outside is better

Contemporary Communion in Advent

This Christmas Eve we are having communion together in my congregation. I pastor and lead the contemporary service at my church and over the last few months we have used the more formal Great Thanksgiving liturgy in the United Methodist Hymnal. Due to both time and the fact I we have been pretty high church lately, I decided to use a less formal approach to communion for Christmas Eve.

The tension revolves in the sacramental conviction I have as a Methodist pastor to keep communion in line with the greater tradition of the Church. Specific words do not matter, but the greater story does. I wanted to find something brief but strong and would fit well within our service.

This Advent, my secret weapon for a few special services as been the A Christmas Sourcebook. I found this while in seminary and it has proven its worth several times over. It has plenty small bits that work well in Advent and Christmas services. It is a must buy for worship designers.

Below is what I am using to tell the story of Christ during our communion time. You can find it on pg. 23 of the sourcebook.

The grace of God has appeared, ordering salvation to all men and women. It trains us to reject the godless ways and worldly desires and live temperately, justly and devoutly in this age as we await our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Christ Jesus. It was he who sacrificed himself for us, to redeem us from all unrighteousness and to cleanse for himself a people of his own, eager to do what is right.

I wanted to share this great resource with you. Buy it and be ready for next Advent season.

Palm Sunday Sermon: The Whole World has gone after Him.

I was given the chance to preach yesterday at church. I am always thankful that Aaron shares his pulpit, and lets a student preach on a day like Palm Sunday. My text was John 12:12-19. I picked this over the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and John) because the narrative flowed in a manner that really related to beginning Holy Week.

I was really struck by how the story of the Triumphant Entry is bookended by the larger Lazarus story as well as the pharisee's realizing the extent of the gospel message.

 

 

John 12;12-19

 

Renewing our Minds

Levite Camp has released its 6th video in the Worship Seminary series. You can check them all out at the YouTube channel and at Levite Camp. If you are interested in a theological conversation about worship it is a great new community.

Order out of Chaos: Worship 101

This is the 2nd video in a series that we produced at Levite Camp. This is part of an extended teaching series on Ordering Worship.

 

Order vs. Ordering in Worship

Most of you know I work with the website Levite Camp.  We encourage a theological conversation among those that are involved with worship.  We recently started producing a series of short (3 min) videos and this is the first one.  I wanted to let ya'll know about them and hopefully see you chime in.

The Memory of the Church and my old suitcase

This is a suitcase that belonged to my grandfather.  In it are books that sat on the bookshelf in his den for decades.  They aren't particularly important books, but they have sentimental value.  While it has been almost five years since he passed and we packed up and sold the family house, inside this suitcase are the smells of the home that I loved so much.  When I open it I am flooded with memories. I only let myself do it once or twice a year...because I want to trap the past inside. 

Last night while I was on the phone I saw the suitcase and reminded myself that it was time to open it up again.  So this afternoon I sat it in the middle of the floor and I cracked the old latches.  I held the books up to my nose and I pretty much put my head in the suitcase and took in the various odors that make up so many childhood memories.  Then I shut it, and it will stay that way for months.

Memory is important to us as humans.  It catches us up in so many things.  In worship, we are exercising Christian memory.  Just as I occasionally open up this suitcase to remind myself of my family, worship opens up the story of salvation to the congregation.  But what separates Christian memory from my suitcase sessions is that in the church we have an active memory.  Our memory is participation, insisting upon a present and future as well as a past.  In the mysteries of the divine we have an interactive relationship with our God and what he has done for us. 

This is why worship isn't passive or just something that is about us.  Individualism doesn't solely reign in worship.  Our individual stories are taken together as we come before Christ as his bride, as the body and congregation.  This is an active life that we have with God, and by his gracious physical gifts to us we participate in this love with him. That is why the sacraments and means of grace are important. 

Worship re-stories us into the reality that the kingdom of God is real, amongst us but also projecting us towards the future where God will dwell with us. It breaks us free from the world and creates a heart fully in love with God.  The scriptures become part of who we are, not just a handy information book.  This is rememberizing....

As much as I love this suitcase, it won't cause new memories to happen.  But the worship of the church is participating with the old as well as causing the new.  Simply reminding ourselves of things doesn't give proper service to who our God is. ....

 

Sunday Setlists 11.28.10

This Sunday we started Advent off at my Church.  I am sure that many other churches shared at least one song on our setlist.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel
O Come let us adore him

Jesus keep me near the cross

Wonderful Merciful Saviour

It was a great time of worship, and I loved being in a congregation that was really excited about Advent.  A more interesting part of the service was before our scripture reading.  Last year when I was planning Advent services at Asbury Seminary we were trying to find ways to really echo some of the Old Testament experience regarding Advent, specifically the idea of waiting for God.  We ended up taking 2 different 200 seconds of silence broken up by a responsive reading of Isaiah 40:6-8

        A voice says, “Cry out.”
        And I said, “What shall I cry?”
       “All men are like grass,
        and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.
        The grass withers and the flowers fall,
        because the breath of the LORD blows on them.
        Surely the people are grass.
        The grass withers and the flowers fall,
        but the word of our God stands forever.”

This Sunday we did the whole 400 seconds instead of breaking it up, but did use this reading at the end.  It was really great being with a congregation that was ready and willing to be part of Advent and wanted to change things up. We heard a great sermon on Faith that was a great start to the season as well.

Advent Voices: Drew Causey

Drew is a great friend and a guy I have the privilege to play music with.  He is a worship pastor here in Kentucky at possibly the coolest church I have ever been to; Hope Community Church. Drew has the task of leading a group of people who are used to free church worship into interacting with the Christian calendar.  They have "done" Advent for two years now, and have even put out a community reader.

Drew is blogging on Advent, and is taking it from the angle of someone who really isn't familiar with it traditionally.  This is a great example of starting a church on the calender and leading them through the season. Lately, his posts have been centered on why Advent is hard.

I am sure this will develop into a great project, and I recommend keeping up with him.

The act of Narration in Worship

My good friend and sometimes partner in crime JD Walt offered a great post this week about worship and how we often view it as a kind of rational event (meaning that is something that “makes sense”).  Often now, we see it as a consumable, we come to worship to get something.  Spending last week at Catalyst (cough Babylon cough) just reinforced this idea. Bigger is better, and entertainment is of key importance.  Innovation is the new revelation.  These are ideas that would seem extremely foreign to Christianity outside of the last 30 years. Adaptability is part of the mission of the Church classically, but it is never done for the sake of "new".

I want to piggyback what JD had to say about worship from the perspective of a why we often design worship around the message.  He had great things to say...but I want to take it to another level.

Why is worship about a person leading songs? I name worship is this way because the average person equates worship to the song set.  Here is the framework that I see in most modern churches.


Worship=Song
------------------- Distinct break (usually marked by prayer and scripture reading)
Preaching=Word (outside of context of spoken scripture)

In both of these actions there is a person directing what we do.  Why do we feel the need to have a person in a position of authority leading us, instead of someone guiding us through something?  This is a fairly theoretical question...so there isn’t an answer I am fishing for.

Perhaps since our services often change every week, we need these people/leaders/pastors in order to keep up?

Lately I have been thinking more and more about the worship leader as the narrator.  What if the “leader” truly was that? A narrator has the role of assimilating information and retelling it. They serve as a guide to direct others in the liturgia in the truest sense of the word, the work of the people. This goes back to my old soapbox of worship being primarily a communal activity.

So what if there weren’t central people in leadership during a worship service, but it was designed and produced in a manner that didn’t seem chaotic and was organized?

Telling the Story: Tomorrow Morrow Land

I came home from a retreat yesterday to find this tweet.  It always makes me happy to know that friends think of my whenever they watch Mad Max.....

This quote comes from a clip that have used for teaching multiple times about the importance of story telling in worship.  Tracing the grand narrative of Salvation by faith in God is an important key element in our motives in how we as Christians worship.

Worship isn't about God, but it is to God.

This means envisioned acting.  We rehearse the hymns of the Eschaton because we know we will be singing them.  We lament the loss of relationship in the fall and rejoice in the incarnation and how the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ restores that relationship. We celebrate Pentecost every moment, because we have lives dramatically changed by the Holy Spirit.

The shape of worship is the shape of Christ, the pattern of descent found in Philippians 2.  All of the things of the past in Christianity are important because one day we will have to tell them to the younger ones.  The Great Tradition of the church is handed down by the Holy Spirit, inspiring those now to cling to the never changing message of the Gospel and to give to those who come after us.

As my friends quote mentions-we are a people that are looking towards a new place, one that has been told of from long ago.  To them (in MM3) it is Tomorrow Morrow Land....to us it is New Jerusalem.