Common Ground Worship

After a time of sharing the preaching in both traditional and Common Ground services, my Senior Pastor and I are going to settle! I will be settling in Common Ground. This will enable me to have more of a voice in and an impact on the worship. So I have been thinking about what it means to have "contemporary" or "alternative" worship. I like what it says on our website (www.svumc.org): "We are striving to discern the common ground between ancient and modern forms of worship that will enliven and strengthen us for lives of discipleship."

Here are the thoughts I have had on what I would like to see in our worship in Common Ground.
1) Scriptural: I love to preach sermons that are topical and I love to preach series, but these types of sermons have to be carefully grounded in scripture. Even more than that, I want to find ways to let the ancient texts become the Living Word whether through the sermon, drama, music, or other arts. The ancient church used many different ways to preach the Gospel. We can do the same by being . . .

2) . . . Multisensory: We know that people learn through hearing, but they also absorb through seeing, smelling, touching, etc. Ancient Israelite worship involved all five senses by command of God. Charles Wesley wrote hymns because he knew that sung theology was more likely to be accessible theology than spoken theology. For those of us who are kinesthetic learners, touching or moving while learning is important. We all realize that children need multisensory experiences, but that is true of adults as well. We will be exploring how to involve all of our senses in worship as we both experience and praise God.

3) Interactive: The word "liturgy" has often been understood to refer to boring, repetitive elements of worship that have lost their meaning! However, "liturgy" literally means "work of the people." We need to return to that understanding of liturgy! Whether it is interactive sermons where the congregation participates, singing with fervent voices, praying together and for each other, or other ways in which people are involved, authentic worship is always the "work of the people," not just the work of the worship leaders!

4) Loving: The goal of worship is to actively show our love for God and to experience God's love for us. An integral part of showing our love for God is showing our love for each other. So when we come together as the worshipping community everything we do must reveal our love for God and one another. Part of this ability to love is the ability to trust. I hope we can love and trust one another enough to verbally share during worship our own experiences of God's care for us. If you would feel comfortable doing this (what some call "giving a testimony") let me know!

5) Experiencing and Encountering: In Hebrew, the verb "to know" means not just head knowledge, but also knowledge in the sense of "to experience intimately, to acknowledge." So our worship seeks not simply to relay information about God but to provide an environment in which we can encounter God, or intimately experience God. That will be the goal for me as our team designs worship.

Yes, this makes an acronym: SMILE. :) I love acronyms; they help me remember!

If any Common Grounders read this, I would love for you to provide feedback. What would you like to see in Common Ground worship?

Becoming a wanderer

Back in seminary I learned that one of the earliest "creeds" of the Israelite people began like this, "A wandering Aramean was my father . . ." (Deuteronomy 26:5 ff). It reminded the people that all they had was a gift from God and that they shouldn't get too comfy or self-righteous because they were a wandering people at heart. Their only stability was in God.

This week I have been a wanderer, a status that seems to be true of me with some regularity these days. My office flooded out on Sunday morning and I had to move everything out to let the carpet dry. Thus, all my books are boxed up and my office is in a state of disrepair. The sense of being a wanderer comes from just having moved into my office and arranging those 1000 books just three months ago. In the past few years I have also wandered from one appointment to another, from one home to another, from one set of relationships to another. So really, this just heightens my identity as wanderer.

But as I wander, I am once again reminded that, like the ancient Israelites, my stability is only in God. It is so easy to fall into the fiction that there is such a thing as "normal" life that we will get to eventually after all these "problems" are past. But reaching for stability or normality in the everyday course of life really is fiction. So when the storms of life are raging (all too literally in this case) I am grateful that God does indeed stand by me. I am blessed to be reminded that wholeness and stability are found in one's approach to challenges, not in the lack of challenges.

I am particularly thankful for the amazing worship that we had last Sunday when we had to rearrange everything at the last minute and the glorious spirit of cooperation that prevailed throughout the church.

My prayer is that when things get back to "normal" we will not forget that God is still standing by us and that our challenges are still opportunities to grow towards wholeness.

Blessings,
A Wandering Methodist