May 21: Creative Worship

I'm in my element this week. Many weeks at Iona, especially in the spring, summer, and fall, there is a program. If you come for the week, you may choose the week based on the program topic--it could be environmental justice or contemplative prayer or another subject that interests you. This week, the focus is on creative worship. Creative worship is something I was introduced to at Union seminary (by Janet Walton and Troy Messenger) and have brought to the churches I've served.

What is "creative worship?" It's getting rid of traditional worship forms and conventions and beginning to plan a worship service with big questions in front of you: what is the Scripture text of the day doing? how can we crack open the text among a group of worshiping people so they can engage it, wrestle with it, be provoked and disturbed and comforted by it? and what's going on in the world that we need worship to prepare us to do and be? It's linking word and world in the body of the ritual. Instead of beginning with a standard "order of service" and plugging in prayers and hymns and a sermon, you design the liturgy from scratch, using whatever elements are needed to draw the congregation into the ritual action so they experience communion with God and with others. 

This was our group this week after a drawing activity--we were invited to put the hardest, angriest marks we could on our paper... then to use an eraser to clear a way through those marks. We set them all end-to-end and it became an image of God's highway in the desert, the way of the Lord through a dry and weary land.

The facilitators this week--Jo, Jane, and Carol--are all terrific and are affiliated with the Wild Goose Resource Group. Wild Goose, which is loosely "based" at Iona, is a collection of people who produce creative, contextual, socially-relevant liturgy. I've been using Wild Goose prayers, music, litanies, and liturgies since I was ordained, first at my church in New York, then in Atlanta. It's nice for me to see the environment here at the abbey in which some of these liturgies were crafted.

This week in our conversations, we've been talking about what goes into making creative liturgies: deep engagement with Scripture, physical movement in and use of the worship space, participatory liturgical arts, and congregational music-making. What this week has done for me is confirm that the worship culture that we've worked to create at North Decatur has been moving in the right direction. I can encourage our worship team back home and perhaps even recruit new participants. It's hard work to dream up new worship services in group process, but it's worth the effort. And I love the process and even the effort.

I've written a long-form essay during my sabbatical that makes the case for why creative worship is needed in this moment and also describes North Decatur's approach to worship. I'll find a way to share it when it's ready for sharing. Creative worship is one way the church feels alive. One thing I'd love to do in my last 20 years of ministry is help other church leaders learn how to do creative worship--build broader capacity for this work in the church.

A side note that is related. We took a half-day boat trip to a tiny unpopulated island called Staffa about 8 miles north of Iona. One of the hopes was to see Atlantic puffins up close, which we did. They're cute. But I wasn't as enchanted with the puffins as others seemed to be, plus I was shivering to the bone on a blustery, wet day on this exposed island, so I took off by myself on the path around the top of the island to walk fast and try to warm up. I was on the northwest side of the island, far away from anyone else from our group, when I looked ahead and saw two enormous birds blocking the path. They had no intention of moving (I asked). I trundled off the path, giving them a wide birth.

Asl I got closer I could see that the two birds were sheltering their fuzzy newborns. I could also tell, at that moment, what kind of birds these were. Wild geese.