator’s original idea, modeled in the image of God and therefore capable of being formed and reformed in line with the creator’s intention. Here, education is understood as external to the person and formation as internal. Education guides from the outside, while formation changes from the inside as one becomes the image of the divine (Müller 2010, pp. 114–35). Thus, education and formation cannot be surgically separated or treated as unrelated in a Christian view.

The Enlightenment, however, focuses on the human powers of self-education, whereby an individual activates his or her autonomy, which is established in his or her reason, a decisive factor in developing the German education system (Schlögl 2023). However, the polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) saw the responsibility to educate oneself as an interior given of the human being. Consequently, Humboldt saw education as a profoundly human reality and a personal task (see Benner 2023).

Weber, synthesizing the paradigmatic educational ideas into what she called “Catholic education”, writes: “Catholic education is holistic in several respects. It is neither focused solely on specialist knowledge or skills, limited to the individual and the individual alone, nor on society as a whole. Instead, it focuses on everyone, regardless of their denomination or religion. It looks at the whole person with all their communicative, cognitive, social, and personal abilities, including their spiritual and emotional abilities. It includes all areas of life. Moreover, it emphasizes the creative character: every person is their creator, builder of society, and companion for others. In this respect, Catholic-based personal development has been holistic personal and social education from antiquity to the present” (Weber 2021, p. 64).

It becomes clear that the notions of education and formation are understood by individuals and organizations within the larger framework of humanity, human existence, and the world. How people understand these concepts determines how they primarily understand education and formation. When applied to religious worship, liturgy is also understood as a ritualized expression of these larger frameworks of meaning. Liturgy offers a ritualized understanding of human existence and presents this understanding in a symbolic framework predicated on a Christian–biblical worldview. As such, Christian liturgical formation operates within a larger pluralistic context that cannot be ignored.

2.3. Liturgical Education in the “Age of Singularities” (Andreas Reckwitz)

According to sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, the significant transition to “singularities” in contemporary society is noteworthy. He writes: “The social logic of the general loses its dominance to the social logic of the particular”, which is socially created (Reckwitz 2019, p. 11). In this context, new religious social forms emerge as “cultural singularity goods of their own kind […]. Religious communities thus present themselves as attractive objects of subjective appropriation that promise a shared cultural practice and an intensely subjective experience. The new religions are not exhausted in private faith and routinized Church; they are constituted in collective, extra-daily and singularly experienced performances and events” (Reckwitz 2019, p. 410).

As Kranemann observed above, liturgical studies have, by and large, developed along the lines of the formative fundamental principle of participatio actuosa and have long sought a “conversation with the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies”, which is also ecumenically sensitive and capable of comprehensive theoretical discussion (Kranemann 2022, p. 378).7 Such a conversation takes seriously scholarly reflection on liturgy and the concepts of liturgical formation or education, including those based on descriptions of society: “For the analysis of the manifestations of religion in Europe, […] the individual religiosity, the participation in the life of religious communities, the membership in a church, or identification with a church”, distinctions can be made (Kranemann 2022, p. 389). Similarly, liturgical practice is also “of the time”, and it cannot avoid becoming subject to singularities as it seeks to “find new forms and spaces for the communication and experience of the Christian faith” (Kühn 2021, p. 29). Here, too, a conversation with context and faith is valuable.

In “Approach, tasks, and perspectives of liturgical science today” (Kranemann 2022, pp. 387–407), Kranemann addresses the “paradigms of social description”, the “increasing distance between church and society”, and the “loss of acceptance of the Christian belief in God.” He cites the “endeavor for ecumenism”, the “reflection on the relationship between Jewish and Christian liturgy”, and the “investigation of the encounter between liturgy and culture (inculturation)” as critical markers in contemporary theology and as elements of a conversation concerning liturgical formation and education.

Given the complexity of liturgical practice, formation, education, and overall purpose, Ines Weber’s insight that a fruitful approach to liturgy can only be possible where the demands of the Christian internal tradition, on the one hand, are capable of dialoguing with the notions of an educational or formation process that emphasizes the autonomy of the individual, on the other hand.

If this is the way forward, how can interior development, the image of God, come into dialogue with the concepts of self-education, external education, and societal formation in applying liturgical formation and practice? Drawing on Reckwitz, it is a matter of taking ritual–worship contexts seriously as “collective […], extraordinary, and singularly experienced […] performances and events …” (Reckwitz 2019, p. 410) and seeing in these the opportunities for self-education, external education, and societal formation, the so-called practice-turn in Practical Theology (Bauer and Schüßler 2023).

The practice-turn begins from a theoretical program that applies “a multifaceted bundle of analytical approaches” (Reckwitz 2003, p. 282), which share the fundamental belief that “The social world consists of constantly reproducing and simultaneously changing ensembles of practices. […] The social becomes performative in this ‘doing and saying’” (Reckwitz 2021, p. 53). Relationality, embodiments, the interplay of events and routines, and the integral inclusion of material objects in actual contexts are crucial markers from which relevant theoretical approaches originate.

In the context of liturgical formation and professional development, these considerations function as a theoretical framework by focusing on processes that construct biographies as collective narrations. Liturgical practice can illustrate the process by which individual biographies become a collective biography or narration because the ritual form of liturgy is intended to create a community of actors out of a gathering of individual believers. By observing the liturgical ritual’s format and functioning, one can delve deeper into processes through which one becomes a subject by “acquiring the knowledge orders and competencies of the practices one is involved in” (Reckwitz 2003, p. 62).

The application of the ideas outlined above in the professional development process outlined here means that the participants (teachers, instructors, pastoral workers, and clerics), who are professionally responsible for the planning and realization of institutionalized liturgical education, must understand themselves as inextricably linked to the dynamic of collective narration in practice, thinking, education, and information-giving as those who are the recipients of these. The overall unifying factor within the process of professional development is the individual. This dynamic subject is influenced by a diverse and complex network of inputs within a specific context inhabited by multiple significant others.

3. The Professional Development Formation Fundamentals

The professional development project outlined here is a modular concept designed to offer a sustainable and motivating formation program for employees in the liturgical and pastoral ministry. The learning is designed to sensitize pastoral staff to their tasks in the context of liturgical education and promote formation through the liturgy. As an outcome of the process, participants should be better enabled to understand, prepare, and celebrate liturgies from the perspective of the inseparable relationship between ritual worship practice and the life-worlds of those involved.

The process’s orientation relies on the Constitution on the Liturgy (SC) and the principle of full, conscious, and active participation through various roles (SC 26–28). Although the primary focus is on those responsible for planning and organizing (Church) institutionalized liturgical worship and liturgical education, not the recipients, the nature of the recipient’s distance–closeness relationships to the liturgical celebration, Catholic faith communities, and liturgical understanding is not ignored.

While an allowance has been made for a competence-oriented approach to professional development and professional qualifications (see Weber 2021, p. 19), it has yet to be enacted. However, the approach treats liturgical formation, ongoing education, and professional development as aspects of lifelong learning (see Weber 2021, p. 23).

3.1. Competence-Orientated Approach in Liturgical Formation

Given each participant’s various job profiles, fields of activity, and liturgical requirements, the following general liturgical–pastoral competencies have been developed. The training team uses these to prepare the course material and format, and the diocesan representatives agree.

3.2. General Competence Framework

Methodological competence

• Participants understand and can critically evaluate their liturgical context and reflect on it theologically.
• Participants are familiar with self-evaluation, external evaluation, and quality development in the liturgy.
• Participants are familiar with relevant methods of liturgical education.
• Participants will be able to plan and organize worship services for specific situations. They have familiarized themselves with the methods for moderating corresponding processes and have expanded their repertoire.

Self-competence

• Participants embed their actions for and in the liturgy in their self-understanding as Christians and church members.
• Participants can reflect on the significance of worship for their life/faith perspective and can further develop their authentic positioning within the ecclesial communion.
• Participants can act appropriately in different liturgical roles.
• Participants reflect on their professional biography and its role in their understanding and practice of liturgy as believers and pastoral leaders.
• Participants can develop an insight into their approach to the liturgy.

Social competence

• The participants take the life situations of liturgical participants seriously and design liturgical experiences—or share responsibility for liturgical experiences—that can be fruitful for participants, co-workers, and cooperation partners.

Spiritual competence

• Participants reassure themselves of their Christian identity and self-determined spirituality.
• Participants can show self-responsibility for their spiritual life.
• Participants can participate in co-responsible planning and organization of liturgical services.
• Participants can, if necessary, lead liturgical services.

Expertise

• The participants are familiar with theological concepts of interpreting the liturgy as an interactive, ritually characterized event.

Methodological competence

• Depending on the situation, participants can differentiate which elements of worship and occasions for celebration require specific ways of organizing and acting during the celebration.
• Participants can precisely initiate controlled deviations from ritual forms where necessary.

Social competence

• Participants can act appropriately in a liturgical role in a church service.
• Participants can adequately instruct the individuals during the preparation and celebration of a liturgical rite to appropriately take on the part assigned to them according to the celebration concept.

Self-competence

• Participants reflect, together with other individuals, participants, and leaders, on their role in the tension between active co-celebration and professional distance.

Spiritual competence

• The participants relate their liturgical actions to their baptismal dignity and participation in the priesthood of Christ and reflect on their liturgical roles.
• Participants reflect that the biblical–Christian worship service of a particular denominational tradition and a corresponding spirituality must always be in dialogue with other Christian and religious ritual and worship practices within a pluralistic environment.

3.3. Modularized Educational Concept

Based on the General Competence Framework, the following subject area modules have been selected because they offer a broad cross-section of material used liturgically: Liturgy and Bible, Liturgy and Language, Liturgy and as Ritual, Liturgy and Aesthetics, Liturgy and Faith/Spirituality, Liturgy and Diakonia, and Liturgy and Power.

These individual modules are designed as cross-professional programs to be presented as and when required. In this regard, they are not considered a curricular model where a specific list of learning content must be provided within a specific timeframe. Instead, each workshop in the annual cycle will provide three of the modules listed above. This modularized concept allows for flexibility because it can respond to the nature and needs of the participant group.

3.4. The Content General Themes

Within each of the modules noted above, there are more general themes related to liturgy and biography, outlined below:

Beginning of life.

Life in Community I (internal church perspective).

Life in Community II (approaches from a social context).

Couple relationships.

Third and fourth age.

Illness, dying, and death.

These themes provide scope for current focal points and for the inclusion of “classical” content, such as Christian Initiation, Eucharist, Liturgy of the Hours, and the Liturgical Year. They are general and provide a framework into which the themes, modules, and competencies fit. These themes are broad enough to accommodate the related material where required.

3.5. The Training Cycle

The training is presented digitally and face-to-face (see

Table 1. Schematic illustration.

Main Theme 1	Further or Additional Development of a Contemporary Theme	Main Theme 2
Cycle 1		Cycle 2
Module (A) Digital		Module (A) Digital
Module (B) Face-to-Face		Module (B) Face-to-Face
Module (C) Digital		Module (C) Digital
Cycle 1: Prayer for Peace in Times of “Hot/Active Wars”	Additional training on a current topic	Cycle 2: “And saw it was very good”. Liturgy as Creation experience in the face of threats to the Biosphere
Module (A)—digital: Violence and Non-violence in Religious-Ritual Practice//Lecture and/or discussion prompts from various religions and exchanges.		(A)—digital: Biblically Grounded Practice of Blessings as Recognition and Praise of the Good Creator God//Lecture and exchange based on examples from various forms of Jewish worship and Christian sacramental celebrations (using classical terminology: sacraments and sacramentals).
(B)—Face-to-Face: How can one authentically pray for peace with others (even across worldviews)? A Prayer Workshop.		(B)—Face-to-Face: Worship and Ecology: a workshop discussion on the political potential of liturgical formats and elements in times of the climate crisis and global injustices.
(C)—Digital: Rediscovering one’s own sources: Praying for peace in the Eucharistic celebration; Comparison with other traditions of biblically grounded prayers for peace//Lecture and exchange.		(C)—Digital: “A new heaven, a new earth”: Liturgy as an eschatological celebration of life between promise and consolation//Lecture and exchange.

below). It is presented in modules that cycle across three years. The first and third modules are presented in a digital format, and the second or middle module is presented face-to-face, with at least one overnight stay. Each cycle (1–3) is self-contained with modules within each cycle. The participant does not need to work sequentially. In addition, each cycle offers one session on a current social or liturgical theological topic.

3.6. The Workshop Process and the Practical Application of the Biographical Concept

The workshops (online and face-to-face) begin with a brief introduction to the workshop. Following this, participants are offered an overview of the biographical model and the reasons behind it. Participants are invited to consider their biographical framework and, at critical points, to share these with the group. They are also invited to consider their liturgical biography and the collective biographical narrative of the pastoral context. The whole process uses a reflective professional model.

Participants are asked throughout the learning process to consider the following questions:

• Is the Church a significant other for you?
• Do you encounter people in your work for whom the Church is both a positive and a negative significant other?
• When encountering people for whom the Church is a significant other, do you (the participant) interact negatively or positively with that individual, and to what extent does that individual’s biography toward the Church influence your professionalism?

3.7. The Workshop Learning Process

The workshop sessions have the following structure (digital and face-to-face):

• The session begins with a biographical round (who you are, where you sit in the Church, and your reason for being here).
• Next, input is offered on a specific topic. The input process enables the participants to further consider their subjectivity as recipients of significant others in forming their theological concepts and liturgical practice.
• Individual reflection follows the input.
• The individual reflection is followed by a group discussion of the group’s critical insights; key influences are identified in this discussion.
• Lastly, a group activity is used to identify how the structure of biographical frameworks might be applied in the pastoral setting as both a tool for professional reflection and an identifier of opportunities and challenges.

This process is repeated with each topic.

The process continues with a prayer aspect as another mode of significance and with the practical application of specific liturgical techniques, language, or concepts that give the participants another opportunity to consider the role of significance in their biographical processes and the application of this concept to their pastoral interactions with people and to consider how the concept of the biographical process may be playing out in the person to whom they are speaking.

3.8. Evaluation and Measurement of Skills Acquisition

Various empirically orientated instruments are available for the evaluation design and measuring skills acquisition resulting from course participation. One evaluation option is presented here, through which the potential for innovation and knowledge that lies in the framework conditions of the project—specifically in the cooperation between the diocese and the Faculty of Theology—is also reflected in the design of the methodology.

Concerning the field of research, a modularized course offering liturgical education for full-time pastoral staff, using a multi-perspective mixed-methods design, is most appropriate. This way, the provider (diocese) and the addressee’s (participants) perspectives can be adequately captured. The following examples of evaluation methods could be selected to capture the recipient’s perspective:

Identification of learning expectations in advance.

Self-assessment of skills acquisition after completing the educational format by questionnaire (quantitative).

A short interview immediately after the workshop in the form of random samples (qualitative).

Written practice-related exercises and video-recorded interviews and feedback that would offer a long-term qualitative and quantitative dimension to the project.

The provider perspective could be captured as follows:

Expert interviews on expectations (incl. competencies) of the educational process before the start of further education and training (qualitative).

Group interviews will be conducted with instructors to assess the learning process and skills acquisition through random samples (qualitative).

Documentation to record the process of content transfer (quantitative).

The evaluation process uses a multi-perspective evaluation method to analyze data from practical (diocese) and academic (faculty) perspectives using an investigator triangulation process (Flick 2011).8

The teaching team provides participants with “feedback loops” on the process methodology and content. However, it does not evaluate a participant’s comprehension of the learning or their application of it in their pastoral setting.

4. Discussion

The challenge for the teaching team is to provide the participants with conceptual or theoretical material that can be applied in specific and diverse pastoral contexts.

A professional development evaluation process aligned with the diocese’s pastoral employment outcomes and those of the individual pastoral worker or cleric might be developed in a further iteration.

Any future framework should include both self-assessment and external assessment tools. These assessment tools must be developed and tested by other pastoral professionals. For example, an external evaluation instrument could include a methodology to gather information from the end-user experience (parishioners, hospital patients, and schools) through an interactive process between the course participant and the end-user that explores the implementation of theoretical learning into practice-based learning by the participant. Such an evaluation might include a face-to-face moderated pastoral practice conversation or an anonymous online questionnaire.

This paper does not address a competency framework for career development, employment assessment, and learning comprehension because this is not the role of the teaching team. All evaluations of professionalism, role attainment, career development, and competency are employment matters and are the purview of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart.