Farmer's Market

A Farmer's Market has kicked off in Timaru on Sunday morning at 9am. They have an aim of having produce from within a 100 km radius.
What would happen if we applied the same rules to our worship? Locally produced songs and prayers? And not at 10am either, as we are all down at the Farmer's market having a coffee, but sometime during the week. What about that?

styles or community?

One of the discussions around the traps at the moment is about styles of service. There is a desire to see something rather more than "traditional" worship, whatever that means. What worries me is that people see styles as an optional extra, a difference that will enrich their lives somehow.

I think that authentic worship has to arise out of community. One of the reasons our worship is dry is that we have lost much of a sense of being in community in our attempts to maintain dignity, privacy, individualism, a sense of space, however you want to call it.

Worship that emerges naturally out of a community that journeys together has altogether a different flavor. The challenge is how to equip a community to begin to worship in this way when they are known a period of time where much of the work of worship has been kept from them.

Yay for you

We held our "Yay for You" service on Sunday night to celebrate the end of an eight week leadership training course for young leaders in our town. We put together a worship team of people who had never played together before - utter madness.
We didn't have enough worship time either.
But friends and supporters were a gracious audience, and they all had enough experience in their own patch to know how to follow directions and pick up if they happened to get lost. And God is very gracious.
It was high energy stuff, and yet we only pulled together a couple of brackets of three. Our usual Sunday service is just so staid by comparison, even using the same songs. Partly having a different keyboard player helped, and having a bass player, even one as shonky as me was useful.
But overall, the service illustrated for me just how different the expectations and experience of contemporary worship is.

Creeds and worship

How do creeds relate to worship?

Do you want a theological or a liturgical answer?

Theologically, what we believe shapes how we worship, and I think how we worship shapes what we believe.

I wonder how well we are served by the Nicene-Constantinople creed, born in controversy, established to delineate a particular orthodoxy in a specific location. Our arguments are less over whether Jesus descended to the dead, and more about how Jesus can be like you if Jesus really is like me.

Liturgically, saying or singing creeds together has a lot going for it. There can be a discussion about whether a creed is a framework, like jazz, or a prison. Some worship traditions seem to manage without formal statements of what they believe.

And which creeds are we talking about anyway? The ones that 'all' Christians everywhere believe? Or the local, recent new ones that try to address the issues?

I wonder if the question itself is loaded? Should creeds relate to worship? It all smacks of an intellectual, rational, logical approach to worship which leaves out the poetry, the non-linear, the creative dancing to the song of the Spirit, the spontaneous, no, not the contrived, planned spontaneity of a pentecostal singfest, but, well, for example, in worship on Sunday, a baby provided a counterpoint to Chris' communion liturgy. Delightful.

Cafe worship

We had cafe worship, well, a Presbyterian version this week.

Some of our people loved it. It was the best service ever! They loved talking to each other, and they loved the informal sermon I delivered (from points this week, not written out as I usually do.) I even had a handout!!

Some of our people hated it. For those with a hearing problem, the group discussion was very difficult. They struggle to follow a conversation in a large room, people are too far away to talk to comfortably, and they didn't really know what was going on.

Solutions
a) Advertise more clearly in advance so people can choose.
b) DON't do at a combined service, so there is an alternative service in the parish they can attend if they wish.
c) Work with the hearing impaired to find other solutions. Can we have discussions when people don't even hear the instructions? Although I did write out the questions and put them on the table. So - hmm.

A funny thing happend in worship today...

So Chris was celebrating communion (note to self, make sure he is wearing the lapel mike next time, doing it with the hand held is just plain awkward!), the servers paused at the back, and then as they came forward, the congregation rose.

Why?

They've never done it before, this is not part of our ritual. I suspect someone was confused about where in the service we were. We do stand as the offering is bought forward.

So - what to do. We have a congregation standing for no good reason. The serving elders continued to serve one another and the minister as they usually do, ignoring the congregation, and eventually, someone took the initiative, sat down, and the rest followed with a sigh of relief.

The funny thing is that we never talk about why we stand or when we should stand. Often there isn't a request to stand, people just seem to.

What to do in response? When something goes differently in a ritual, it can be interesting to think through the response. To correct people without jarring is a delicate operation. On reflection, perhaps the best thing to do would have been for the presiding minister to seat the congregation after receiving the plates back, but before going on to serve them. But he didn't.

We've also noticed people standing and leaving before the scriptures are processed out. In part, there are some rest home residents anxious to leave and get back to lunch. They are anxious because the service is running late! Argh! So, they make a dash to get out before the minister, so they are not held up in a reception line to greet the minister.

Solutions?
a) Offer an alternative exit for those who need to leave quickly (we have plenty of doors!)
b) Make an effort to keep the service to an hour. I'm not sure why, but there is a strong expectation that Sunday worship will take an hour. There is a conflict here with the minister, who wants to be more relaxed, include a decent bracket of contemporary music, and to be fair, often starts late.

What is worship?

Is worship more than the songs we sing and the style in which we sing them? Of course, and yet those visible, observable aspects of worship are often the parts of worship that are most controversial. Worship is discussed and evaluated in terms of personal opinion, taste and value.
What about what God wants?
Our worship reveals what the worship leader thinks about God, and the people whom they attempt to lead in worship.

Experiential worship

The distinction between fantasy literature and 'high' literature is, in part, about the way the reader experiences the narrative. In the work beloved of academics, reading is about decoding the symbols in the text. Many of the recent '-isms (feminism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism) are distinguished by their challenging the perceived assumptions of the author, and positing alternative interpretations of the symbols in the work. The reader is always an outsider, external to the work. There is a kind of objectivity that can be shared and written about. But in works like Tolkein, the reader is invited to enter an alternative world which functions more or less independently of our own. The same themes exist - good versus evil, the notion of friendship, the corruption of power. Each reader encounters the story differently, and while there are always touch points which are shared, each reading experience, even by the same reader but at a different time is a different experience. While the written words never change, the way in which they are experienced always changes. There is a kind of subjectivity here which is none-the-less real and powerful.
Is the claim for Christian worship more like the first or the second? It is certainly possible to stand outside the experience of worship, and to interpret it using any number of world-views or methodologies. It is possible to compare and contrast the rituals of Christian worship which those of other religions and note the similarities. More subtly, liturgists take The Liturgy, and use that as an objective measuring stick for the rightness or accuracy or goodness of worship.
However, I think that worship is first and foremost an experience of the divine. It is profoundly experiential. Each worship event is experienced differently. Worship takes us out of ourselves, and changes what we perceive as reality.

Godzone Worship

What on earth are we doing in worship?

More importantly, what is God (insert your favorite set of assumptions/experiences/images here) doing in worship?

Despite my ongoing conversations with thirty-somethings who describe church as "toxic," I think good things are going on in worship, as worship leaders and minsters and priests all over the place struggle each week to lead their congregations authentically and with integrity.

A couple of weeks ago a deputation from one of my congregations met with the music team to complain about the music in worship. Too many contemporary songs. Not enough hymns. But, I pointed out, there were two hymns in most services, a classic hymn (pre-twentieth century) and a modern hymn. No, we want the hymns we know from our childhood.

So, the question for today is the extent to which we indulge this exercise in nostalgia. There is as much real danger, I think, of manipulating people with classic hymns, as there is in contemporary songs. I could craft a service that would include their favorites, but the cost is high.

Firstly, worship leaders always run the risk of making worship or the music an idol, something that replaces or is given the credit for the presence of God. I have found that many people lack the ability to express what they clearly sense in a particular service in anything but practical or secular terms. The reasons differ. In part, I've worked in mainline Presbyterian congregations, and as a rule, we don't live in the charismatic end of the worship spectrum.

Secondly, our task as worship leaders is not to craft services that people like or make people feel good. Not is it our task to upset them unduly. Our task is to be responsive to what we sense the Spirit of God doing.

Thirdly, the feedback that we take on board has to weighed carefully. Perhaps I have genuinely erred, and this is God's way of telling me I screwed up. There is a dimension of pastoral care that I take seriously. But there are also other voices in that meeting who tell me that the mix is about right, and we need to craft services that are not completely alien for visitors from our highly secularized culture.

I think the mix is about right; I have thrown too much new music at this congregation in part because I am new, and their list of what they thought they knew has turned out to be inaccurate. Like any worship leader, when I'm under pressure I tend to head for where I am comfortable. But we also need to hang in there with the new songs. Many of the songs I currently find most useful I didn't like on first, second or third hearing.