About Ryan Marsh

Ryan and his wife Bonnie inhabit Lynnwood, Washington with their precocious children Moses and Juniper. Ryan is the pastor of Church of the Beloved, a new church start that serves their surrounding neighborhoods through creative worship, intentional community, faith, arts and culture events, organic community gardening, and training entrepreneurial leaders.

Bring the World into Worship

by Ryan Marsh | October 20, 2011

Sustainable Grace Blank Slide

In my last blog I did my big soap box thing about not asking people to culturally commute to church, but rather foster the skills within your community to discover all the places that the Spirit of God might be at work in the world and attempt to integrate that into your worship practices. And, admittedly, there’s a way in which curating a collection of services about God’s glorious creation while sitting indoors is like describing a feast to hungry people without ever feeding them. Kinda cruel. But! It doesn’t have to stay indoors. During this series would be the perfect opportunity to schedule that all-church hike or camping excursion or Sunday School trip to the aquarium or youth group afternoon at the zoo. Perhaps someone in your community has a high-powered telescope you could set-up on your roof or in a nearby field. Check with your local parks and recreation to see if there are trails that need clearing or habitats that need invasive plants removed.

Sustainable Grace Gospel Slide

Not only that, but there are lots of ways to bring the outdoors in. If your church uses projection in your service, you might want to send your community on a photo-scavenger hunt around the neighborhood or during summer travels and ask them to take pictures of surprising beauty, fascinating intricacy, and overwhelming majesty. Have them email you their best shots, then use those images as the backgrounds for the projection slides you use during the Sustainable Grace services. You’ll want to look for blank or negative space within the images in order to fit text for songs and responses in some of the slides. If you don’t use projection you could turn your foyer or fellowship hall into an art gallery by blowing up the photography and hanging them on the walls or on easels. An creative and inexpensive way to show lots of photos is to hang clothes line and attach the pictures with clothes pins.

Sustainable Grace Sending Announcements Slide

Those of you reading this have the collective creativity to think of hundreds of ways to bring the world into worship and worship into the world. What would you do to mix it up? Post your ideas!

Categories: Sustainable Grace

Wow Moments: Integrating the World-Worship Divide

by Ryan Marsh | October 17, 2011

Sustainable Grace: For The Beauty of the Earth

Wow Moment slide in Sustainable Grace series

When curating worship one of our main goals is to integrate the perpetual world-worship divide, in which our experience of God gets relegated to an hour and a half on a Sunday morning and the rest of our life must be left at the door during that time. We suspect that the more the world shows up in our worship the more worship we discover in the world. Part of our participation in the kingdom of God is the desegregating of these sacred-secular spaces, till no stone is left unturned. Good theory, huh? Now, how to do that?

We’ve included an element in Sustainable Grace called the “Wow Moment” that virtually anyone in your community can do. The Wow Moment is a brief show-n-tell about something you’ve discovered that fills you with awe and wonder and gratitude. The first week might be an elementary-aged child who shows pictures of a neighboring solar system, perhaps the next week a middle-aged woman shares some research she’s been doing on brain science, then a new father describes the rapid pace of his child’s development. Really, there are as many things to share as there are things that make you say, “Wow!” We’ve parsed the hymn “For the Beauty of the Earth” both before and after the Wow Moment as an introduction and a community response to the individual’s sharing. That seems to tie things together neatly.

As a worship curator, it feels so gratifying to see the transition take place in people whose “Thanks!” turns into “Thank God for this!” and finally becomes “Thank you God!” That is a major connection when all of life becomes directed toward one’s God and each experience becomes a part of the ongoing conversation of faith. The Wow Moment might not do all of that for your community, but it’ll definitely point you in the right direction.

Categories: Sustainable Grace

Confessions of a Religious Tourist

by Ryan Marsh | September 23, 2011

Two international trekkers from our community had recently returned from hiking in the Himalayas and brought home gifts they had acquired on their adventure. They presented our community with a shiny “singing bowl” (which rings out for minutes when you ding it) and a strand of multicolored Tibetan prayer flags.

Throughout the season of Easter our community had been writing prayers on small colored papers and pinning them to twine strung throughout our worship space. The result of the growing prayer installation closely resembled the flags brought by the world travelers. All we were missing was the wind to blow the papery rows of petitions about, and Pentecost could not have been a more perfect culmination of this season.

The children led us in procession from our worship space to the community garden out back, where we tied the prayers of our community from one bean teepee over to a sweet pea trellis and then finally over to an arch. The plan was to hang the Tibetan prayer flags alongside the prayers we had created, but before we did this, a member of our community, Christa, pulled me aside. “Ryan, I don’t think you know what’s written on these Tibetan prayer flags. It’s not simply ‘peace, love and harmony.’ They are prayers to other deities that are not the Trinity. I don’t think it’s right to do this.”

Christa had lived in Northern China before moving to Edmonds and joining our community and knew a lot about Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism. I felt unprepared to care for her concern while also honoring the people who had brought the gift, so in my insecurity and anxiety I deflected by inviting her to share her experience and perspective with the two trekkers. Which she did, respectfully, while I made myself busy barbecuing. I checked in with the trekkers later on. “Oh, I wasn’t offended at all,” one said. “Actually, if you remember, you were the one who had asked us to bring back the prayer flags.”

How could I have forgotten?

The next day, I wrote an confessional and apologetic e-mail to Christa and the trekkers:

I was being a ‘religious tourist’ who intended to remain superficial. Then, when I got scared of being exposed, I passed the buck. Obviously, this is terrible leadership. I’m sad about that. If any conversations occurred yesterday about ‘what might it mean to be a Christ follower in a pluralistic world,’ or if anything positive resulted, it was because the Spirit of God is with us. Please forgive me.

All three individuals were gracious to me, and generous conversations did follow.

Our community may not have seen tongues of fire rest on our heads during the Pentecost service, but the Spirit moved in ways I didn’t expect – through a fumbled liturgy, open communication, and forgiveness. As curators of worship, we don’t get everything right all the time, especially the more we are willing to risk, and yet, Lord willing, something beautiful still emerges.

Words and Image © Ryan Marsh

Categories: Leadership

Sustainable Grace

by Ryan Marsh | September 12, 2011

Sustainable Grace Main Image After a couple thousand years of intense devotion and discussion, we’ve barely begun to imagine the breadth of what the death and resurrection of Jesus means for the world. Even today, as we face modern and devastating ramifications of our greed, even bigger ramifications of God’s redemption are being revealed. How else might we, as Christ followers, explain the almost global conviction of conscience around matters of environmental stewardship? How else might we understand the resurgence of home and community gardening? How else might we view the Church’s growing involvement in green government policy and grass roots local efforts to restore some balance to our out-of-control consumption, waste and mistreatment of the planet? Our answer seems ridiculous to anyone other than those who have been caught up into the story of God’s ridiculous grace in the cross of Jesus. Our answer: Only a movement of the Spirit could be responsible for this turn of heart!

Sustainable Grace is a collection of worship services meant to lead your community down this path of exploring what it means that “God so loved the [whole!] world.” The topic of environmental stewardship is often served with heaps of guilt. Fair enough, but we firmly believe that it’s God’s kindness that leads us to a turn of heart. Therefore, this collection attempts to gulp down as much of Creation’s beauty and wonder and Wow! as is possible, trusting that the more we fall in love with the Creator’s Creation, the more committed we will be to joining God in caring for it.

(Okay. Between you and me, I know you’ve been looking for a way to talk about this in your church, but you’re not sure if everybody is ready for it. Just blame it on those hippies from Seattle if you catch fire. You have my permission. Now have fun with it!)

Categories: Sustainable Grace

Wee Ones in Worship

by Ryan Marsh | September 5, 2011

“I was so moved after receiving communion from a child tonight,” a first time visitor to Church of the Beloved wrote to me in an email. “Coming from a tradition that set such rigid boundaries around who may serve communion, it was wonderful to see children empowered in this way.” Their family, who was Christian but churchless, joined our community a few months later. We try to take children’s baptismal vocation seriously and invite them to serve in any part of the liturgy they are able, whether that be reading, praying, singing, creating artwork, or sharing the bread and cup.

If this is something that you want to encourage in your community, I can’t think of a better time to start than Advent or Christmastide, as we are surprised that God would come to us as a little child! How much we benefit from worshiping together as a whole community! And there is also value in age-specific engagement with God’s story. For this reason we’ve created StorySpace: A Service of the Word for Children to accompany the Advent collection, “What Happens When God Comes Close.” StorySpace was designed for children to experience the first part of worship with the whole community and then be blessed to enter another worship space. The children then return, bringing the elements of wine, juice, and bread to set the table at offering time. Leaving and returning are important movements and some coordination is needed to time this accurately.

The themes of waiting in Advent are vital for children. You may be familiar with the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment which tested a group of pre-school children to see how long they might be able to resist eating a marshmallow for the reward of two marshmallows. The researchers were surprised to later find a close correlation between the children’s future success as adults and their earlier ability to delay gratification. The children prone to immediate gratification were far more likely to have become troubled, while the children who were able to display self-restraint were far more likely to have become competent adults. Waiting is a skill that is difficult to develop and rarely developed in relationship to God. And yet our scriptures are full of stories about people, like Sarah and Abraham, who wait twenty, thirty, forty years or longer before they see the fulfillment of God’s promise to them.

Categories: Advent God Comes Close