Worship as Performance Focusing on the Performance Theory of Richard Schechner

The decrease in the number of Christians means that Christian worship is meaningless and worthless to people. The Korean church has discussed how to overcome the crisis of a declining number of Christians, but the typical pattern of worship has not renewed. Although there have been many discussions about restoring worship, they are often only internal discourses in the theological area. Therefore, this paper criticizes the problems of the worship in the Korean church reflecting on other academic theories. First, it approaches to introduce the Performance Theory discussing the necessity of interdisciplinary research. It helps to approach a new pattern of the worship service by diagnosing the problems about the current Korean church worship situation. This academic effort is to overcome the limitations of theatricality. Then, it explains the concept of performance and performativity suggesting Performance studies as a newly emerging method. Thus, it applies the principle of Schechner s Six Axioms for Environmental Theater to the principle of worship. Finally, this paper insists Worship as Performance composed of human behavior, metaphor, and implication.