Mid-August, we invited you to come up with a question about worship curation and send it to us for Mark Pierson to answer in his talk at the STORY, Chicago conference, September 15-16. A great bunch of questions were sent in. Unfortunately, the format for his live presentation at STORY wasn’t given to answering these particular questions. Still, we couldn’t leave you hanging!

We’ve included in this post a personal note from Mark, along with the questions you submitted and his responses in writing.

From Mark: My apologies to those who submitted questions for me to respond to at STORY Conference in Chicago recently. In the end the time-frame and setting didn’t allow for what I had planned. So I will attempt some sort of answer here. Thank you for your questions!

-Mark

Mark, how can the model of curating be applied in a more traditional liturgical setting, like the Lutheran church I currently serve in, where it seems that creativity is often scoffed at as “contemporary”?

Drew Yoos, Lutheran youth minister in South Carolina, USA

Drew, I assume that “contemporary” in your setting is a bad thing! I would tend to find one aspect of your worship event – perhaps prayers for others or prayer of confession – and do something with that moment only. Don’t introduce it with, “This morning we are going to do something different,” just go straight into it, “For our prayers of intercession this morning I am going to show you some headlines from this weeks newspapers/tv (put them on the screen, or hand sheets of newspaper around.) I invite you to silently make your prayer for whatever the headline brings to your mind. After a few seconds I will say, “Lord Hear Us,” and invite you to respond, “Lord Hear Our Prayer.” (Or whatever you usually use in your setting.) Then over time and doing something from time to time you can build up the level of comfort and creativity and participation. It’s slow, but the intention is not to dump our creativity on people but to enable them to better engage with God.

How do you avoid worship becoming about emotionalism while trying to set a reflective tone with young people?

Russell Lloyd, Creative director for a school mission organization in Melbourne, Victoria, AU

Aussie young people emotional in Church!! I thought that only happened at AFL games Russell. I don’t actually think this is a big risk, although it is directed quite a bit by the way you introduce the elements of your worship and what ways you ask young people to respond.

On the other side of that, there is the truth that we need to engage hearts at some level and not just heads if we are to see any real commitment to following Jesus in meaningful ways that aren’t an overlay on a current life but have some formative and transformative element to it.

Stick with the biblical text, help people engage with that story.

I think my response is really to say that if you are asking this question you are very unlikely to ever fall into the trap. You are already aware.

What is the worst thing you can do as a curator to make worship difficult for your community? (We recognise the small mistakes we make, but what are the bigger fundamental errors?)

Alison Squires, Christian aid and development worker in Auckland, NZ

Wow, difficult question Alison. The mistakes are probably unique to each of us. We all have our blind spots which is why we need to be constantly reflecting and reviewing and being held accountable for what we do.

Perhaps, if I was pushed, I would say that the worst error a worship curator can make is to not care deeply for the people at worship, and for seeing that the community engages with God in transformative ways. Then the curator is about ego and control and arrogance. Not a good look. But one I see too often in worship leaders (i.e. musical leaders). A good curator has to be willing to let her best and most creative idea drop, even at the last minute, if it doesn’t  support what she wants to say in the worship event. That’s about knowing yourself and knowing your people.

Do you play to both literalist and allegorical readings of the text/theme? Do you find that if you play to one, that you “lose” the others who “don’t get it?” What kind of choices do you make to comfort and stretch people from their ways of seeing and knowing?

Kathy Keener-Han, PCUSA interim pastor in Appleton, Wisconsin, USA

Hi Kathy, I do tend to play both sides of the fence, but not consistently. I assume we are talking mostly about stations based worship. I would always have a range of stations that covered not only a variety of ways into the text but a variety of ways of responding, too. Then, what may have been quite a literal reading may get interpreted in paint or clay and that shifts the response.  So you pick up different people in different ways and at different levels. That’s what I love about stations-based worship events.

I do try to be honest with the text and so do a lot of exegesis and study of it so I understand what it is and isn’t saying, what its context is, etc.

By covering a range of possibilities, even subtly different, I find there are few complainers. (Apart from those who would complain whatever I did.)

You suggest in your book that being attentive to community needs and input is important, but trying to curate a worship experience as a team is difficult. As a curator do you have any advice about balancing the input of others with your creative vision for a worship experience?

Brian Beckstrom, Campus pastor in Waverly, Iowa, USA

I wish I did Brian. I admit that I have been at worship curating for a very long time now and I find it quite difficult to work with absolute beginners. So, my modus operandi tends to be that if I am responsible for the worship event, I take responsibility and pull in others to check, comment, evaluate, contribute to what I have put out. I then revise and change according to the advice given. This might take weeks of back and forth. If I am curating, I am carrying the can, so I need to step up to do that.

My involvement with other worship curating teams tends to be that they send me what they plan to do and I comment on what I think will work and what won’t. Then they take or ignore my advice! But they take responsibility for it, and if I participate in the worship event I will write them a brief evaluation of how I thought it went.

In a church setting I would be meeting weekly with people who were assigned to put together worship (if it was weekly). I would always want a designated curator, even if it wasn’t me. Too much falls through the cracks otherwise. Someone has to take the lead.

How can interactivity be integrated in the standard Evangelical or non-denominational style worship service? The performer/congregant paradigm doesn’t readily accomodate community and collaboration, yet it seems to be growing in terms of “market share” of churches using this model. Rather than shoehorning competitive models (liturgical, pentecostal) into the Evangelical world, how can the Evangelical model be challenged, subverted, or mutated into a curation-friendly service?

Paul Gratton, Weiv interactive worship tool designer, Prineville, Oregon, USA

Ohhhh Paul! That’s a $10,000 question. I think that everything I have said in answer to the other questions, particularly Drew’s, is appropriate here. You have to start small, with some internal aspect of the service, and build slowly from there.

Otherwise start something new on the side. Regular or occasional. Treat it as a mission of the church. Don’t expect anyone from existing congregations to attend, but some will. Over time they will be exposed to a variety of approaches and that will make it easier to blend those aspects into the main event. You will also be modelling what you have in mind which makes it a lot easier for people to grasp it than just trying to explain it.

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