Archive - July, 2011

House of the Rock

July 19, 2011 in Emerging Church, Lutheran Church, Music, Worship with 1 Comment

Psalm 62:2 – God alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall never be shaken.

This past weekend, I took a crew of Lutherans from my church (mostly from our worship band) down to Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in downtown Atlanta.  This is a church known for its age, its size, and its marble columns. For years they’ve had a “contemporary service”, which seems to be yet another blended worship experience (a.k.a. “everybody loses”) somehow involving a jazz trio…

Yeah, I don’t know either.

Anyway, we went down because a few friends from AFFIRM are working on a fresh worship experience in Redeemer’s basement:  House of the Rock.  The goal seems to be in line with what I’ve been advocating for some time – a modern, yet liturgical Lutheran worship experience.  You may be thinking “blended”, but let me explain what I mean.

Liturgy can be defined differently depending on who you’re talking to, but the consensus when differentiating between a “liturgical” and a “non-liturgical” church seems to have to do with liturgical churches having a somewhat standardized order of activities during worship or, at the very least, a standardized set of activities that occur in some order.  In ELCA Lutheran churches, this order is more or less:

  1. Gathering
  2. Word
  3. Meal
  4. Sending

From my perspective, these four components make a Lutheran service, well, Lutheran. They can occur in any order, but they should all happen at some point. Sunday night’s worship experience at House of the Rock provided all four components somewhat seamlessly, with all components having a modernized and updated feel to them.

Let me point out a few things that make this worship experience seem “modern”, to me:

  • Darkness - A little darkness goes a long way in worship. The folks at House of the Rock get this. They painted the ceiling black, blocked out ambient light from the windows, and set up their own lighting. Their service is in the evening, which also helps them out some. This is a huge departure from the “norm” at most Lutheran churches. At my own church, for example, we have a giant window just behind the stage. The walls are all white. Our service is at 10:45am. It is bright in there. I understand the arguments for having sunlight in the church – seeing the beauty of God’s creation, etc. The issue I have with an extraordinarily bright worship space is that people feel less “free” to express their worship. The brighter the worship space, the less comfortable worshipers will feel expressing worship to God in a way that differs from the majority of the congregation. The darker the worship space, the easier it is for people to forget about the other worshipers around them and focus on the One who is worthy of worship.
  • Modern Music - This is probably a bit of a no-brainer, but the music on Sunday night was spot-on. Lyrically repetitive, yet musically dynamic – allowing worshipers to learn the songs as they were singing them, even if they didn’t already know them. The other trick is that the volume of the music was such that you couldn’t hear the person next to you singing. This goes back to my darkness statements above… the more we can do to get worshipers to forget about the people around them, the better. The goal is to create an environment that allows worshipers to focus on God. If the music is quiet, people feel more self-conscious about their own singing, knowing that the person next to them can hear them.
  • Casual Vibe - Modern churches have a more “come as you are” approach to worshiping God, reinforcing the idea that worship can and should happen often, regardless of location, appearance, etc. Churches that push for formality – whether through musical instrumentation, attire, language, etc. – create a stuffy worship atmosphere. We were made for worship. Adding formality to it makes worship seem difficult – even less accessible. Using very formal language in church dialogues makes worshipers feel disconnected from the text. Having a pastor in a robe can make worshipers feel like the pastor is somehow closer to God than they can ever get. Even hymns create a disconnect. How many people listen to organ music during the rest of the week? Worship should connect people to God in the context of their own lives. The less connected people feel during Sunday worship, the easier it is for people to feel like worship is something that just happens on Sundays. If what they see, hear, feel, and experience during a worship service is put in familiar language, using familiar attire and familiar music styles, people are more likely to see worship as an ongoing experience – something that can happen anywhere at any time.
  • Conversational Sermon – I find that many pastors sound like they’re teaching a class. This academic style of sharing the Word is another immediate disconnect created during many worship services. Sunday night’s experience at House of the Rock was far different. The presentation of the Word was (in my humble opinion) theologically spot-on while being delivered conversationally and casually. It felt more like hanging out with the pastor and chatting than some sermons I’ve heard. The world isn’t changing, the world has changed. The way people receive information today is far different than it was even ten years ago. People engage in various communities and play tug-of-war with ideas. The conversation is global and interactive. This is how today’s generation is used to learning and growing. Our pastors need to get on board with this.

Regardless of the stylistic trimmings and presentation methods, we gathered in His name, received the Word of God, came to the table for communion, and were sent out to serve.

Gathering.
Word.
Meal.
Sending.

Just because it’s modern doesn’t make it less liturgical.

I’m personally grateful for the effort these guys have put into planning and executing this worship experience. I hope it catches on. It’s filling a gap that has existed for some time within the Lutheran church. Moreover, I can honestly say that it had a quality to it that I’ve only experienced at bigger (and better-funded) churches. If you’re in the Atlanta area, definitely check it out!

It’s Been Just Over A Year…

July 13, 2011 in Emerging Church, Lutheran Church, Music, Tech, Worship with 2 Comments

It’s been just over a year since my last post here. I’ve spent the last year working hard on several “projects” which I felt the need to focus on. Yeah, I probably could have blogged along the way, but I find my days don’t have enough hours in them anyway. Ignoring this site was a conscious decision – an attempt to streamline my activities so I could focus my attention on making some key changes.

For starters, I got a new job… sort of. I ended up going back to work for the company I’ve spent the vast majority of my working life at. I resigned from there a couple of years ago and moved to Atlanta. After I started a new job here, my old company began to contact me. Ultimately I worked out a deal that would allow me to stay in the Atlanta area and work for them in what appears (at least so far) to be much better circumstances. At the moment I work from home (or from the Land of a Thousand Hills coffee shop), which is great considering how wild my work schedule can be.

Beyond my work, I have my second (unpaid) job:  church. The goal I set for myself for this last year was to assess my abilities and figure out how to plug my abilities into needs at my church. I feel like I have a few things to offer:  music, business (especially in marketing and communications), and project planning and management. So, here’s what’s going on there:

Worship Music
I really wanted this year to be a whole new phase in contemporary worship music development at my church. During the Easter service in 2010, I had a glimpse of the potential we had to get something really great going. Up to that point I had been on the fence – getting fairly cynical about the process of developing a contemporary worship experience in a Lutheran church. Easter was the turning point. I decided that I was either going to cut my ties and go elsewhere, or commit 100% to trying to develop the service into what it could be. I chose to commit to it and have worked diligently to “step our game up” at the contemporary service. We gained a couple of new band members and attended a worship seminar led by Paul Baloche. I feel like we now have a shared vision for the service’s music and its potential. There is still a lot of work to be done, but I’ve never been closer to my goal than I am now.

Worship Service Planning
Similar to the above, I had a goal of making some progress on the planning of our contemporary worship services. My thought was that if I could get one or two services to be planned as a group with the best ideas from the group being executed successfully, I’d have a couple of good examples I could point to as “the right way” and could take action to push both church staff and volunteers to commit time and energy to planning our worship services each week. I feel like I’ve met half of this goal. Good Friday and Easter 2011 were the best planned, most meaningful and impactful (yes I know that’s not a word) services I can remember attending at any Lutheran church. I know the congregation recognized it too, based on the feedback. The problem is, the amount of time and energy required by a handful of people to get those services together was far greater than it needed to be. I want to spread this effort out to a larger group in order to minimize the amount of time and energy required by the few who are involved in the process currently. This hasn’t happened yet. I had every intent of writing up a plan to get this done – but the task has recently been put on the back burner while I work on a few other things.

Church Communications
Our church web site sucks. It’s sucked for a long time. I realized that I should stop complaining about it and start doing something about it. So, I whipped up some stuff in WordPress and presented it to the staff. It’s been received well. I’ve involved a few other people (because I do NOT want to be the “church web site guy”) and the development is progressing well. My hope is that I can get a number of volunteers trained up to take the site over once development is complete. I don’t need another job, and I don’t need web site management pulling me away from other activities I feel are a better use of my time. HOWEVER, the work on the church web site has exposed many other issues within the church – namely, the lack of any sort of communications plan. Our church is easily 10-15 years behind the communications curve. Our church secretary uses templates to produce bulletins and newsletters. She posts these to the church web site (the ONLY dynamic part of our church web site). Nevermind the clear technology  gap that needs to be bridged – it’s clear to me that our church doesn’t really have a clear voice. Each scrap of material that gets published is written by someone different – and each has a spin applied to it that seems intended only for current church members. It’s growing more and more apparent to me that when my church communicates, the only audience in mind is themselves. This needs to change. Beyond changing the audience, I believe my church needs to change its message. If I had to sum up the current message of our church based on everything we publish and announce, it would be:  ”we’re reluctantly trying to be more youthful and contemporary so that we don’t lose people to some other church.” This is obviously not the message we need to be sending. We actually do have several community-oriented pockets of activity within our church. What I’d love to see happen is for these pockets to grow from the bottom up and to gradually change the culture of our church from being inward-focused to being outward-focused. As this culture changes, so will our message. Then… we’ll finally have something truly of value to communicate out to the world.

None of these are “small” tasks. I think I’m to the point now where I’m making progress with each of them, and I have some (fuzzy) goals I’d like to reach over the next year. Just as I made a conscious decision to NOT blog over the last year, I’m making a conscious decision TO blog this year. I’m hoping that by writing out my progress, it will push me to drive harder to the goals. I’m also hoping that discussions and feedback will pop up here and there to help me when I feel “stuck”.

Here we go…