WorshipHelps

1. Remove your phone case and power down your device.

Mighty God, source of power and love, in these moments when my device powers down, I give you thanks for the power you give to me to serve and the energy to live this life.  Remind me to rest when it is time, give me solid sleep.  Help me wake with joy.

2. Polish with a microfiber cloth.

With this cloth and its small fibers, remind me that each choice I make is like a small fiber, woven into the cloth of my life.  Empower my decisions, Lord; help me to be brave and kind, wise and trustworthy.  Bind all of us and our choices together into a cloth that makes this world safe for everyone.

3. Next, reach for a branded disinfecting wipe.

These wipes are full of weird chemicals, O Lord, and I don’t know how this cloth will bio-degrade.  But it is a sign of the wonders of this creation – of materials and inventions, science and industry, and for that I give thanks.  Give wisdom to researchers in all fields and help us protect people, planet, and prosperity for all.

4. Let your phone air dry for a minimum of 5 minutes.

Lord, you are more wondrous than wifi – you connect us in ways that we cannot see.  As my phone dries, I pray for all of my contacts in that phone.  Help them to know my affection and respect for them.Continue reading...

Years ago, when I worked as a chaplain at Central College, I had a colleague who used to get together with me regularly to pray for our students.  We did so not only because we believed it would make a difference for them, but because we knew it made a difference for us.  Praying for Jennifer and Scott as they worked through the pain of their parents’ divorces in anticipation of being married themselves, praying for Kim as she struggled with anorexia, with Mark as he battled addiction – these prayers helped remind us that though we are to be faithful and diligent in the ministries God has given us, in the end the sun does not rise, and the crops do not grow, and people are not made whole, and the kingdom does not come by dint of our own effort.

No, the world belongs to God.  It has been entrusted to us, yes, but it is ultimately in God’s hands.  What a good thing for type A people to remember every day!

I let this lesson guide our evening prayer a few weeks ago as I led worship at the hard-working General Synod of the Reformed Church in America.  We decided each night to let a particular song shape and direct our evening prayers.  So we would sing a verse and then let that verse prompt particular petitions and thanks.  So, for example, one evening we sang verses from Bless the Lord, My Soul, the setting of Psalm 103 from Taizé.  Another evening we sang four verses from All Praise to Thee, My God, This Night.  But my favorite was the evening we began and ended with the old gospel favorite “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.”

Planning the service, I wanted to get rid of the repeated masculine pronoun, and thought to change the lyric from “He’s” and “his” to “You’ve” and “your” (a far less clunky tweak than alternating genders or using “God’s” throughout). This had the surprising – and wonderful – effect of altering the character of the song altogether.  It shifted it from testimony to prayer; from speaking about God’s providence to speaking to God, rooting our petitions, both spoken and silent, in a confident declaration of God’s power and love: “You’ve got the whole world in your hands.”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...

Many Christian traditions suffer from a lack of musical resources on the issue of justice.  Here is one based on Micah 6:8 you might try.  It is written in the style of a Taize chant.  In other words, it is a simple line of scripture set to a repeatable refrain.  It can be used in worship on its own as a canticle (scripture set to music), sung as a refrain to prayer petitions, or interspersed with scripture readings.

Click here for the PDF.  Click here for the MP3.

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This Taize type chant was originally composed for use by the worshipping community of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California.  Micah 6:8 is the theme verse for the 2006-7 for seminary chapel program.  This song can be used without further permission if the following line of credit is provided:Continue reading...

As we've been living in the midst of house renovations, I've been thinking about congregational imagination. A congregation's imagination is reflected in many ways: how it shapes and reshapes its worship space, how it shapes its re-telling of biblical stories and its own congregational stories, the kinds of people who are welcomed and who feel at home, and the kinds of cultic practices it considers normative.

I had a pretty clear sense of the congregational imagination of the church in which I served as music director for over twenty years. The congregation had a sense of the dramatic, and this was reflected in its development of the worship space. It loved to take unusual angles in its retelling of biblical stories; it was not unusual to have worship feature a potter's wheel in the centre of the sanctuary and liturgical dance, though not frequent, was welcomed as part of normal (rather than “special” or “different”) worship.

I am now in a new congregation, and am still in the process of learning the scope of its imagination.

The congregation's imagination cannot, of course, be completely separated from that of its leadership. There is a kind of conversation that begins early in a pastor's (or other leader's) tenure, as congregation and pastor listen to one another, and develop what you might call an “image bank”, that treasure house of story, metaphor, symbol, visions and images with which it expresses its communal identity.Continue reading...

Victoria Weinstein, a Unitarian Universalist minister [obviously outside of the bounds of evangelicalism] who goes by the handle PeaceBang, has launched a fashion blog to encourage the "defrumpification of the American clergy." And in a recent Boston Globe story, Weinstein says that even though fashion isn't the greatest concern for clergy, it still matters.

I read the article and I would like to put a spin on this.

Though Weinstein's advice is decent, especially to her target group of women ministers, her comments have implications. And I'm sure Weinstein's aim is not to cause any overt controversy, but it raises some interesting questions...one I've heard on more than one occasion.

"Anyone who is in a position of leadership has to consider what image they're projecting...they will not be willing to hear us in the same way if we look like we walked out of 1972."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.

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In some monastic communities, monks go up to receive the ashes barefoot.  Going barefoot is a joyous thing.  It is good to feel the floor or the earth under your feet.  It is good when the whole church is silent, filled with the hush of people walking without shoes.  One wonders why we wear such things as shoes anyway.  Prayer is so much more meaningful without them.  It would be good to take them off in church all the time.  But perhaps this might appear quixotic to those who have forgotten such elementary satisfactions.  Someone might catch cold at the mere thought of it.

-- Thomas Merton

In his book on emerging or progressive Christianity, The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg questions whether "sin" is the best term for describing our human condition before God. His argument isn't merely theological, but liturgical: "The nearly universal liturgical element of 'confession of sin and absolution' might be replaced or complemented by a 'declaration of what ails us and God's promise to us'" (p. 170). He continues in a note: "I am not suggesting these exact words as 'liturgical headings.' I would hope more elegant phrases could be found, but I am suggesting the notion that lies behind these words" (p. 185, n. 8). Following is one attempt at more elegant phrasing for several of the images Borg mines from the Bible to describe our condition.

Confession of Blindness and Promise of Illumination

God of Light, we confess that our vision is impaired. Your presence is lost to us in the shadows of our world and the darkness of our hearts. We look, yet we do not see, blind to the daily opportunities to praise you and serve others. Restore our sight, we pray, in the name of Christ whose vision of your kingdom come, led him on the path of salvation.

God who commanded light to shine out of darkness has sent Christ as the light of the world. He remains with us in the Holy Spirit, and promises that those who seek will surely find. In Jesus Christ, our eyes are open. Amen.Continue reading...

Back in July of '06, I wrote an blog post entitled, "The Pope's Rift with Riffs" on my blog, relevintage.com.

I would like to dust it off for the sake of conversation here on Worship Helps.  Here it is:

It's official.  The Pope has entered the worship wars.

From the New York Sun this past week:Continue reading...