I’m a bit of a Tevye. You remember him: he’s the main character in Fiddler on the Roof who constantly agrees with both sides of a heated argument. Like Tevye, on the one hand I resonate with Hans Kouwenberg’s article in the December 2010 issue of the Presbyterian Record.
I, too, see signs of worship getting short shrift in the life of the Presbyterian Church. On the other hand…
On the other hand, Connie Purvis’ “Change is Common” article makes the valid point that moving education (and, I presume, worship) support services to regional areas should bring them closer to the churches that need them.
On the other hand, Presbyterian churches–correct me if I’m wrong–keep scoring their lowest scores under the “Inspiring Worship” and “Passionate Spirituality” headings in Natural Church Development studies. Should we be alarmed? Or, should we rather be confident that the Presbyterian Church in Canada is making faithful and well-considered choices?
I have neither the position, nor the mandate, to judge.
Here’s what I do know: we live, or die, by the vitality and the faithfulness of our worship. I keep going back to the Presbyterian Church’s1988 Vision Statement, paragraph 4.
“Our congregations will be alive. Worship services will be joyful and full of meaning, aware of the world in which we live, and work, and seek to do God’s will. The forms of worship and the music used in worship will be lively and varied.”
Are we implementing this vision at the local and the national levels? I don’t have the mandate to judge.
What I do have is what I offer today, the first day of 2011: ideas that I have begged, borrowed, stolen and implemented in the past year (and a few years before), that have made worship more joyful and more full of meaning for the congregations in which I have had the honour to work. Here are a few, with some more to follow in my next column.
The Power of Song
If you’re looking for sharp reminders of the power of song, join the millions who have seen the YouTube flash-crowd video, filmed at the Seaway Mall in Welland, Ontario.
Watch the DVD about a Seniors’ choir like no other. It’s called Young at Heart. Like the audience of convicts at one of its live concerts, I began as a skeptic and ended as a tear-filled convert. Believe me, it earns both the converts and the tears.
Watch Amandla, the documentary about a “Revolution in Four-Part Harmony.” Directed by Lee Hirsch, it celebrates the changing roles–and the overwhelming power of song–in the story of the fall of apartheid in South Africa. I watch it whenever I become discouraged about the state of congregational song–religious and secular–in our culture, and wonder if I (and a few crazy friends) think that singing together is a powerful thing.
Scripture in Worship
I am convinced that droning, monotonous or officious reading in our churches will not feed, challenge, disturb or heal us. We need to work, continually and faithfully, at teaching our congregational leaders to read well. We need to experience the biblical text deeply and fully. We need to learn to embody–to incarnate–the biblical witness, in both our work and our worship.
The Psalms were written to be sung. It is not difficult for congregations to learn to sing, not only the refrains, but also the texts of the psalms. The Book of Psalms, published by the Presbyterian Church in Canada, invites us to sing them in all their joy, their pain, their anger and their faith. Of course, it’s well known that the lines of the psalms reinforce and intensify the one before: “Blessed are those who do not stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the scornful.” What is less often practised in our worship–at least in Canadian Presbyterian congregations–are dramatizations. Some psalms, such as Psalm 50, can be presented as dialogues; others, such as Psalm 107 have refrains, and different voices that different readers, or sections of the whole congregation, can read. At Beaches Presbyterian in Toronto’s east end, we wove a whole service around Psalm 107, with various readers presenting the different trials and triumphs of God’s people, and with the sermon also divided into meditations inspired by the different sections.Also at Beaches Church, we dramatized the image of the potter in the biblical witness by having Dawna Duff, one of our members who is a potter, work at her wheel in the middle of the congregation and talk about the potter’s art. This was interspersed by appropriate meditations and music. It was meditative, calming, and energizing, all at the same time.
Gospel stories are inherently dramatic. The Samaritan Woman, the Rich Young Man, the Prodigal son can all be divided for dramatic reading. Add a sung refrain, and a stand-and-deliver reading can become memorable.
We did a similar spiritual and meditative exercise with the visual art of congregational member Tim Murray. Young people offered monologues based on four colours inspired by the Passion narratives. They splashed paint onto a canvas which had been treated with wax to “reject” the paint, revealing the head of Christ as a suffering servant. Simple but powerful.
At a recent conference of the Hymn Society in the U.S. and Canada, some of the parables were mimed as they were read. Miming them helps portray the humour, the hyperbolae, the subtlety and the poignancy of these difficult, but essential, stories.
At Trafalgar Presbyterian Church in Oakville, Ontario, where I’ve been for the past seven years, I wrote some sung versions of gospel stories set to Québecois echo song folk tunes, called chansons à répondre. Together we sang stories of the Good Samaritan, Zacchaeus, some of the events depicted in Mark’s gospel on the road to Jerusalem, and a few others. This song form, with its built-in echoes and repeating refrain lines, is a wonderful medium for telling stories and for involving the children of the congregation in the narrative as it unfolds.
Pacing in Worship
Before I take my leave – for now – I leave you with some homework. There’s an excellent article by Paul Ryan in Reformed Worship (Issue#79)
It is about the pacing of a worship service, and specifically about the connector words and phrases we use, those crucial “in between” words that move the worship service along.
To be continued…
