church — Clayfire Curator

Worshiping Together = Spiritual Formation?

by Jodi-Renee Adams | April 12, 2011

Being part of this online community immediately assumes that we are all interested and perhaps a little knowledgeable about corporate worship, even if we don’t use that particular terminology very often. If somebody asked us a question about corporate worship, we could probably answer with some amount of articulate idea and certainly no small amount of passion. I wonder what about this particular part of our identity gets you the most excited? brings you the most alive?

I’m confident that I would learn a great deal from sitting around with you over some good wine or strong coffee and talking about the personal story that informs your understanding of “corporate worship.” But what would happen if I asked the question “what is the difference between worshiping together and worshiping at the same time?”

There’s something inside this question that is waiting to infuse our gatherings with something vibrant and regenerating, something self-perpetuating and earthy. If we moved into an experiential understanding of the difference between the two ideas, I think it would radically change the consumer-church concept most of us have to wrangle. It would start to give a creative resuscitation to our life in the “in-between” as kingdom people.

No doubt, the term “corporate worship” is something that we’ve taken for granted. We may have even substituted the language for something less formal sounding: community worship, worship gathering, worship service, etc. As far as defining it goes, of course it means the act of worshiping with other believers, right?

What if that’s the definition that’s limiting us? What if we’ve taken for granted a framework that is actually incomplete? Some of the accusations leveled at the contemporary worship culture seem to reflect this faulty framework: individualism, sentiment, narcissistic song-writing, sub-culture artistic reflections, sensationalism, presentation-driven idea, etc. Then on the polarity, we encounter worship reflections that feel more like team-building exercises with odd arts-and-craft projects and awkward pronoun replacements in our hymns and praise songs.

There are some basic assumptions in the framework of “worshiping at the same time” that are eating away at our gatherings. Some of these assumptions are contributing to the declining numbers of worshiping believers and some of them are the driving force behind the media power-house of contemporary Christendom. It’s entirely possible to have a thousand people in a room all together singing a song about a personal and individual encounter with Jesus. Or a personal and individual liturgy about how God is going to improve the situations of my life. If all thousand people are engaged in singing this song or praying this prayer about their personal and individual experience, does that make it corporate? Does it make it worship?

First off, we need a very basic ecclesiology. We all would agree that we are the Church, that the Church is a living, breathing organism constantly giving birth to new life. We are the Bride of Christ, the Body, a temple. We all would agree that church is not a place but an identity. I think we also would all agree that the Church needs to gather to remember and reaffirm this deep-soul identity and to give thanks for richness, mourn our darkness, lament and grieve over devastations within and without, celebrate life, and bless God for the work that is constantly happening around us in a co-creation with humankind – an affirmation of God’s goodness, power, beauty, and unknowableness. This we can all stand in agreement on.

But who is “the Church?” There are different levels of seeing this beautiful, living being: first is the local community, the church we gather with for worship and serving our neighborhoods. Honestly, even getting our worship brains around expressions of the local community concept takes a bit of work and collaboration. The second level is the universal church – the body of believers that live right now from all around the world. The brother in the Turkish house church, the sister in the Anglican gathering in northern England, the wise mother in the Quaker community. All of us who claim to be disciples of the Nazarene Rabbi, regardless of race, creed, gender, or orientation make up the universal Church. The third level – the mind blowing and exciting level – is that we are part of the mystical Church, the Church comprised of all of the Christ-followers who have ever lived and who are building the Church now. This is comprised of all of heaven and all of earth. This is Hebrews 11 and 12… you have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. The entirety of the mystical Church worships together whenever we celebrate the resurrection and the powerful implications of this Missio Dei – the Mission of God.

The first aspect of corporate worship means taking our place in this mystical Church, losing our urgency to fulfill our own felt needs in worship so we can, in reality, have our soul-holes filled. It’s definitely the “something bigger” that so many people are aching for! If we gather and take our place in the mystical Church, it changes the context and the tools a great deal, but ultimately it forces us to ask the question what story are we telling? If we enter that mysterious paradigm and try to bring our own stories, the “me and Jesus” story, it will feel painfully and almost ridiculously small. With this small shift, our concept of corporate worship has already changed too much to allow for a self-focused story line.

So what is the narrative of God? What is God’s story?

God’s story begins with the Triune God, the essence of community, breathing life into humankind; creating paradise-beauty, pleasures of mind, body, soul and heart, and a love that means we were profoundly and truly seen. Then came the Fall, the great division that broke humans from their God and also tore the foundations beneath man and wife, brother and sister, parent and child. It is here that God begins his passionate pursuit of the Beloved, all of his creation. With subplots and dramas that rival anything written, God is in motion to win the hearts and minds of humankind and ultimately, to restore the entirety of creation. We looked for God and found him in strong men and women, in soulful art, in mysterious rites, in magnificent temples, in family bonds. Yet it was still incomplete. So God came as one of us. He turned our concept of holiness, greatness, and justice upside down. He died a criminal’s death and came back to physical life on a dew-soaked morning three days later. On that day, all of creation changed it’s trajectory from degenerating and effort-driven to restorative and grace-infused. We became not just recipients of God’s grace, but agents of his ongoing redemption, this process of renewal for the planet, for relationships, for souls, for lives, for minds and bodies. We suffer with those who suffer, we speak for those who cannot, we create beautiful windows into heaven with our art and music for those who are struggling to see. We live as the Body of Christ and look for God at work out there. This is God’s story. Entering into it “on purpose” changes us almost despite ourselves.

It means losing ourselves in the vast greatness of this living and eternal mystical Church so that we can truly and unshakably find ourselves. It means having a strong sense of where Christ is in the here and now – and my guess is that he’s not really listening to Christian music or hanging out at the local Christian bookstore. My guess is that he’s holding a sign on the street corner, standing in the shadows of the porn-shop door, gathered at the immigration rally, sitting in with the hot jazz trio, inked on the pages of a Tolstoy novel, captured in the provocative black and white images of the international photo-journalist.

This has great implications on our worship gathering. It changes how we define participation, how we define intercession, confession, celebration, good art… spiritual formation. It changes how we approach missional communities, life with friends, our own personal prayers. It might even change us.

O God, for whom all times and places are your habitation, be our God for we would be your people. We praise you for life’s intangibles. We praise you for our collective dreams and the ability to bring them to pass. We unite our hearts to pray for your Church. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

So I have to ask you again: I wonder what about corporate worship – this formative part of our identity – gets you the most excited? brings you the most alive? gives you the most frustration?

images © iStockphoto

Categories: Formation

Chapter 10: Guerilla and Transitional Worship

by Mark Pierson | March 23, 2011

It would be easy to argue that much of what happens under this heading isn’t really worship. It’s more a stimulation for spirituality. I am not going to bother arguing the point. As I said last week, the terms I use to categorise worship are all arbitrary and descriptive rather than prescriptive. And the categories are to help us think about the different contexts in which we might be curating, and how that affects what we design.

It could be described as “worship for those Christian and those not yet Christian.”

I think the area of Guerilla worship is very exciting at present. It feeds back into community worship so I’d encourage every curator to find some opportunities for being involved with at least transitional settings. (I defined “guerilla” and “transitional” last week if you are unsure what they mean.)

Guerilla worship is the creative fringe that feeds the Community worship centre. Community worship provides the heart and content that Guerilla worship will reframe and be sustained by.

My own growth as a worship curator, and in fact where I began to develop the term, was through a monthly worship event in the mid 1990s. The Parallel Universe was our answer to everything the Church couldn’t give us. We met in bars and venues, used 20 foot projection screens on 3 walls (with slide projectors!), had no front, no musicians and rarely sang. Participation was high. Creativity was the name of the game. Each event moved toward ending with dancing as a celebration. (We did often provide live music for this.)

We did some outrageous things. Some worked. Some didn’t. God was present. We learned a lot. Those few years have influenced everything I do now in Community worship.

Guerilla worship draws its best inspiration from the arts world. Particularly the world of installation art. Here is a fabulous example that I wish I had found earlier in Lent, although the idea could be used in a number of other settings.

British artist Richard Stott made 40 clay figures and left them in various outdoor public places. He asked people to send him photos of their deterioration. No overtly Christian connections at all.

A church in the US picked up his idea and made it into their Ash Wednesday activity by building on the “dust to dust” imagery inherent in that day. During their service they had people make clay figures and take and leave them in their communities.

This is an activity that could be used equally well in settings that are predominantly Christian, or those that aren’t. The fact that the original artist is also a Methodist Minister is irrelevant.

Last Friday was a national day of memorial in New Zealand for the victims of the Christchurch Earthquake. The downtown church that I am part of includes a large international congregation that consists mainly of students, many of whom are in NZ to learn English.

The most prominent building to collapse in the earthquake housed a language school that many students and staff in were killed. So the church decided to run a memorial service and invite all the Auckland-based language schools. The service would be in their Baptist church building, and advertised as a memorial service, but curating would be done with a largely non-Christian and other-faith congregation in mind.

This is a good example of transitional worship.

The auditorium was unchanged apart from white cloth draped over the raised stage to symbolise the long white clouds of Aotearoa-New Zealand. If nothing else it covered the horrible carpet on the stage (“Church Carpet by Committee”) and provided a clean backdrop. A line with the flags of 12 countries hung across the front as it often does.

Five large candle trays and piles of candles were distributed around the space. These were lit by the Principals of language schools off the Christ candle during the opening liturgy. Amidst a very participatory service that used a lot of different people and a variety of languages, the congregation was invited to write a prayer on a provided form or to light a candle as a symbol of their prayers. This was the only time people moved around.

The written prayers were posted in a box and would be sent to the school in Christchurch most affected by the earthquake. Ninety percent of the people wrote a prayer.

The service ran for forty-five minutes, as advertised, and was very straight-forward in that it was quite verbal, contained two congregational songs, an item song, a long scripture reading (Psalm 40 with parts in 3 languages), a eulogy, and a part from the prayers response which was done seated. There was nothing particularly creative about it.

But it was carefully crafted and curated with an understanding of the type of people who would be present and what the occasion was about. They were also aware of what the service was not about. It wasn’t a time for preaching or evangelism. The seven Principals and other faculty who came were very complimentary about the value of the event for them and their students in the grieving process.

Everyone took away an order of service sheet that had all the readings, songs, eulogies and segues in full. As the curator said, “The plan was to publish a programme that would not only be a memorial but also a message of hope.”

I hope this worship event will remind you that curating worship isn’t about being flashy, different, or even more creative. It’s about being more careful and thoughtful in how you design and lead an event. And doing so with keeping the people constantly in mind.

He tangata, he tangata. (“It’s people, it’s people.” – an indigenous Maori expression.)

image © Richard Stott

Categories: Curation

Chapter 9: Contexts for Worship

by Mark Pierson | March 16, 2011

This week’s blog is likely to be a bit disjointed. Christchurch, then Japan, and now a young family friend has died, and I have been asked to take her funeral on Friday. She was ex-church and from a family that is church, ex-church, post-Christian, and atheist.

This afternoon I met with the pastor of a large inner city church. He has decided to insist on one substantial hymn in every worship service at his church. He will check and alter archaic language where possible and explain unfamiliar metaphors when necessary. But one hymn with substantial theology and clear language. We talked through how and why he would do that and what else was missing from his weekly public worship events.

Yesterday, I offered another pastor some ideas and content for a memorial service for victims of the Christchurch earthquake. International students from 17 English Language Schools are coming together in a church setting to remember and grieve. Most won’t be Christian.

Three different worship events. They are a strong reminder of the different contexts in which we can be called upon to curate worship. While in these cases all will be in church buildings, they are each for very different purposes and will require curating differently. The curation will build on the very different answers to the “what do I want to say” question.

And that is really the point of my setting up the 3 contexts for worship that I offer:

community – regular week by week worship events or services.
transitional – not quite either of the categories it sits between!
guerilla – sacred spaces in public places and the like.

It’s not that these are definitive. Rather they remind us that different contexts – of people as well as place – require different approaches in content and style. In other words, they need curating differently. When it comes to worship, the cry of the Thai t-shirt seller, “one size fits all” is simply not true. Ever.

We so often forget that the people are the reason we put a worship event together. In particular we do it so that those people will engage with the Trinitarian God in some way.

The funeral and the memorial service are both about death and grief, but they will provide quite different contexts for worship. The people and the purpose are different. The services wouldn’t be interchangeable even if they were taking place in the same church building. (It’s interesting to ponder whether they would be interchangeable if the congregation was the same in both cases.)

The pastor introducing a hymn into every service has yet another context. Clearly a community one. Within that context the worship events are interchangeable because the people-context and purpose remain very similar week by week.

Until we are able to get our minds around these differences we will continue to sell our people short in the worship events we offer. We will use the same formats and content across everything we do.

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so. (Quote attributed to Gandhi.)

It is this people-focus of the curator that recognises the difference in contexts and leads her/him to design and curate appropriately.

A few minutes ago I was asked by email, “I’m curious. How many times have you experienced full blown community worship and stations-based transitional worship all at the same time and in the same place? And that you didn’t curate?”

I haven’t had time to find out what is behind the question, but my answer would be that I have had the great pleasure of experiencing that on maybe 15-20 occasions in the last 5 years. Most times in three regular worship events that I have been part of.

Community worship that has an open edge to it. Worship with communities that are used to creativity and the arts, and questions, and struggle and engagement in the worship they come to. These communities are rare. I expect them to become more common.

Community worship that is also transitional (i.e edging to at least some degree toward Guerilla) requires very carefully made deliberate choices. It’s a wide spread to bridge. My feeling is that it probably ends up sliding more into one category than the other.

In the reprint of The Art of Curating Worship, my friend Linda Parriott at sparkhouse has tidied up the chart on page 151. The first printing wasn’t as clear as it might have been. Sorry about that. Linda still can’t quite understand what I mean by “composite” worship.

“I’m still struggling with ‘composite.’ According to your stated intent, it looks as though you mean a composite as a combination of ‘non-stationed’ and ‘stationed.’ I can’t envision how that would work. I’m wondering if you mean a combination/hybrid of ‘ambient’ and ‘linear.’”

This overlaps the question above about combining community and transitional worship.

By composite I do mean using both stationed and non-stationed elements in the same event. So a community worship event that started and finished sitting in pews, with 30 minutes of stations in between would be “composite.” Depending on its context and intent it could also be community worship that was edging toward transitional (i.e. it had a wider audience in mind than just the usual Sunday morning crew.)

In the end these are “straw worshippers” I have put up. The categories and labels aren’t important. Thinking about the people you curate for, and designing for the various contexts and to support what you want to say is the bottom line.

Before I go back to designing for my funeral context – which could probably be described as “community worship with a transitional edge in a ritualised setting” – I want to share how Katie Strandlund answered the “what do I want to say?” question for a recent worship event she was curating at Journey Church in Nashville.

What Do We Want to Say?
the light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not understood it
Jesus is the Light
darkness must be revealed so light can come in
Christ calls us to leave behind the darkness of bondage to sin & guilt and walk in the Light
we have the opportunity to share the Light through our stories.

Thanks Katie. Maybe you can tell us if the process of answering the question was actually helpful or not?

I’m still taking suggested materials for a Good Friday service. Flick me anything you think could work and I’ll see what I can do to bring it all together. Read more about the project here. Submit your stuff here.

image © iStockphoto

Categories: Curation

Chapter 8: Stations the New Altar Call?

by Mark Pierson | March 9, 2011

It was my friend Stuart McGregor in New Zealand who I first heard describe stations as “the new altar call.” It was after he had curated a stationed response for 2,500 young people at an Easter camp in New Zealand.

These youth camps run over the four-day-long Easter weekend downunder. Two of the largest will have 4,500 and 3,500 people at them this year. Easter camping has been very significant in the conversion and discipleship journey of tens of thousands of Kiwis over the last five decades.

Stuart encountered a common problem with using stations in worship: worshippers loved them and “head-counting” evangelists loathed them because they couldn’t count “souls saved.” People use the stations to make a wide variety of responses, none of which is generally directly measurable.

So if your organisation depends on head counts to keep sponsors and supporters happy you are unlikely to be convinced of the value of using stations in worship. If your commitment is to a depth of transformational engagement with and response to God; and if you are dedicated to living that out by following Jesus in the real world – stations will definitely be of interest to you.

Station at Hydrate Gathering

If using stations becomes part of your toolbox as a curator, it’s important not to get too fixated on stations as small tables or plinths as people moving around in the worship space.

While the word does mean “a place to stop and stare,” that stopping may involve all the congregation staring at same thing at the same time. And not necessarily moving from where they are seated.

A single station could be inviting everyone to tear a shape out of their bulletin; to shape putty they received as they came in; to knot a piece of wool; to hold a piece of colored card while they pray; or to handle a grain of popping corn while it is spoken about.

The danger with understanding stations this broadly is that you could probably argue that most services are made up entirely of segued single stations – listening to scripture, singing a song, listening to a sermon, making an offering.

I’m not looking for a waterproof definition that excludes these. I just don’t consider the usual activities of a worship service that take place without anyone moving from their seat to be stations.

Thinking of stations very broadly as “places to stop and reflect” can help us be more creative in the worship we curate. It’s not just an activity for when there are no pews or seats.

These days I find it almost impossible to design a worship event that doesn’t include stations of some sort. I find it equally difficult to engage in worship myself when there are no active options such as those that stations provide.

This past weekend I participated in Hydrate. This beautiful little worship event in New Zealand started last year on a farm property covered in native bush and looking out over magnificent coastline on three sides.

It’s billed as a worship context not a concert and seeks to provide a 24-hour period away from the stresses and strains of city living. Every three hours or so there is an hour of corporately sung worship led by an unadvertised worship band followed by an unadvertised speaker. The hours before the next “gather” are spent talking, praying, and reflecting on the art-based stations that are available.

It’s a wonderful hype- and pressure-free combination of singing, silence, talking, praying, art and ministry. This year the registrations were closed at 250 (up from 120 last year) to keep it small. Unfortunately, torrential rain also had it moved to an indoor venue at a few hours notice.

The stations were interesting. Ambient, in that you could visit them in any order and didn’t need to visit all of them. Art-based, in that artifacts were provided to handle and engage with. The space they were in looked beautiful, especially with candles glowing in glass lampshades through the twilight and darkness of the evening. Cushions and bean-bag chairs were provided for seating, with the stations around the walls.

The five stations themselves were beautiful. A small white box at each with a candle on top and the appropriate artifacts and instructions within and around each box provided consistency and tied the stations together.

I liked the four big timber window frames that were part of one station. We were invited to write our prayers on the panes using liquid chalk.

I am unable to tell you what that station, or any of the others, was about specifically as the full page of text at each station was in a font too small for me to read easily, and there was more information on it to process than I was inclined to do. This was disappointing.

I was in reflective mode, but the stations instructions forced me out of that and into cognitive processing mode. So I settled for handling and thinking about the artifacts that were part of each station – a collection of crosses, the windows and chalk-pens, pocket New Testaments, post-it notes, etc.

Writing appropriate invitations and content for stations is a skill too easily assumed and overlooked in its significance. Even the most creative content isn’t much good if it is presented in a way that is difficult to access or engage with.

Station artifacts

Today is Ash Wednesday. It was actually yesterday for those of us living downunder. I curated the weekly staff Chapel event at World Vision where I work. Did my usual thing with a clothesline on which I hung signs for “Advent”, Pentecost”, “Lent”, “Holy Week”, etc. in the order agreed by people calling out. Then I talked about Lent, its purpose in the Church, and about Ash Wednesday and Shrove Tuesday.

For the last part of our usually static thirty minutes together I offered three stations while a piece of music was played. People could come forward and have the sign of the cross made on their hand or forehead. (I mixed Eucalyptus oil with liquefied sand that had been pushed up in massive quantities by the recent Christchurch earthquake.)

They could also light a candle as a symbol of their prayer for issues mentioned previously, or they could stay seated and reflect on those issues. We closed the Chapel service with our usual Benediction.

Those small stations worked well with a group not used to moving during these services, and a group not all Christian. Feedback was very positive from a wide range of people-types.

We also launched our small booklets called “Lenten Reflections.” These 2 3/4 in. by 3 in. (65 x 70 mm) booklets have a page or two of reflection (image or text) for each day in Lent including Sundays, and for Easter. They are written to guide our staff on a journey through this time, and to be carried in a pocket or purse or left on a desk or bedside table. It occurs to me that they could be seen as another version of stations. But stations engaged with solitarily. Do they count as stations?

If you register your email address at lentenreflections.org you will get the same pages as the book emailed each day during Lent and Easter. Reading email is an even more solitary event.

I’ve got a few ideas for stations for the Clayfire community worship Good Friday event, but I’d love some more, or any ideas you have of any kind for the aggregation from which the service will be built. You can read about the project parameters here and submit your art here. Looking forward to “working” with you!

Categories: Curation

The Great Experience of Just Showing Up

by Jodi-Renee Adams | March 8, 2011

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” Joseph Campbell uttered these words in 1988 during a PBS television series on The Power of Myth. In his great work as a professor and writer, he was speaking mainly about the deep journey of self-discovery and spiritual awakening but I’m firmly convinced that his insight is just as much about worship as it is about life.

Experience. Aliveness. Awareness. Engagement. This what we quarry from the meaning of life. And from the kind of worship that shapes us and forms us. Think about it—people want to have an experience in worship. They long to encounter the Divine; and a good chunk of people are finding that experience outside the four walls of their local church worship gathering.

No doubt, as worship curators in this age we’re up against a lot in the work of drawing people into transformative experiences. We serve a media savvy people with a huge array of options quite literally at their fingertips. A smaller globe and virtual windows into every possible experience on the planet mean that engaging the human mind and soul is a whole new creative challenge. Add to this that worship has been a largely presentational act for a long time in all kinds of denominational settings and you’ve got another issue looming. People aren’t sure what it means to engage in worship. They’re not sure what the expectations are; or worse – what’s the point.

Sometimes I wonder if we, the enlightened and seminary-educated, know.

Worship is—at the atomic core of its essence, at the first breath of its practice—active. The practicum is defined by participation. The etymology of the word itself implies a necessary engagement. And the actual watermark and evidence of worship is only brought about by participation. But what does it mean to participate?

Well, sometimes it’s just showing up. Just aligning our actions with the belief that something worthwhile will happen in community worship (ironically, whether we “experience” it or not) and we need to be there. Sometimes the simple act of getting our butts out of bed and through the door to be with the people we do and don’t like, to pray together and share communion, is the greatest act of participation. This is our starting place. Sometimes, engagement begins with the argument inside ourselves about whether we even want to participate and choosing to anyway.

And sometimes, well, sometimes engagement is as simple as doing it. Sometimes the simple act of holding the bread and saying over and over again—whether we feel it or not—“the body of Christ broken for you” starts to form us, to change us. The action seeps itself slowly into the pores of our soul and does something unexplainable and unpredictable.

If we believe this either anecdotally or scientifically as worship curators and pastors, that changes the game for us. Suddenly, it is no longer about who has the coolest media show prior to the service because we think that will somehow inspire a certain kind of buy-in (often confused with participation) but it’s about intentionally and thoughtfully finding as many places for the people to participate and engage in as many ways imaginable. With their minds, their bodies, their words, their songs, their artistic expression, their grief, their cynicism, their stories, their deep intentions.

When we commit to this kind of formative and wondrous worship, this kind of participation, our values may have to change. Where we once valued production, control, tidiness, emotional consumption, we may now find that we’ve come to value the messy, erratic, unpredictable expression of a people in dialogue with GOD. The liturgy becomes alive as it once again becomes the work of the people. And in our roles as curators and pastors, this is our watermark: the fluid, honest expression of the people we serve and lead. Beware of defining engagement in a monolithic manner—such as singing or feeling only. At Ecclesia, people participate by taking pictures to frame the liturgy, serving communion, reading, praying, taking part in stations, collaborating on liturgy. Amazing. And completely not what I was taught worship should look like or sound like. Hold yourself accountable to the greater purpose of creating a space for people to experience GOD in a way that awakens them, engages them, and ultimately transforms them. And be ready for what will come. No doubt, you’re in for a beautiful surprise.

How do you define participation in your context? What are the biggest obstacles to people’s engaging in worship inside your community? And honestly, what do you fear the most when you think about a highly participative worshiping community?

Categories: Formation