WorshipHelps

A wonderful way to make explicit the sacramental connection between our everyday life and its distillation in liturgy is to sing a variation on the Great Prayer over our ordinary meals. Chip Andrus, a pastor, teacher, and musician with the Office of Theology and Worship for the PC(USA) has written a lively folk prayer that works well for just this purpose.

Sing upbeat, but not too fast—maybe 88 bpm. The song is syncopated throughout, but is notated more simply here for easier learning. Once you’re familiar with it as written, attempt appropriate syncopation where you feel it (the third “come” in the first measure should slightly anticipate the third beat). If you have trouble, ask your kids for help. The song repeats the chorus a few times, and then concludes moving to the tonic and repeating “come.”

This wonderfully percussive tune works best antiphonally. When the meal is almost ready, begin to sing (“Come, come, come!”) as you bring the food from the kitchen to the table. Or send out a family member to the corners of the house, singing and summoning everyone together. When all are assembled, conclude with a spoken prayer to God, since this song is a call to pray and feast rather than a prayer itself.

It’s especially fitting to pray following a classic prayer pattern, like a collect. So, for instance, begin by (1) addressing God and naming one of God’s attributes (“God, you are . . .”); then (2) speak a word of thanks and/or make an appeal rooted in that attribute (“we thank you for/help us to . . .”); finally, (3) express an aspiration rooted in God’s character, an outcome that makes sense of the request (“so that we might . . .”). For example, (1) Lord Jesus, you said that wherever two or three are gathered together, you are with them. (2) We thank you, then, for this good food, for those who made it, for each other, and for your presence with us as we eat. Open our eyes to see you at this table, (3) so that we might more easily see you when we leave it.Continue reading...

In order to illustrate and remember the difference between unity and uniformity, our worshiping community occasionally prays the Lord’s Prayer in the following way: Persons who can recite the Lord’s Prayer in a language other than English are invited to do so.  Others are invited to recite the Lord’s Prayer as they learned it.  Participants unfamiliar with the Lord’s Prayer, or who desire to recite it in Spanish are invited to read one of the versions below:

Our Father                         Padre nuestro
Who art in heaven                que estás en los cielos,
Hallowed be Thy name            santificado sea tu nombre.
Thy Kingdom come.                Venga tu reino.
Thy will be done                        Hágase tu voluntad,
On Earth as it is in heaven.       como en el cielo, así también en la tierra.
Give us this day our daily bread     El pan nuestro de cada día, dánoslo hoy.
And forgive us our debts                Y perdónanos nuestras deudas,
As we forgive our debtors            como también nosotros perdonamos
                                                    a nuestros deudores.
And lead us not into temptation       Y no metas en tentación,
But deliver us from evil;            mas líbranos del mal;
For Thine is the kingdom,                porque tuyo es el reino,
And the power,                            y el poder,
And the glory                            y la gloria,
Forever.                                        por todos los siglos.
Amen.                                        Amén.

When the Lord’s Prayer is recited in this way, worshipers are able to recognize a rhythm and commonality to this most universal of Christian prayers that transcends the boundaries of lanuage or particular translations of scripture.

I’ve been reading lately about how our consumer culture tempts the Christian with a competing and compelling way of being in the world.  It even has its own calendar, featuring economic “holy days” in which we are encouraged to engage in ritualized pagan practices.  This upcoming Sunday, Mother’s Day, notwithstanding its ostensibly Christian origins, is one such day.

Not surprisingly, many churches participate in the cultural holiday by having special “Mother’s Day” worship services.  This is not in itself a necessarily bad thing.  The church excels at baptizing culturally suspect practices and turning them to God’s good ends.  And I love my mother, I love my wife, and I happen to be a huge fan of motherhood and know well the spiritual value that being a parent can bring.

But we’re on dangerous ground when the Church’s worship on this day turns away from new life in Jesus Christ, and turns rather into a slightly veiled civic celebration of the “traditional” family and the woman’s often subservient role within it.  We are on slick footing when we plan services that have less to do with engaging a triune God and more to do with handing out a bit of instruction regarding our own preferred parenting methods.  We risk pastoral malpractice when we put a certain type of woman on a pedestal, take a soft-focus picture, and offer bland, if well-meant praise, all the while ignoring the pain and the gifts of other types of women in our congregations: unwed mothers, women who have had abortions, women who have suffered from undesired childlessness, and women, both single and wed, for whom God’s call does not include children at all.

So this Mother’s Day, make use of the counter-cultural liturgical calendar, and follow the lectionary readings for your service planning. And then let the struggles of family life and motherhood inform a rich pastoral prayer, like one of these from the Lutheran Church in Australia:Continue reading...

Last year we used this Mother's Day liturgy and it received a warm reception. It's inclusive of women in all stages of life.

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Mothers’ Day Liturgy

Lord, on this day set aside to honor and remember mothers, we give you thanks for our mothers. We are grateful that you chose to give us life through them, and that they received the gift of life from your hands, and gave it to us. Thank you for the sacrifices they made in carrying us and giving us birth.Continue reading...

Paul’s sermon in Athens (Acts 17:22-31) is substantially different from any of his other sermons. While his other sermons are identifiably Pharisaical and present the gospel in a way that would be accessible to a predominantly Jewish audience, the Athenian sermon employs patterns and concepts which were common to first century Athens. It is a significant and noteworthy accomplishment on Paul’s part and it may be taken as a mandate to subsequent Christians always to be prepared to articulate the gospel message using new and distinct cultural patterns. While the content of the Gospel is always consistent, the form in which the good news of Jesus Christ is presented should always be flexible. What follows are excerpts from a somewhat playful worship service that was designed to illustrate to a worshiping community the issues and possibilities involved in attempting to articulate a Christian worship service in a particular context.   College students, youth, and children are often engaged by this way of distinguishing between what is essential and what is negotiable in worship.   Read the liturgy after the jump.

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SCRIPTURE LESSON AND PROCLAMATION—

Luke 10:30-37 and Horton Hears a Who (Theodore Geisel, 1934)Continue reading...

Everyone wants heightened spirituality, but don’t know what it takes to get there. Most pastors and worship leaders have such a hectic schedule that it is impossible to slowdown enough for quiet time or solitude. Yet the Apostolic Fathers of faith placed a high value on it.

If leaders have a problem with carving out quiet moments can you imagine what the congregation is feeling? Jonny Baker and Doug Gay’s Alternative Worship: Resources from and for the Emerging Church, provides a “ritual” that contextualizes the spiritual practice of being in the desert that can be used as part of a worship service, small group gathering, or as teaching illustration.

Items needed: Removed Van seat, a boom box, selection of CD’s (ideally instrumental), a video projector and VCR. Video tape a drive down the highway, even being stuck in traffic, or driving through the city.

Description: Traveling in a car is the closest thing for most people get to solitude. “Setting up this ritual will hopefully help people to reflect positively on the space they have next time they are driving alone in the car” (Baker and Gay, Alternative Worship, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 2004, 86)Continue reading...

In some worshipping traditions, the "prayers of the people" are anything but.  The people don't do much praying at all-- they mostly endure the sincere but longish monologic ramblings of a pastor.  Those congregations who practice a bidding prayer fare a bit better, but their responses ("Hear our prayer, O Lord") can sometimes become dry and rote rather than heartfelt affirmation.

Here is one suggestion for addressing these deficiencies while accomplishing a number of ancillary purposes:

1. increasing congregational participation in the prayers of the people;
2. letting the prayer's shape be suggested by the prayerbook of God's people -- the Psalms;
3. making room within the prayer not only for speaking, but for listening to God's voice.

More details after the jump.Continue reading...

We have written before (here, here, and here) about incorporating lament into worship.  Most often such prayers are corporate rather than individual.  The harsh language of the Psalmic lament is difficult for most individuals to appropriate in their own devotional lives.  We have somehow learned that asking questions of God is irreverent, especially if those questions have a rebuking tone.  But the Psalms teach us that such questions are a central part of a relationship with God, and Scripture as a whole teaches us that God can probably handle our mild rants once in a while.

One interesting way to encourage folks to pray prayers of lament (whether publically or privately) is to prompt the prayers with an interrogative word, like "why" or "where" or "when" or "how long."  (The phrase "how long", in fact, is used over 20 times in the Psalms alone.)  This way, our prayers for peace in the Middle East, for example, are not merely petitions for wise leadership; they become  expressions of our own helplessness: "When, O Lord, will your children in the Middle East stop firing rockets at one another?"

After the jump is a short devotional service based on this idea.  It embeds the prayer of lament within both a sung Kyrie and a concluding Alleluia.  It also contextualizes the prayer  -- both the lament and the declaration of God's ultimate sovereignty -- as continuous with the "words of the faithful in all times and places."

Art courtesy Mary Ann BartleyContinue 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...

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...

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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...