These are some (very long) excerpts from the first draft of a report I’m writing for the Commission for Mission who employ me… would love some feedback…
[The preceding paragraph is about the different events I’ve been asked to prepare worship for – Synod meetings, inductions, cutting of ties, schools of ministry, etc.]
One of the things these experiences highlighted was that often the church wanted something new, but they didn’t really want to change at all. I’d often be told i had a blank sheet of paper to work with… but then be asked what hymns I’d like the organist to practise. People wanted something new, but they didn’t want the new to be any different to the old.
I realised quite early on that the alternative worship project was becoming a microcosm of the change that the rest of the Uniting Church was struggling with…
When we did curate worship that wasn’t for a particular event, but purely worship for the sake of worship, we had an interesting mix of people coming along. There were those who came because they had a desperately longing for this. The worship we offer has become ‘home’ to a remarkable group of people. There were also many people curiously peering in from the edge, wanting to know, to dip their toe in, but not wanting to fully commit to being a part of the experience. Some had been burnt by the church too often and they need to tread slowly and carefully. Some thought they might be interested, but wanted to make sure first that they weren’t going to be part of a failure, however glorious that failure might be. The most curious group, however, were the spectators – those who (mostly) were long-standing members of the church – they’d come along, but they would just stand on the edges, watching, rather than actually participating. I’m coming to wonder whether the Uniting Church has become a worshipping church of dispassionate observers… whether we’ve bred that in the church through our mainstream worship, which is largely ‘performance liturgy’ (or where participation involves reading the words in bold to a prayer in a newsletter that someone else wrote on our behalf) … we critique, rather than immerse. The alternative worship we have been offering expects an entirely different kind of participation. It’s hands on. That kind of difference is a very big crevasse to jump… The trouble is, if you don’t get your hands into this kind of worship, it’s kind of hard to understand what it is. Alternative worship is an interaction, not a performance…
There were also a number of people who got involved, and then realised that we were actually talking about something very different to what they imagined. Many people were hoping that they could simply find a list of creative ideas, in order to transform their own worship. Often people would carry a sheet of paper and pen during worship so that they could write down ideas as they saw them… They were hoping for experiences that would offer another creative idea to carry them through another week… We do that a lot in the Uniting Church. We grab ideas, take the sharp edges off them, and make them fit into what we are already doing. It can be a great skill for a church to have. But I’ve also watched a lot of the alternative worship stuff we do be diluted. I know this sounds really precious, but the concept of alternative worship is much more than just the finished product as it comes ‘packaged’. The alternative worship that we have been experimenting with over the last year involves a reworking of our whole theology of worship, leadership, the church… Putting the individual components of an alternative worship into another context is a fabulous thing to do – but we also need to recognise that the changed context (the community and space it’s put into, the understanding of the role of leaders and participants in that community, the understanding of what actually happens in worship) will change what that ‘component’ of worship will do.
What I’d love to know, is how to take people on the journey from being dispassionate observers to active participants in worship… and i’m talking about that participation which is more than reading the words in bold printed on a news sheet… participation where people influence the outcome of worship…
craig mitchell
Cheryl
roddy
craig mitchell