transformation — Clayfire Curator

How are stories acted out in your worship events?

by Eric Herron | September 26, 2011

A couple weeks ago, our theme was “story.” This week, our theme is “dramatic arts.” What’s the difference? These two are related, but not the same.

A story is an account of events – real or invented – that is written or told.

A drama is a story, acted out. “Drama” comes from the Greek dran, meaning “do, act.” Dramas involve actors, not just readers. Dramas involve action, not simply description. Dramas involve three, spacial dimensions. A story in a book literally lies flat.

The dramatization of stories happens everywhere in our culture. The media of television, music video, film, and of course the stage all utilize the dramatic arts. But how are the dramatic arts used in church? What does drama have to do with worship?

The first thing that comes to my mind when someone says “dramatic worship” is ritual. My memory scans back to the times I’ve sat in a Roman Catholic mass or other “high” church Eucharist and witnessed the presiders performing “high” drama. The vestments, utensils, and gestures of the celebrant mimic the costumes, props, and physical actions of the actor in a stage play. The story content is different, but in each, the narrative is brought to life by real-life action, not just words.

“Dramatic worship” also makes me think of the that old 1990’s formula for successful drama in church:

… use a six to eight-minute contemporary sketch (comic or serious) to introduce the topic the pastor will address. -Steve Pederson, Drama Ministry, 19

It’s easy to be critical of this particular use of drama for worship, however I have personally experienced sketches in church that made a powerful, lasting impression on me and the others present, helping promote the transformation that worship is supposed to bring.

How else is drama presented in worship? Some churches write, direct, and perform full-length plays, either in a regular worship service, or as a supplementary event. Others take portions of scripture or other poetic writings and divide them up for a number of people to deliver verbally as a “reader’s theater,” with emotion and expression that isn’t typically present in a regular reading of text.

How exactly are stories acted out in your worship events? Which of the forms discussed in this post have you tried successfully? Are there others you use regularly that aren’t listed here? Share with our readers your experience with drama in worship in the comments of this blog post.

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Categories: Q of the Week

Soooo… the Trinity

by Jodi-Renee Adams | June 14, 2011

My then eleven year old daughter – a bright and imaginative girl who I’m quite certain came from the same Divine imagination that created unicorns and Portuguese music – finally asked me the mysterious question that everybody eventually asks and nobody completely answers: “Sooo… one GOD but three… huh?” We sat and talked long enough about this great and magical idea of the Trinity to make me think she needed to play more video games. Eventually she and I both left the table realizing that it’s not about getting it, but maybe about realizing that we can’t; just look for GOD in faith, realizing that there’s more to GOD than we can quantify, qualify or understand. I thought that was a parenting score, if I may say so myself.

So I can’t explain the Trinity, obviously, but I’ll be perfectly honest: I’m glad. I dread the day that we can tidily box the essence of GOD up into neatly labeled compartments with the smug demeanor of people who “get it.” Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. This is not to say, however, that I’m coming from what may seem like the other pole of “don’t care to over-think this so I’ll just lump everything in the Jesus bucket.” If you are unfamiliar with this particular bucket, I urge you to listen to your local Christian radio station’s music for a small taste of it. Everything about the essence of GOD, every act, every purpose, every title seems to actually be “Jesus.” As best I can tell, this is far more a trait of Christian culture than it is of any particular denomination, but since Christian culture pervades across those lines, a little thoughtful inventory wouldn’t hurt any of us.

So why does it matter? That seems to be the first and most obvious question. Why does it matter – what we think of – or maybe even if we think of – the Trinity in our prayer and our worship?

Let’s start here at the seeming impossible – defining the Trinity…or at least paying homage to the identity and essence of the Trinity with our limited language. The Trinity is all that is in the very essence of GOD’s identity about community, interdependence, and risky love. The Trinity is about the creative impulse, new life, rebirth, the tension of true beauty as it appeared in the dawn of time, worked out through the cross, and appears now in our now-and-not-yet world. The Trinity is about restoring what is broken, returning what is lost among the seen and unseen. The Trinity is about co-creation and collaboration. About turning expectations inside out, turning over tables and over turning hearts. And all within the interwoven desires and work of GOD-the-Mother-and-Father, Christ-the-Son, and the Holy Ghost, each with their respective roles and essences. To steal shamelessly from the evangelical theologian Stanley Grenz in Theology for the Community of GOD:

The ‘Father’ functions as the divine program for creation. The Son functions as the revealer of GOD, the exemplar and herald of the Father’s justice, love, and grace for creation, and the redeemer of humankind. And the Spirit functions as the personal divine power active in the world, the completer of the divine program.

Not the most poetic explanation (ah, the poetic theologians… so jealous the Lutherans have one) but a solid and expansive one.

What does this mean for worship? For prayer? For the daily inhaling of all that is divine and sacred?

I’m throwing this out there for consideration: If we aren’t acknowledging the essence of the Trinity – creative, redeeming, moving, relational, mysterious, inconvenient, interdependent, giving of salvation – then it would stand to reason that we are worshiping an artificial god that we’ve created to satiate our felt needs. When we make our worship all about the Jesus we can relate to – our brother, redeemer, savior – or when we attribute to Jesus all the welcome work of the Trinity without the more dangerous invitations of the Spirit or the bigness that is the GOD-head, we create our own safe, comfortable, satisfying and wholly incomplete god — our golden calf. We practice a kind of self-help that may have some beautiful therapeutic value and even some possible overflow to our neighborhoods and relationships, but ultimately we fail to participate in the radical transformation in our own lives and in our communities that comes when we abandon the Jesus-GOD and embrace the interdependence and overturning life of the Trinity and the Trinity’s co-creative work.

This is more than creative praxis or scholastic theology. This is about thoughtful participation in the ongoing Story of GOD and celebrating that in our worship. But even greater – it’s about seeking to undo our limited understanding or overly-concrete expectations of GOD and purposefully moving into a collaborative life with the Trinity. I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I encourage you, even I beg you, to consider the mystery and the great overturning that is waiting in this kind of life, in this kind of prayer and worship.

How do you honor and acknowledge the Trinity and the work of the Trinity in your worship? In your prayer? How do you empower those you serve to see the world through this lens?

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Categories: Formation

Pentecost Changes Everything

by Guest Blogger | June 10, 2011

This post was written by Patrick Oden.

In our age of hyperbole, it’s not uncommon to run into something that you are told changes the world, or is the best. thing. ever. The newest book will transform your life and you’ll finally find the secret five step plan to accomplishing everything you have wanted in love, money, property and leisure. Here’s a diet that will help you lose all the weight you want, keep it off, all without exercise. Oftentimes, they’re not really all that different from what came before. Even churches get into this sort of attitude, using the buzz words of the day to suggest they’re doing something radically different, even when they’re not.

This isn’t always comparable to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, because sometimes the ship doesn’t actually sink. Sometimes the “radical” transformation, then, is more like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Queen Mary. It’s not going anywhere, but it’s pretty and it’s historical. For the especially transformational, it might even be like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Queen Mary II, that latest and greatest of ocean liners, which has the latest technology, the most up-to-date amenities, and advanced engineering. But the fact remains that even with all these advances, it’s still basically the same. There’s change, but it doesn’t really change everything.

Air travel was significantly more of a change. If a person wants to get to London or Paris from, say, Los Angeles, they are not likely to choose an ocean liner, except out of nostalgia. What used to take months, or at least weeks, now takes less than a half a day.

That’s change.

Pentecost brought even more change than that.

Pentecost isn’t the equivalent of air travel versus ocean travel. It’s more like a Star Trek transporter. Everything is different. For many, the changes that Pentecost brought are just as much a story of science fiction as a transporter device. Pentecost brings change that is often disturbing or inconvenient, so while we might celebrate it with words, we try to ignore it in how we organize our churches or worship services.

Pentecost changes everything, because with Pentecost we have to incorporate the work of the Spirit in how we gather. The Word, in light of Pentecost, can’t be limited to the Word that is preached or the sacraments that are administered, because that would limit the work of the Spirit to one person, or at the very most a few people, who stand at the front as the representative of Christ to the world.

Pentecost expresses the Word in a transformational, participatory way. Preaching is not the center, just as a single participant is not the center. Nor, however, is preaching dismissed as irrelevant. For those who are gifted, and there certainly are those gifted in proclamation, preaching becomes one among the many expressions that may happen in a gathering. All who gather are expressing the fullness that is Christ to each other and to this world.

The whole gathered people of God speak in many tongues. Indeed, the miracle is not just that of speaking the many tongues, but of people from many nations hearing the one message in their own language. The Spirit works in the preaching and in the listening.

The Spirit is also about more than talk, transforming how we live together. They gave to those in need, they shared meals in festive celebration of Christ’s work of equality, they participated together as a new community. They were not just a big mouth and many little ears. They were a Body of Christ who gathered in holistic participation. This new way of living was a holistic testimony to this world, in this world, for this world.

The work of the Spirit enlivens and renews this world by giving all people hope in new possibilities of living. This new way of living extends itself into breaking down the chains of oppression, resisting the forces of evil, bearing light and healing in communities that are dark and full of sickness.

When the people are given the space for participation, this brings transformation in their own lives, in their neighborhoods, and sometimes might even lead to transformation that changes the face of this world.

If we want the experience of traveling on the ocean, we can take the Queen Mary II. If we want the experience of the old covenant, we can model the church on the Temple or on the synagogue. But if our goal is different, if we seek the transformation that Christ brings, we have to pay attention to what happened on Pentecost. This is the expression of the Spirit, the only substantive source of the expression of the Word, who works in the context of the whole Body of Christ. This changes absolutely everything. Thanks be to God.

Image © iStockphoto

Patrick Oden, blogging at dualravens.com, is a 3rd year PhD student at Fuller Seminary, studying theology with a minor in church history. His first book, It’s a Dance: Moving with the Holy Spirit, explored the topic of pneumatology, using a fictional emerging church as the setting for conversational theology. His latest book is called How Long?: The Trek Through the Wilderness. Patrick’s in-process dissertation focuses on the emerging church in conversation with theologian Jürgen Moltmann, with some liberation theology mixed in for texture. When he isn’t buried in his many books of deep theology, he loves to camp on islands, ponder the activities of local ravens, and spend as much time as possible with his wife of two years, Amy.

Categories: Formation

No Evaluation? Time to Re-evaluate

by Eric Herron | May 5, 2011

I’ve been loving the poll addition to our Q of the Week. We are receiving significantly more responses than when commenting was the only option. This is providing more data for accurately assessing where our readers are coming from.

Speaking of assessment, this week’s Q is: How Do You Evaluate Worship? The poll gives five choices and allows voters to choose up to two. As of the writing of this post, most poll responders (42%) claim they use their “intuitive sense” more when evaluating their own worship curation. Not surprising. What is surprising to me is that the second most popular answer (37%) is “we don’t evaluate.” Really?!

I suppose the reticence to evaluate is related to some of the thoughtful comments we’ve seen this week. Red Livingstone called evaluation a “human thing” and suggested that perhaps our evaluations of worship are “irritating” to God. Evaluations are certainly a human thing in the sense that God personally has no need for the process of evaluation. God immediately knows the state of things. She doesn’t need to stop and check her intuitive sense. No informal polling is necessary, nor is a team assessment prudent – unless by team you mean “Trinity.” God’s assessment is immediate and final.

And yet, aren’t we “evaluated” by God? I mean our sin is not hidden from God. And though the LORD does not “keep a record of sins” (Psalm 130:3) we are certainly evaluated as unrighteous and in need of repair. Maybe evaluation isn’t a God-thing. Maybe, like prayer, it’s more for us than it is for God. It is necessary for our lives of faith and it is necessary for our worship curation and leadership.

I like what Jodi had to say this week about evaluating worship. At the end of her post, she asks us how we actually go about the kinds of evaluation she describes. In reference to the poll options (intuitive sense, informal polling, team meetings) I would like to suggest that we ought to engage in all three of these. It is the cumulative input from these methods that will help us as we look back and seek out indications of transformation in our community.

The Community Level
Informal polling is the “community” level. It is the most democratic method, one which seeks (admittedly randomly) input from the widest selection of worship participants. When we casually speak with fellow worshipers about what they’ve experienced in worship and they respond, we are hearing from the local body of Christ. Each part is important. Each part is (hopefully, to some degree) engaging God’s Spirit in their lives and discerning what they’ve seen, heard, and felt in the gathering from a uniquely personal perspective, and at the same time from a spiritual perspective as they are open to the Spirit’s whispers.

The Leader Level
If informal polling is the community level, I say team meetings are the “leader” level, the next, narrower group of evaluators. Whether you have a fairly flat leadership team approach or a more old-school hierarchical leadership scheme, when the local church is one activated by the Spirit, the leaders have been divinely called. At the leader level, there is typically a greater sense of what God is/has been up to in the church. This goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: it is not because the leaders are necessarily more “spiritual” than everyone else in the church, but rather it is because God has placed each leader in his or her role for the appointed time. And, leaders lead. Otherwise, they are followers, not leaders. Though the body must function with each member playing her part, the leader’s share of that functioning often involves heightened discernment when it comes to what has happened in the community, what is happening, and what needs to happen next. Because of this, I think the leader evaluation level is just as crucial (if not slightly more) as/than is the community evaluation level.

The Spirit Level
The third level corresponds to the intuitive sense. Though this “sensing” happens on each of the other two evaluation levels, it is worth emphasizing this third evaluation approach as it’s own category. Our intuition comes into play when we are able to assess an experience of worship in a way that seems true to all others who hear it, and yet may be lacking the hard data (such a cold way of putting it) to bolster our assessment. An intuitive worship evaluation is the kind of thing we see when most everyone feels that God moved in some significant way at the gathering, while at the same time, knowing that the projection was off, the sound system crackled, the preacher was distracted, the stations were a little hard to understand, and the band sucked. It is only our God-graced intuition that can make this sort of non-sensical, unscientific evaluation. That is why this third level is indispensable and also why it partners so well with the other, more “human-driven” methods of evaluation.

Evaluations are good. They are better when they are informed by the Spirit, the leaders, and the larger body – all three. They are best when we don’t take our evaluations too seriously and allow ourselves the grace and space to flop and fail again, knowing ultimately that the LORD will play maid to our messy attempts at seeking, praising, and following Him.

Categories: Leadership

Watermarks

by Jodi-Renee Adams | May 3, 2011

Here’s a confession: I’m always torn when people come up to tell me that worship was really good today. Part of me balks at that a little and I always find myself unsure what to do with my face. I know what they’re trying to say and I desperately want to believe that their intentions go beyond our standard American “Feed me, Seymour” mentality around… well, everything. I’m guilty of that in so many areas, enough that I know that consumerism seeps into the little cracks in my brain where I don’t pay attention. So when it comes to worship, we don’t question the definition so much, nor do we wonder if our expectations are healthy.

This was a conundrum for me as a young and wet-behind-the-ears worship pastor. Hey, who are we fooling: it’s still a conundrum some days. If “good worship” so often seemed to be an experience that focused on the felt needs of an exclusive culture, what was the alternative? How do you plan worship that address people’s actual needs? And was I even able to discern that? This was all I knew: there had to be something greater than “people are happy with it” or “I enjoyed it” or even “it was a positive experience.” It would be foolish of me to say that none of these things matter or have meaning; foolish and maybe even dangerous. The problem shows up when we make those the barometer of transformative worship.

So that brought me back to my original question. What do people need actually? After plowing through the psalms again and wrestling with countless conversations, here’s my best guess:

Transformation.

People need spaces that invite honest encounters with self, spaces that let GOD out of the boxes we so often put her in, spaces that challenge even our desire to box GOD up in that tidy and slick way we so often do, spaces that teach us how to imaginatively enter into orthodoxy with all those who’ve gone before us and walk with us now.

That felt like a challenge, but one I could get excited about. One that, no doubt, inspires the artist-priest that resides in so many of us.

This adds another level of thinking to our evaluations of what is or is not “good worship.” It’s a necessary element of our work to pull back after each Sunday or gathering and determine whether or not we did the best we could to provide a beautiful and liminal space for those we serve. We can evaluate pieces, transitions, obstacles, possibilities. This is important. This is the work of an artist.

But the second level is identifying the watermarks of true worship. No way can we do this on a weekly basis. This is the kind of evaluation that gets seen in the long rear view mirror of our faith life. It leaves its colors after long seasons of confession and absolution, of prayer, of encounter, of being nourished by the Eucharist, of hearing Scripture read as poetry over and over again.

The watermarks of worship? The ones that appear in our lives almost without our conscious effort? Astonishment that births gratitude that leads to the kind of peace that works for justice. Supernatural evidence.

How do you identify these watermarks in your story? In your congregation? How does this long range hope work it’s way into your planning on a weekly basis?

Categories: Formation