WorshipHelps

After being persuaded that we need to be more serious about lament in our worship, we have been struggling with where to put it in the service.  There seems to be no natural place in our order of service where it "fits."  Then someone at a planning meeting suggested we replace the confession one week with a lament.  Not to avoid our own sin, but to recognize that our personal sin is caught up in the brokenness of the whole world.  We lament then, and say not so much "I have messed up" but "I am messed up."

But then there is another difficulty: what is the appropriate response to lament?  After a confession, we long to hear words of God's forgiveness:  "As far as the east is from the west, so far do I remove your transgressions from you."  This doesn't seem quite right when we're talking about racism and environmental degradation and cancer.

But a declaration of God's ultimate sovereignty is exactly right -- it follows the Biblical pattern (see, for instance, Psalm 42 or 43), and it assures us (just as an assurance of pardon) that in the end, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

(Art courtesy www.davidsweeneyart.com)Continue reading...

It often seems that tradition is in the eyes of the beholder.

A friend visited for a while with our large suburban congregation and suggested that what she discovered was a heritage of worship that was part town hall meeting, part local talent show, and part lecture series. Perhaps there are other congregations whose Ordo follows in a similar path.

As pastor of the congregation for a little over two years, I have been faced with a number of questions related to local tradition. Making appeals to the great traditions of the church and faith don’t carry much freight for people who mark tradition according to what their parents taught them or what the last great preacher suggested.

For large churches, change often comes slowly with much conversation – especially if change is rare and sometimes has been disastrous.Continue reading...

Ron’s story about baptizing his nephew and the connections of baptism to our care for creation show how multifaceted the layers of this sacrament are. All of life, for those of us born of water and the Spirit, is wet. In other words, every moment of each day is grounded in baptism. Even if we are not following the will of God, those moments are redeemed in God’s grace, which is one aspect of baptism (cleansing from or forgiveness of sin). This is why confession or at least a reflection on how we “missed the mark” or sinned is a part of the compline prayer. The ancient “compline” prayer, or prayer at the close of the day shapes our sleeping and rising in the death and resurrection of Christ. This image is one of baptismal life; continually dying (repenting and turning from ways that separate us from Christ) and rising to new life each day.

Throughout the worship service there are several moments each Sunday where we can engage water in ways that help us understand and live more deeply into our baptism. Here are a few examples:

During the gathering of the people you can pour water into the font or baptismal pool with words that accentuate our inclusion into the family of God such as:

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you m ay proclaim the mighty acts of the One who called you out of darkness into God’s marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)Continue reading...

Dr. Steven Taylor is the founding pastor of Graceway Baptist Church in Ellerslie, New Zealand. He has a PhD on the Emerging Church and a Masters in Theology in communicating the cross in a postmodern world. Steve recently did a course at Fuller Seminary entitled “Communicating the Biblical Text in a PostModern Culture” in July.

He argues that to communicate the biblical text for today’s context requires one to “incarnate, indwell, our culture.”  Taylor goes on to use the phrase “DJing” with respect to the community.  A record DJ learns the historical stories (old records) and uses them authentically in contemporary culture and integrates them into the community's stories.  There is too much to summarize here, but do look for his book “The Out of Bounds Church: Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change” from Zondervan.

Taylor cites Bono of U2 as a person who effectively DJs today.  According to Taylor, Bono is in fact a worship leader for over 40,000 people; Bono recontextualizes the biblical text and leads concert goers into a time of community worship and prayer. Taylor plays the “Vertigo ‘05” DVD and shows us how Bono is leading worship.  This intrigued me to the point that  Dr. Taylor and I discussed this further after the workshop. The following is from Steve’s article “7 Things I learnt from Bono about Worship Leading.”

1.    Connect uniquely. In the Vertigo DVD, Bono speaks about Chicago and his memories of Chicago. He makes a unique connection with context, day, and time.
2.    Engage through familiarity. Bono includes songs that resonate with previous experiences and previous encounters.
3.    Use repetition to call forth prayer. Bono uses the repetitive “Hallelujah.” It is easy to sing. The simple repetition enables the audience to sing with the band.
4.    Secure a 5th (visual) band member. U2 now has a 5th member of the band to add a visual layer to the experience. A wise worship leader will look to add not just singers or musicians, but a “visual” person to their team.
5.    Create hope by drawing the best from the past. Bono tells the audience in the Vertigo DVD, “We as a band are looking to the future. We’re taking the best of the past and moving forward with hope.”
6.    Plan participation. Bono can draw one boy from the audience to sing to, one woman from the audience to dance with. He uses repetition to call forth prayer and encourage congregational singing.
7.    Invoke passionate practices. Bono invites the audience to hall out their cell phones and to text “Make Poverty History campaign.”  A worship leader turns singing into action. He turns entertainment into justice.Continue reading...

For a fine article about 'contemporary' worship -- structure, style, planning, etc. -- that features some of the authors of this blog, click here.

What should Christians do when we gather to worship?   Of course, there are all sorts of things we actually do: we stand, we sit, we sing, we raise our hands, we are silent, we eat and drink, we pray.  Then again, we do all these things when we attend a football game.  But in worship we do all these things (and many more) with worshipful purposes in mind: to confess, to praise, to hear the Word, etc.  But we don't do every possible option at every single service.  So what elements are so important that we should not do without them?

The Bible offers many examples of the sorts of things worshippers do when they assemble:  the Old Testament records in great detail what Temple worship was supposed to look like, including the specifics of animal and agricultural sacrifices.  The gospel of Luke tells of reading from the scriptures as part of synogogue worship.  Acts 2 tells us that the early church devoted itself to the "apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers."  So my question is this:  what are the non-negotiables of worship?  When God's people gather, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to renew the convenant of grace in Christ Jesus, what stuff do we do?  What actions do we perform that are non-negotiable?  If we gather to worship and never hear a sermon, is it worship?  If we don't break bread at the table, have we worshipped?  If we don't pray., or sing...  You get the idea.  What do you think?  Post your comments.

On Thanksgiving Day many churches offer a very traditional worship service: Psalm 100, a litany of thanksgiving, “Come, You Thankful People, Come.” On a day when we look back with gratitude at God’s good gifts to us, it makes sense to make use of the work and wisdom of our forebears and to worship using that which is tried and true. Other congregations seek innovation: pilgrim puppets behind the pulpit, prayers of thanks colored (not written) in crayon on scraps of paper and dropped in the offering plate.

Our culture craves novelty, which may explain—but doesn’t necessarily commend—our thirst for it. A more laudable urge is to offer in our worship not a stale tradition, repeated out of habit, but something original: our creative expression, our prayers and words and music, our very selves. We want to offer something fresh and new. But must it be an either/or choice?  Many congregations are very successful in their efforts to examine the tried and true traditions (often more true than actually tried), identify the best in them, and then freshen them in ways sensitive to their contexts.  Here are a few ideas...

***

Call to Worship
Psalm 100 is just the right Scripture to use as a call to worship on Thanksgiving Day. It’s familiar, and it summons God’s people both to worship and to give thanks. But the elevated diction of most psalm translations, and the formal quiet out of which calls to worship are often spoken, can diminish the psalm’s affective energy. To generate enthusiasm, some congregations bring out their best thespian/liturgist to lead the reading with strong voice and grand gesture. But the right song might work as well—if not better—to encourage rather than coerce the congregation into eager, participative praise. For example, teach and then sing the song “Come, All You People” (it can be found in the hymnal supplement Sing! A New Creation) at the very start of the service, and let the energy leak into the responsive reading of Psalm 100 as a call to worship. Let it leak by maintaining a soft percussive pulse, and maybe a low bass drone, throughout the speaking. Then reprise the song afterward, and the service will have begun with faithfulness and vigor.  (See the music here, hear it here.)Continue reading...

As we plan weekly worship here at Fuller Seminary, the worship interns and I have been talking quite a bit lately about three persistent and related problems.

The first problem is theologically inspired boredom: we are growing weary of planning and leading the same twenty minutes of “opening exercises” every week. The dominant feature of our pre-sermon worship time is a significant chunk of music interspersed with words of welcome and perhaps a prayer or two. In the past months we’ve worked hard at intentionally selecting congregational songs that have cultural breadth, theological depth, and liturgical clarity. Still, the logistics of the service (including the architectural shape of our space) leave us with a default organizational ordo with which we are increasingly uncomfortable. It is an order that feels not blessedly simple but distressingly simplistic: songs (led by a group from the right hand side), followed by a sermon (preached by a professor from the left hand side).

The other problems we’re struggling with are thematic coherence and sacramental expectation.

***Continue reading...

This is an article that featured Todd Johnson and Ed Willmington address the question "What is Worship?"  It helps to get inside of the heads of these two worship gurus.

Pastors’ Gathering Explores Worship Issues

Worship was the topic of Fuller’s semiannual President’s Breakfast for Pastors held Thursday, November 9, with speakers Todd Johnson and Ed Willmington, both of the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts. More than 100 attended the event in Payton Hall.

“What and who is our worship for? Why do we worship?” These must be central questions we ask in our churches, said Todd Johnson, the William K. and Delores S. Brehm Associate Professor of Worship, Theology and the Arts at Fuller. In his talk “Worship Choices: Going Beyond the Categories,” Johnson discussed what we can learn from early church worship history, and then went on to offer pastors some “neutral terms to help you evaluate what you are doing in your worship, and why.” Professor and author Lester Ruth offers three helpful questions we can ask, he said: First, whose story is being told in your worship—God’s story, or the individual’s story of coming to faith? Second, who do you understand your church to be when you worship—one part of the larger corporate church, or a more autonomous, homegrown congregation? And lastly, where do people find God in your church’s worship—in the Word, table, or music? It is helpful to understand who you are as a church and work to strike a balance between these different elements, Johnson said.Continue reading...