March 2008

Motivation:

This was a simple service designed to be a ’starting point’ to these services, and in doing so introduce people to the concepts of worship which emerges from one’s own experiences, preferences, hobbies, and spiritual ’style’.

Environment:

What I’ll call ‘the usual’: Small circle of chairs at the front of the church, and a fair few tealight candles scattered around. Mid-level of darkness. Running on the overhead projector we had about 30 images plucked from the alternative worship image library (www.smallfire.org – thanks Steve!) on a slideshow to provide inspiration and ideas.

Audio:

Background music throughout all of this service provided by a mixed playlist of Taize, Biosphere, Hybrid, Aim, Amon Tobin and Gustavo Santaolalla. Moody, emotional, reflective stuff.

The Service:

  • Opening Prayer
  • Welcome and Introduction: Introduced people not only to this service, but this new routine of evening, reflective services. We hoped that this will become a diverse range of worship experiences and styles. Tonight we are looking at worship itself – It’s a good place to start in any worship ’series’, but it also is a chance to explore some possible worship ideas that we can use further down the track.
  • Reading: We read a small exerpt from the Prodigal Project talking about worship (Sorry, I’ve misplaced my copy so I’ll quote the text here when I find it)
  • Activity: The reading led into an activity where we were going to ‘design our own worship service’. A worship service which we would design for ourselves. A worship service which was unashamedly ’selfish’ – suiting our tastes, preferences and desires. It could take any form, the planning could take any shape, it was really about capturing the essence of what’s important to us in worship and how we best engage with God. On a table in the middle of the space were hundreds of little slips of paper with various elements of worship written on them (eg. chants, baptism, discussion, cushions, food, candles, dance, bible, sermon, light, charity, coffee, teaching, incense, art, hymns… the list goes on) There were also blank slips for people to add their own elements (which is critically important. If people wanted to add ‘motorbikes’ or ‘bonsai’ then they needed to be free to do so!) People were then given 20 minutes and big sheets of paper, pens, etc. to create their own worship.
  • Discussion: Following the design phase, everyone gathered and spoke to their own piece (if they wanted to) and some questions were asked, comments made about other pieces of work, etc. The differences in how people approached it was amazing, with people able to pull out critical things of importance to them.
  • Closing Prayer.