Worship Ways: For the People Within Your Reach
Worship Ways: For the People Within Your Reach
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781426796272 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
· Lucinda comes to coaching and vocational mentoring with over 30 years of local church experience from a micro sized congregation to multiple staff large church senior pastorate, to District Superintendent and former Executive Pastor of Worship and Ministerial Development at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. Lucinda currently as a popular consultant/coach in the Missouri and Great Plains Area of the UMC, as well as a part-time Pastor for Churches in transition. Rev. Holmes coaches and mentors others to their unique call of God resulting in the growth and vitality of congregations and their clergy leaders.
Read an Excerpt
Worship Ways For The People Within Your Reach
By THOMAS G. BANDY, Lucinda Holmes
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2014 Abingdon PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-9627-2
CHAPTER 1
Mission-Targeted Worship
God's intention is to rescue the alienated world, and restore the unity of creator and creation. This means that the church and all activities of the church are about mission. Even worship is about mission. This is one of the most radical and controversial implications of the transition to the postmodern world of demographic diversity.
The church has always tried to diversify worship choices. In the days when Christianity could claim authority over the passage of time, worship was diversified to focus on Christian seasons, Christian holy days, and theological themes that gave meaning to relatively stable, agrarian lives. In just the last hundred years, industrial and technological revolutions have eroded that authority, forcing the church to search for new ways to become relevant to ever more diverse and unstable societies.
First, the church diversified worship by time. Our great-grandparents and grandparents referred to the "early" or the "later" worship service. The former was usually simpler (perhaps without as much musical accompaniment), and the latter was usually more elaborate (perhaps including more music, drama, volunteers, and so on). However, each worship service had the same theme, liturgy, and sermon.
Next, the church diversified worship by generation. Silent and boomer generations began to refer to "traditional" and "youth" worship services. The former was weekly, standardized, and predictable, with sermons that exposited scripture and explained theology. The latter was occasional (or another than Sunday morning), topical, and creative, with sermons that commented on current affairs.
Church membership in North America peaked in the late 60s and early 70s. In the spiral downward, and responding to criticisms about boring and irrelevant worship, the church diversified worship by style. Boomers and busters began to refer to worship as "traditional" or "contemporary." Each option included young and old. Traditional worship usually honored veteran church members and held the prime-time Sunday morning slot between ten thirty and twelve o'clock. It blended denominational and local church customs but continued to be standardized, predictable, and more formal. Contemporary worship styles varied according to what leaders considered contemporary, which often seemed five to fifteen years out of date to the echo generation. Churches began seriously to consider other days, times, and locations; used new technologies and instrumentations; and explored interactive methods to deliver a message.
The postmodern attitude that emerged in the 90s and new millennium affected young and old. Seekers and members looked for substance beyond style and began asking the fundamental questions about the real point and purpose of worship. The real breakthrough, however, has been the discovery that existential anxiety, urgent life situations, and yearnings for incarnation were not just individual issues. These could be generalized as expectations—or yearnings—that defined lifestyle segments.
This is a matter of identifying trends rather than certainties, but it is possible to connect demographic and psychographic research to identify clues to the spiritual hopes and religious preferences of distinct microcultures.
Seeker sensitivity can now be taken to a new and more objective level. This no longer depends on the personal biases of a few observers, the popular assumptions of the media, or the best guesses of a church board. Spiritual hopes and religious preferences can be more objectively tracked by sophisticated demographic research. They still must be reality tested by listening strategies and interviews with local nonprofit organizations, but church leaders can now design worship options with more confidence that these will be really relevant to the publics they hope to bless.
There is a direct correlation between the changing circumstances of life and the kind of worship a particular public seeks. And there is a direct correlation between a lifestyle segment, the anxieties that motivate it, and the kind of worship in which it might participate. Worship design is a simple formula:
Seeker Sensitivity + Incarnational Experience = God's blessing through Relevant Worship
It is important to understand the radical shift from modern religious sensibilities to postmodern spiritualities. In the modern world, the whole point of seeker sensitivity was to attract people into the institutional church. Worship leaders measured success by worship attendance and eventual program involvement. In the postmodern world, seeker sensitivity has a very different goal. The point is not to attract people, but to bless people. Church leaders evaluate success by counting changed lives and social impact that often has nothing to do with attendance and membership. Yes, seeker sensitivity that aims to bless people first may also result in institutional growth but more as a side effect or an added benefit. Those who aim to bless the publics around them are in turn blessed.
The formula may be simple, but the design process for each option of worship is much more complex.
First of all, there are currently seventy-one or more lifestyle segments in the United States and Canada alone. In the most homogeneous rural areas and small towns, there will still be three to six distinctly different lifestyles segment that represent the greatest proportion of the population. In the most heterogeneous urban and urbanized areas, there may be ten to fifteen distinctly different lifestyle segments within a radius of just a few miles. Each lifestyle segment is driven by a different spiritual urgency, with reference to a different life situation. Their religious preferences for hospitality, worship, Christian education, small groups, and outreach and their preferences for facilities, technologies, symbol systems, and communication media may even be contradictory.
This means that the era of blended worship that worked effectively at the close of the modern age in the 80s and 90s won't work today. Blending works best if the goal is to attract people into the institution, so that a single hospitality strategy and worship service can include everybody. Today it is no longer possible to satisfactorily blend a "one-size-fits-all" experience. The public is too diverse, and the tolerance within each lifestyle segment to put up with the preferences of another lifestyle segment is too low.
The good news is that worship options don't all need to be expensive, technologically sophisticated, or labor intensive.
• Tom has discovered that even in remote parts of Canada, for example, among outports in Newfoundland and Labrador, and the isolated regions of America (e.g., Appalachia or Idaho), it is possible for even the smallest church to design two distinct worship options. One might be an educational, caregiving worship service on Sunday morning, addressing the anxieties of aging church veterans over death and brokenness and focusing on compassion and wholeness through formal liturgies, nineteenth-century hymnology, intercessory prayers, and traditional preaching. The other might be a rompin', stompin', Celtic or cowboy inspirational and coaching service in the evening, addressing the anxieties of being lost and entrapped through song and dance, spontaneous prayers, and lay witness.
• Lucinda has discovered that in small towns overtaken by urban sprawl in the United States, it is also possible for churches with few resources to develop multiple sites and multiple choices. One option might be a caregiving, healing worship service early Sunday morning, addressing the anxieties of loneliness and abuse and focusing on friendship and acceptance through informal traditions, passing the peace, and pastoral prayers. The other might be a coaching and transformational service later Sunday morning, addressing the anxieties of lostness and entrapment and focusing on lifestyle coaching and addiction recovery through video, drama, dialogue, and the laying on of hands.
Some options require salaried professionals, lots of volunteers, print and audio technologies, and wooden pews. Other options require unpaid volunteer expertise, a handful of friendly folks, computerized images, and a drama team. The one clear fact is that these services are designed separately, not blended. The formula for postmodern worship may be simple, but demographic and lifestyle diversity makes implementation complex.
The second reason a simple formula still requires complex implementation is that a church cannot give a blessing that it has not already experienced.
In other words, you can't give what you don't have. If the worship leaders have not personally experienced Christ as spiritual guide, perfect human, new being, promise keeper, healer, vindicator, or shepherd; then no matter how clever their techniques and tactics, they will never succeed in blessing seekers with direction, rapport, deliverance, new life, healing, vindication, or belonging. Worship design in the modern world was all about program. After all, the goal was to connect the visitor with an appropriate program so that he or she would join the church.
However, worship design in the postmodern world is all about relationship. The goal is to connect the seeker with an experience of Christ that changes his or her personal, family, and community lives.
Once again, this shift to postmodern seeker sensitivity is radical and stressful for veteran church leaders. In the old, modern world, worship needed to be designed by professionals in a quest for quality. Highly trained, paid experts needed to create high quality performances in order to attract people into the church. In the emerging, postmodern world, worship needs to be designed by credible spiritual leaders to encourage authentic mentoring relationships. Highly accountable, spiritually deep, and often unpaid leaders who can speak personally of both life struggle and spiritual victory shape intense (and sometimes unpolished) experiences to bless people as they leave the church.
Seven Options for Mission-Targeted Worship
There is an amazing ferment in creative worship design happening in the global Christian movement today. Most church leaders are unaware of this diversity because their peer influences tend to be limited denominational affiliation, local and regional connections, and cultural boundaries. Indeed, churches have often been the last homogenous communities based on shared demographics of age, race, economic status, and educational achievement left standing in the midst of communities that are now radically heterogeneous. Therefore, church leaders are often unaware of the creativity in worship occurring in local congregations across the city or across the street.
Protestant, Catholic, Pentecostal, and independent church leaders often assume uniformity, predictability, and continuity of worship within their traditions that really isn't true. Yes, this may alarm church officialdom that seeks to defend dogmatic purity and political correctness.
However, the urgency to create relevant worship that blesses the public with authentic, life changing, society-reforming experiences of Christ outweighs the risks in the hearts and minds of many mission-driven pastors. Their creativity may not be widely known within their institutions out of self-protection. Few books explore their innovations, because by the time a book is written, edited, released, and distributed it is out of date. Even the Internet captures only a fraction of this ferment, because video streaming is still not a high priority among many lifestyle segments.
Tom has had a "macro" experience traveling and consulting across the United States, Canada, and Australia in nearly every state, province, and major center and coaching internationally among other cultures and contexts. Lucinda has had a "micro" experience innovating, leading, and training worship teams in urban, urbanizing, and transitional community contexts.
What we have discovered is that externally focused, mission-driven churches are giving up the fruitless task of diversifying worship by style. In part, this is because it simply doesn't work! Churches may succeed in attracting visitors to worship, but they fail miserably in transforming individual lives and positively changing social contexts. No matter how high the quality of worship, and how appealing the style of worship, the world still isn't any different because the church exists. This means that however attractive a church becomes, it cannot sustain participation. The public is not stupid! Indeed, its thirst for God is more urgent (and specific) than ever, and its perceptions of authenticity or hypocrisy are more acute than ever!
Moreover, church leaders have discovered that stress management over changes in worship style is simply not worth the effort. Church members are not stupid either! Their thirst for God is just as urgent (and specific), and their need for profound spiritual and missional rationale for change is ever more acute! Attraction is not enough. There must be a deeper reason to change worship than merely increasing attendance and potential financial support.
The only justification for worship is that it addresses the critical life situations of people and resolves their existential anxieties. The only credible worship is an experience of Christ that is a catalyst for acceptance. This is why the terminology of "traditional" and "contemporary" worship is dropping out of use. Each worship option is now being described by its anticipated impact to bless seekers. Faithful church members are willing to go outside their comfort zones and do whatever it takes to change worship, provided it really helps people experience the transforming power of Christ and changes society.
Building on the table presented in the first chapter, we observe that there are seven basic kinds of mission-targeted worship services (at least in Western Christianity) today.
The tactics for each worship option will be explored in detail in the coming chapters. We encourage readers not to make any assumptions (either with excitement or alarm) about the personnel, music, liturgy or drama, technology support, or financial resources that might be demanded by each option of worship. Tactics are very contextual. Exactly The tactics for each worship option will be explored in detail in the coming chapters. We encourage readers not to make any assumptions (either with excitement or alarm) about the personnel, music, liturgy or drama, technology support, or financial resources that might be demanded by each option of worship. Tactics are very contextual. Exactly how each worship option is implemented requires thorough research into the lifestyle segment that is likely to seek out any particular worship option.
The first step in targeting worship is to understand which lifestyle segments you are blessing now, and what kind of worship option you are currently doing. As we shall see later, it is usually only possible to blend two at most. Some pairs of worship choices are easier to blend than others, and some pairs of worship are nearly impossible to blend. You simply have to surrender any expectation to bless everybody with the same worship service.
The second step in targeting worship is to identify the next lifestyle segment God calls you to bless. Remember, the issue isn't whether you like it or even want to do it. The issue is that they yearn for it, and God expects you to set aside your personal likes and dislikes to bless others. Which is more important? Me first or God's mission?
Church planters often understand this more clearly than established church leaders. Planters have already targeted the lifestyle segment for whom their hearts burst and proceed from there. Their challenge is that once they have successfully focused and developed a worship service for the target lifestyle segment, they need to resist complacency, fall down on their knees, follow Jesus to a new lifestyle segment, and do it all over again.
Established church leaders often need to realize that the lifestyle segment(s) they are blessing now, and who are well represented in worship today, actually do not represent the largest lifestyle segments in the mission field around the church. Their challenge is to refocus mission on the largest lifestyle segments in the community, rather than spend all their resources on a relative minority in the community.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Worship Ways For The People Within Your Reach by THOMAS G. BANDY, Lucinda Holmes. Copyright © 2014 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Authors' Note,
Introduction: Why Worship?,
Mission-Targeted Worship,
Worship Option: Coaching Worship,
Worship Option: Educational Worship,
Worship Option: Transformational Worship,
Worship Option: Inspirational Worship,
Worship Option: Caregiving Worship,
Worship Option: Healing Worship,
Worship Option: Mission-Connectional Worship,
Possibilities for Blending Worship,
The Sunday Morning Experience,
Notes,