8 Ideas for Developing Creative Worship

I would like to invite you into a world of possibilities. Jeremy Begbie, a distinguished professor at both Duke Divinity School and Cambridge University, often says, “the arts are showing us over and over again the possibilities of transformation…they show us how things can be even in this world [and] even the worst can be woven into God’s purposes.” If this is the case, then what possibilities might the art of Christian worship be showing us?

This past January, I spent some significant time with several communities in the United Kingdom (U.K.) who have been engaged for at least two decades now in a movement called alternative worship. These worshipping communities have created a broad spectrum of improvisations on Christian worship using popular culture, their own specific cultural contexts and of course their Anglican tradition. But how does one even begin to improvise with the vast tradition of Christian worship?

I have compiled eight ideas from my time in the UK that can help break open our imagination for developing creative worship. The most important thread that runs through all of these, however, is risk. Simply put, if you don’t risk, you won’t innovate.

1.Write Your Own Liturgy // Many (if not most) of the alt. worship gatherings have a communal practice of writing their own liturgy with images, metaphors, visual references, and language indigenous to their own location (think social location, geographic location, denominational location). If you find yourself in a place where liturgical forms are more restricting than freeing, even starting with elements of the worship often not typically seen as “sacred” can open up space for further improvisation. The prayers of the people, the invocation or the benediction all offer fairly non-abrasive way in to creative prayer.

2. Encourage the Artist(s) // In the Church of modernity, rationalism dominated. Making room for the voice of the artist to be heard, seen or felt inspired creativity. Artists know better than us “nonartists” (Everyone is creative, whether or not they identify themselves as an “artist”) that exposure to creative thinking fuels further creative thought. The arts are often highly encouraged within alt. worship in a wide range of ways. The result is a creative atmosphere, a culture of creativity.

3. Practice Storytelling // The practice of telling the story of a community’s life together evokes shared memories as well as critical reflections. At times such a community practice even raises a diversity of perspectives about that shared history! Alt. worship has made a habit of telling their stories at Greenbelt (an annual music festival where alt. worship communities converge for a “family reunion” of sorts), resource weekends and in collaboration with local community partners. Make use of the biblical narratives too when telling your story. Remember that the biblical stories are not so much authoritative because they happened, but because they happen…today.

4. Imitate Someone Who Inspires You // Imitation is a powerful tool for improvisation. It is a practice of careful and intentional study. Even when taking careful considering to imitate and replicate, new connections and insights are made. Doing the same routine in a new place invites creative thinking and deeper attention to context. It won’t matter the medium, so think broadly here. Below are several sites that have documented alt. worship gatherings all over the world. Find something that inspires you and imitate it with careful reflection on your own context.

5. Visit Art Galleries // Though it may seem odd, there is much that can be learned from experiencing well laid out and well curated art exhibits. Paying attention to flow, lighting, presentation of the art and background information presented can provide new ways for thinking about creativity. At Grace (London), Jonny Baker has developed much thinking on “curating worship.” For example every Grace service is led by a “curator.” The idea here is that when good curation happens, you experience the difference and yet no one ever knows or realizes who the curators of any exhibit are. Good curation is felt more than noticed on the surface.

6. Create Boundaries and Limits // Often it is harder to be creative with absolute freedom. Rather than starting with a blank canvas, choose an element of liturgy (or other aspect/event of community life) and create intentional boundaries to work within. For example, many of the alt. worship gatherings were limited to the presence of only lay people. This meant that their sacramental practices had to be creative with other areas of the service — such as creating prayer stations, the worship space itself or music.

7.Do Less, Simplify // Similar to creating boundaries, limiting the content to the bare minimum often produces a more creative setting. Create a special seasonal service (Advent, Lent, for example) with the bare minimum. Use the same scripture multiple weeks in a row or use the same prayer repetitiously but in slightly different way. Though many alt. worship services are intricate, many participants often choose a single prayer station or opportunity to express themselves. Another example of this repetitive simplicity can be found at the Community of Taizé where simple chants are repeated over and over again.

8. Create a Change of Scenery // Often times when we are dislocated, we find ourselves with a new awareness of our surroundings. Changing the location (be intentional here) of where worship or another community life event is help to re-imagine what the possibilities are. A change of scenery was responsible for both Transcendence (Visions, York) and for a new rhythms of community life at Grace (London).

As you begin to take risks and develop your own creative worship, perhaps a careful distinction would be helpful. Christianity has a rich history and tradition. In fact it’s quite creative. I want to draw a distinction between traditional (adjective) and traditioned (verb) worship. Like all adjectives, traditional is highly relative and has come to be equated with the static — maintaining the status quo. The later, traditioned, as a verb, represents an active process of engagement and study with a particular tradition. We all come from a tradition. Worship that is traditioned though has been intentionally seasoned (think “flavored”) with the symbols, images, metaphors, language and icons that contain deep significance for Christian faith. But traditioned worship has also been handed over to a new day, a time in which the original must also speak to the present and to the future. That is to say, they become relevant for today and beyond by their very function. And so if we are to develop creative worship that helps us make meaning of the world we find ourselves it, it will be both traditioned and relevant. But those two are never intrinsically mutually exclusive.

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Tim Snyder is the co-founder of the Netzer Co-Op, an emerging community in Austin, Texas. He holds the bachelors of arts in theology from Texas Lutheran University and is a graduate student at Luther Seminary. Tim is Managing Editor of GENERATE Magazine.  Tim previously contributed an article on the liturgy of the farmers market to The Everyday Journal.

Additional Resources for Creative Worship:

www.smallfire.org // Here Steve Collins has curated the largest collection of pictures documenting the alt. worship movement in the UK.

www.smallritual.org // Here Steve Collins has curated a large collection of articles, videos and other resources from the alt. worship movement in the UK.

Proost (a small publishing outfit in the UK) has published a series of Pocket Liturgies from many of the most creative worshipping communities in the UK. These are great especially if you are interested in writing your own liturgy. visit Proost online at www.proost.co.uk

Jonny Baker’s Worship Tricks is a collection of creative moments in worship from all over the world. You can find those on his blog: http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/worship_tricks/

For the best introductory guide to developing creative worship, see A Wee Worship Book (4th Incarnation), Wild Goose Worship Group (GIA Publications), 1999).

Emergence Amongst the Libertarians

Jesus Creed guest blogger Michael Kruse brought up an interesting juxtaposition of economic emergence versus Christian emergence in his recent post “Selective Emergence?”

Emergence/emerging/emergent pastors and thinkers have all been shaped by chaos theory, game theory, or emergence theory in some way, and it is a helpful metaphor for the way of thinking about the community life of the local church as in a healthy tension with the individual member.  Kruse gets down to the nuts and bolts of the issue with a comparison of similar ideas between libertarian economics and emergence Christianity:

As I was in conversations [with emergence Christianity], over and over again I heard in my mind the Austrian School economist-philosopher Friedrich Hayek, a darling of libertarians. Hayek exposed the inherent limitation of human knowledge about mass human behavior and our inability to centrally plan and control human systems. Yet, when we establish a basic set of abstract rules and boundaries and turn people loose in markets of free exchange (i.e., free trade), a spontaneous order. Since emergence has captivated postmodern Christians, I thought, we will naturally see a preponderance of emergent Christians sharing Hayek’s view of the economic order. Right? Wrong.

I have a hypothesis about why what would seemingly be a congruence between libertarian economic theory and emergence Christianity doesn’t happen.  I think the fault is in Emergence Christianity itself, specifically a lack of a theology of the Holy Spirit within Christian emergence thinking (pneumatology for you theology nerds).

From my fairly significant reading of emergence Christianity thinkers there is a taking for granted of the Holy Spirit within theological formations.  I don’t think this is an absence or reluctance to deal with the Spiritual or charismatic, but instead a falling into the trap left by our evangelical foundations and forebears.  The Holy Spirit is evident and its presence attested to, but it just doesn’t show up in the literature.

So to the specifics of my hypothesis.  I believe that emergence theory in Christian thinking and libertarian economics is categorically different on the aspect of power and control.  Whereas the wording and phrasing may sound similar between economics and theology, I think the Holy Spirit serves as the control within Christian emergence formulations; specifically, when emergence Christians speak of chaos theory, group dynamics, or free exchange there is always the unconscious acknowledgment of the Holy Spirit’s divine presence within the system.  That is, the chaos is from a human perspective and not God’s perspective (unless you are an open theologian).

Emergence Christianity and libertarian economics share many of the same goals: a democratization of power and control so that an equality can be achieved within the market (of spirituality or economics, respectively).  The divergence which Kruse brings up appears to me to be caused by the lack of a theology of the Holy Spirit within most of emergence Christianity’s theological formations.

Do you agree with my hypothesis?  Do you have examples of a theology of the Holy Spirit in emergence Christianity?  Specific examples of a lack of such a theology?

My Obsession with Order

About a year ago I became obsessed with bringing order to my life, an order that was descendent of monks and Ben Franklin’s daily schedule in his autobiography.  I was jealous of their ability to schedule themselves so rigorously, and I thought I would excel under that kind of management….in an ideal world.  A world that only had one person in it, me!

Fortunately that is not the case.  I am with other people, in community, and a selfishly down to 15 minute intervals schedule doesn’t last too long when you are married and have a job and are in graduate school.

I have been reading Jon M. Sweeney’s Cloister Talks: Learning from My Friends the Monks, and the book has done a fine job of both reminding me of the essence of order and how the cloistered life is not to be imitated by the family life.  Both are sacraments, and both carry their blessings and difficulties.  Both are considered of the utmost holiness.  I desire order, but what I have been learning as I read is that macro-order is more important than micro-order.  Where my old schedule used to say something like: Wake Up, shower, read, breakfast, pray with fifteen minute intervals marked like a checklist I am trying to bring more order to my life by deciding to not do certain things for the sake of order and allow freedom in the different segments.  To go with the seasons, I have talked to my wife about having certain "orderly" goals like: we cannot turn the TV on, for a movie or a show, until it is completely dark outside.  We should be outside enjoying the weather, cooking, eating, walking, or reading outside.  We will have time to be inside once it is dark.  But until then, we will not do anything that can detract from our enjoyment, liesure, and play after a day of working inside.

I am confident that this is a much more mature approach to the family economy than the rigorous scheduling I have attempted in the past.  Even if I had gotten it to work it would have been obliterated once we have a child.  I must be honest with my vocation in a family cultivating the fruits of both garden and Spirit to be mindful and orderly in how I go about each day, while at the same time never missing the richness of this world and our delight in it for the deceptively inticing false pleasure that comes from controlling everything so that it becomes your own world.

An aside: I have three chapters left in Cloister Talks and will be posting a review (fingers-crossed) tomorrow.

Wedding, a Microcosm of Community

I attended a wedding this weekend that was low-cost, simple, and do-it-yourself.  In our contemporary wedding culture of extravegance piled onto extravagence, this is often looked down upon and scorned by people wanting to be treated like royalty for a day.

I stubbornly and unceasingly have questioned this "high-brow" mentality, and the response I hear most often is that a wedding is supposed to be a transaction of sorts, a high-stakes barter where expensive gifts are exchanged for the cost of an expensive catered meal, mediocre wedding cake, and chocolate fondue fountain.  The cost of the wedding per person is supposed to be reflected in the market value of the gift, which must always come from the registry.

This mentality robs a wedding of its theme and purpose: a complex metaphor of community.  When two become one, that is community.  When people gather together in a church to commemorate an event through liturgy, that is community.  When people gather at a common table with common food (and a common cake), that is community.  When gifts are given to a new home, that is community.

Gifting is the most distorted of all aspects in the modern wedding ceremony.  Wedding gifts are supposed to establish a home, but as the home has disintegrated the gifts have begun to reflect the inbalance of home living.  Cooking and housekeeping items are decreasing from registries as TVs, DVD players, stereos, camcorders, computers, vacations, cars and other gadgets are beginning to creep onto them. These things have no real value in setting up a home to be a community centered around the keeping of a house and providing ways to give back to the community through hospitality and stewardship.

The new arbiter of weddings is the bridezilla—the ferocious, bratty, and stubborn bride who forces her hand upon every detail of a ceremony.  But I think the community and culture at large has bred these beastly brides with their demanding expectations for a wedding to be a lavish event.  Weddings aren’t lavish events, they are celebrations of community. 

Not much has changed since Christ had to "save" a wedding by creating wine.  The community expected the hosts to provide instead of seeing a need in the community and then filling it.  Two thousand years later, it is about time for us to begin to see weddings, as well as other community events, as a way to pitch in and meet needs instead of being lazy and demanding that lavishness come to us.