The Subject is Worship

Worship is one of the major themes of my sabbatical,  It is also one of the arenas of church life that, at First Baptist, needs the most transformation.  It is an arena of church life that matters to a lot of our people--enough so that quite a few people have been impatient with our lack of progress over the past five years.   At various times I have tried to make significant steps forward  but I always encountered enough non-interest and resistance to cause me to keep worship transformation on the back burner.  This was frustrating but necessary.

Without having resolved the non-interest and resistance to worship change, we still included it as a major theme in the proposal we wrote to the Lilly Endowment for a sabbatical grant.  Maybe this was wishful thinking but when I was writing the grant proposal and listening to the input of others for the proposal it seemed like this might just be the time.  The sabbatical might create the context for us to become truly innovative with worship.

So far I would say that this is exactly what has been happening.  The sabbatical has created opportunities to explore and experiment with worship.  Worship Services on Sundays February 27 and March 6 were set aside for some experiments in designing worship in new and creative ways.  Three lay members of a worship design team worked with me to create two services on the themes of 'Life Is Difficult," and "Leadership."   We will meet soon to evaluate and learn from these experiences.

During the sabbatical each of the three lay members who designed the two services mentioned above will be forming their own worship design team.  We are trying to involve as many people as possible in planning and leading worship.  Each team will begin to plan some of our worship services between May 8 and August 13 by meeting and reading the appropriate lectionary texts and agreeing on a theme.  Our sabbatical interim, Allison Voorhees, will meet with each of the teams and will have a significant role in all of the services during the sabbatical.

I will make a continuing contribution to many of these services.  Once the design teams have chosen worship themes, I will be creating worship resources for the services based on my experiences during the sabbatical.  Learning to use Media Shout, the software the church uses to create our media show each Sunday. and growing my skills in digital photography will help me to make more creative and meaningful contributions to worship, now and in the future.

So, what about our worship is in the process of being transformed?  We are not seeking to transform worship by dramatically changing the kind of music we use using.  We are not going to focuse on what we title our emerging form of worship.  We are not trying to divide the church by declaring some practices of worship to be old-fashioned and others contemporary.  What is changing is the level of engagement in worship that our people have.  What is changing is the amount of time we spend together imagining the most powerful ways we can of praising God.

It is going to be very interesting to see how all of this evolves but it definitely seems that the sabbatical has created an exciting time in the life of our church when many things can be made new.