Americans get cold feet with regards to footwashing, experts say.
Maundy Thursday is a Holy Week service marking the Last Supper. In some faith traditions, that service has included footwashing from the instance in John 13, where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet in the course of the supper and says, “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you furthermore may should wash each other’s feet. I actually have set you an example that it’s best to do as I actually have done for you” (v. 14).
According to interviews with theologians and pastors, footwashing is now a rare practice even in churches that consider it a component of Maundy Thursday or regular worship. There don’t look like recent surveys of how often US churches take part in the ritual. A 2009 survey found a decline in footwashing in a single Anabaptist denomination, despite the tradition’s high view of the practice.
Most evangelical traditions have historically embraced John 13 for instance of sacrificial love quite than as a particular commandment for a worship ritual. That approach was clear in a widely discussed Super Bowl ad this yr from the He Gets Us campaign featuring footwashing. Other traditions like Pentecostalism that do include footwashing in church services don’t practice it fairly often.
“Other than Maundy Thursday service, the practice is few and much between,” said Lisa Stephenson, a theologian at Lee University who has done research on footwashing, especially amongst Pentecostal churches.
Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, does footwashing in church every few years.
It generally is a “a visual sign of an invisible grace,” said Ben Sloan, the pastor of missions at Eastminster. But he added with amusing, “I don’t want my feet washed every week.”
Sloan remembered that in his ordination process, his examiners asked him what number of sacraments there have been. He said two: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The examiners asked him, “What about footwashing?”
“I used to be stumped!” he said. “I said, ‘Well, I believe it’s because in that passage in John 13 [Jesus] says, A recent commandment I provide you with is to like each other. It’s about love quite than physically washing the feet. It’s about serving other people.’”
Roughly speaking, Catholics (though only recently allowing women to have their feet washed), Episcopals, Anglicans, Methodists, and Lutherans perform Maundy Thursday service footwashing, but participating is optional.
Another group of traditions consider footwashing a ritual Christians should do all year long: Pentecostals, Anabaptists, and Primitive Baptists. Seventh-day Adventists are perhaps essentially the most committed to its practice, often bundling footwashing along with monthly Communion in church services.
One 500-year-old Anabaptist hymnal still in use among the many Amish has a footwashing hymn that’s 25 stanzas.
But many traditions with a history of formality footwashing hold it loosely and will not practice it in any respect.
“Among our congregations, some practice footwashing, while others have discontinued the practice or have never observed it,” says the Mennonite Church USA’s website. “Congregations are encouraged to practice foot washing when it’s a meaningful symbol of service and love for one another.”
The 2009 survey on footwashing published within the Mennonite Quarterly Review found that the three churches with the very best frequency of footwashing services were Hispanic congregations in New York, New Jersey, and Texas.
But overall, the survey found a decline in footwashing amongst Mennonites.
“Worried that younger members or recent members feel uncomfortable with the rite, many pastors have moved the footwashing service from its more traditional positioning inside the Lord’s Supper celebration on Sunday morning to a night service or one other less conspicuous moment within the liturgy,” wrote researcher Bob Brenneman.
Early Protestant statements of religion like the Belgic Confession and the Westminster Confession of Faith assert there are only two sacraments: the Lord’s Supper and baptism.
John Calvin considered footwashing in church services a practice for “Papists,” and in his commentary on John he called it an “idle and unmeaning ceremony” and a “display of buffoonery.” He was concerned that the annual ceremony would let participants feel “at liberty to despise their brethren in the course of the remainder of the yr.”
Reformed theologian R. Scott Clark has argued in his history of the practice that it was not done as a ritual within the apostolic period. Others like Stephenson argue it was a practice of the early church.
“Footwashing was observed in a wide range of places within the early Church, over a widespread geographical distance,” she wrote in her 2014 paper, “Getting Our Feet Wet: The Politics of Footwashing.”
William Seymour, one in every of the fathers of Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement, argued within the newspaper The Apostolic Faith that there are three sacraments: footwashing, the Lord’s Supper, and baptism.
Stephenson said her experience is that Pentecostals don’t practice it commonly despite Seymour’s argument that it’s a sacrament. She sees the decline as each theological—with people believing Jesus’ example wasn’t a literal one to follow—and sociological.
Stephenson is an element of the Church of God, a Tennessee-based denomination that practices footwashing as a sacrament. Historically these churches were in Southern Appalachia and poor. But she has noticed that footwashing doesn’t occur often now.
“As our tradition has change into more middle-class and gained more social standing and moved up economically speaking, it’s change into a more uncomfortable practice,” she said.
In her classes at Lee University, which is affiliated with the Church of God, she notices that students like the thought of footwashing but feel awkward about doing it. In general, she also thinks the rise of megachurches makes footwashing harder to perform.
“It’s often a really moving component of a service,” she said. “It works in people’s lives in ways which can be unanticipated.”
In interviews, people shared those sorts of experiences.
Richard England remembered when he was a chaplain for adults with special needs within the county of Kent, United Kingdom. During Holy Week, footwashing was too sensitive for the adults, in order that they washed one another’s hands in a bowl. England remembered being paired with a girl with Down syndrome.
“I cried like a baby,” said England. “It was the closest I actually have felt to the footwashing recorded in John and it was way more moving than any of the particular footwashing services I’ve been a part of.”
Churches that wash feet are doing it in additional creative ways.
In South Carolina, Eastminster Presbyterian Church does wash feet every week, but not in a church service setting. It has a “footcare” ministry that a podiatrist within the church began years ago after individuals who couldn’t afford to pay kept coming to him. The church joined up with an area ministry that was already providing lunch for the homeless and offered to present pedicures and recent shoes to anyone who wanted them. The idea, in accordance with missions pastor Sloan, is that the homeless are on their feet greater than others and don’t have as much access to showers. Quite a lot of doctors volunteer within the ministry, and guests may get free medical care if needed.
“It’s a vulnerable thing,” said Sloan. “It permits you to speak in confidence to people in alternative ways. It’s a humbling thing to have someone wash your feet—it’s a humbling thing to clean feet.”
Lib Foster has been volunteering within the footcare ministry for greater than a decade. Recently she was washing the feet of 1 man who refused to talk to her, but then he allowed her to hope for him and he began to cry. The footcare process is about half an hour, so it gives the guests and volunteers a probability to speak.
“It’s amazing to see the Holy Spirit work in that room, and we’re stuffy old Presbyterians,” Foster said. She said people have a “fear of the uncomfortable or awkward,” but getting past that awkwardness is rewarding. Foster’s daughter does an identical footcare ministry at an Episcopal church in downtown Atlanta.
But even in Maundy Thursday services, the way in which liturgical churches do footwashing can vary.
HopePointe Anglican Church in Woodlands, Texas, does footwashing on Maundy Thursday but has footwashing stations arrange across the sanctuary so parishioners can wash one another’s feet, in accordance with member Katie Grosskopf.
In practice, that meant heads of households washed their household members’ feet. Grosskopf is single, and so she mentioned to the clergy that she felt isolated within the footwashing setup.
“After that, the clergy made a degree of mentioning within the service to the entire church that we would have liked to be mindful of the entire family of God and never just our nuclear families within the footwashing,” Grosskopf said. “Later, an older woman grabbed me and one other single woman and washed our feet while crying and praying. It was very moving.”
Stephenson argues for the renewal of the practice.
“Evangelical Christians don’t appreciate liturgy as much; we are likely to be Word and worship congregations,” she said. “But that doesn’t engage our whole body. These practices are ways to interact our whole body in ways in which worship and Word don’t, and invite us to live out the story in ways in which Word and worship don’t at all times do. … They discover us and mark us and reorient us at times to what matters, to what we’re to be about.”
