spirit whispering: musing on my worship transition

It's been almost 3 years since my family & I stopped going to weekly worship gathering at an Episcopal church.  I have found so much meaning in the liturgy of the Anglican/Episcopal tradition, which tends to follow a certain consistent form.

I am still adjusting to the consistent worship form of evangelical worship gatherings:

gathering songs, children's message, personal witness, collect offering, special music, sermon

The two communities we've been a part of these past 3 years - New Hope & now Journey IFC - both live in that bubble space, between traditional evangelical & post-post evangelical.  While quite different from one another, and very different from the mega-churches that spawned them (MPPC  & Riverbend Church respectively), both New Hope & Journey tended to stay with the traditional worship form that unites most evangelical communities of faith.  Some weeks are different, a great deal is changed - but the core framework is still consistent most weeks.

I've really struggled with making this transition.  I've found myself struggling to find moments of quiet & mystery among the glorious parade.  I've missed the connection to a historical worship form that takes its outline from the 3rd century church & from Judaism.  My own experience of liturgy is that it can often be the "work of the people", while the evangelical setting can too often be very individualistic (what I thought of the sermon ?  what did I get out of the message ?).

There is some irony in the ways these two forms link.  Most sermons I have heard in an Anglican setting felt like a speech at a dinner party - most communion rituals w/in evangelical settings feel like an after-thought, like snacks served as a meal.  It may be too simplistic, but for me, liturgical settings are like meals and evangelical settings are like assemblies.  Neither is right or wrong, good or bad - just what you grew up with & where your communal feeding takes place.

I was really struck by this at yesterday's Journey IFC gathering, which was given over completely to  A Spacious Place , a wonderful ministry that has sprung out of Journey.  Kaye & David McKee worked with a wonderful board & a great set of volunteers earlier this Spring to host a series of weekly gatherings:

• Multi-media exploration of a God metaphor   20 minutes (a mix of visual arts, music and film.)
• Arts Expressions Classes   80 minutes (a choice of two arts options for each session,  including photography, mime, creative writing, collage, dance, painting, drawing, design, mosaic, bookmaking, and art from nature.)
• Sharing Session (voluntary)   20 minutes ( share with the other participants your creative work and thought.)

The worship gathering on Sunday was quite different for me in a few ways:

• the main voices speaking were female (Journey & New Hope tend to be led primarily by women, but men still hold the main voices in worship)
• the focal point was not a sermon or communion - it was stations for the gathered community to engage with
• the call to action/ benediction was much more clear

Kaye started the gathering with a preamble, framing Jesus following vs. Christendom, with imagination playing a transformative role in that battle in our time.  While it may seem like a small thing, I was struck again & again how the worship gathering spoke to a core part of what A Spacious Place seems to be trying to embody:

We feel no need to convince you of anything.

The folks who spoke & sang & expressed themselves at yesterday's worship gathering were neither excellent or unexcellent - you simply could not assess or evaluate their souls & stories under that construct.  You can evaluate whether or not a liturgy is superior, how it hues to the rubric, whether it went according to plan.  You can evaluate a sermon, whether or not is better than Pastor Skippy, how the examples clicked with your own POV.

I have been enagaging some in a conversation at Tony Morgan's blog - specifically around his question Should I pursue unexcellent?   My own sense is that a great deal of communities define themselves by their weekly worship gatherings, how excellent they were, how superior their gathered numbers were compared to last week, last year or even that church over there.  I hope - pray - believe - that we are moving past the point of excellence as the litmus test for a worship gathering, what ever form that community assume. 

Instead, I sense that the simplicity of this idea

We feel no need to convince you of anything.

is much bigger than some excellent liturgy or airbrushed PowerPoint or killer sermon. 

We gather as community to glorify, honor, praise, exalt, and please God.

image from gbenard

In our modern model, we are convinced that "if you measure something, you can manage something".  You can not measure glory, honor, praise, exaltation or how pleased God is.  You can not measure transformation or conversion or even what happens to our souls.  If, in fact, there is no need to convince - the measures of excellence become academic, distractions even.

I am struggling - and I so thankful for the spacious places that I find from folks like Kaye & the Spirit Whisperers.

Comments

[kel]

OMG..."to pursue unexcellance?" you've read my mail...especially with church. I love our community, and yet there are some aspects of "unexcellance" that I'm still adjusting to. I've been bred in the mega-church. There's nothing wrong with slick and excellant, but how much of a place does it have in the church? That's my question...hmmm. we should talk.

[P3T3RK3Y5]

"We feel no need to convince you of anything." i love this.