Worship, The Arts, Outflow, and Outreach

Last night, Ryan, Christina, Melissa and I had a very productive discussion about worship and music during the planning of the gatherings. We started really probing and discussing the different elements of worship that had and hadn't been so effective. We asked ourselves why the "music" portion of our gatherings had more often than not seemed stale, particularly in recent months. Answers ranged from furnishings to instrumentation to bodily position to style, and these were the thoughts that were thrown out, though certainly not conclusive:

• The atmosphere in the Fireside room isn't very conducive to worship in general.
• That the couches cause you to slouch so much has a physiological effect of excessive relaxation (or in Christina's case, discomfort!).
• Facing one another in close proximity while standing, clapping, and expressing emotion is awkward.
• The position of one's body has some effect on the degree of engagement, with a possible "hierarchy" of physical involvement, beginning with standing, then proceeding to clapping, dancing, or something else.
• The size of the room, available instrumentation, and seating arrangement all are barriers to genuine, spiritual, celebratory participation (at least for some of us), as compared with more solemn or contemplative participation, which comes more easily in this context.
• The most effective style of music changes from context to context. Christina made an astute observation about this, mentioning that she seemed to connect with God best through more folk-styled music, particularly in more intimate settings. I agreed, and Ryan and Melissa seemed to indicate that this made sense. Ryan had some technical explanations of why folk music was better suited for smaller groups, and rock music for larger groups, which strengthened our consensus.

The consensus seemed to be that we try to incorporate more folk songs and fewer rock ballads. The best resources I know of for these are Enter the Worship Circle, Waterdeep, 100 Portraits, Robbie Seay, and Shane & Shane. This means that we probably need to rethink the content of the "hymnal" to remove (for now) the more upbeat rock-oriented songs (i.e. Blessed Be Your Name, Holy Is the Lord, Famous One) and add more folk songs. A good start would be adding a majority of the Enter the Worship Circle and Second Circle songs to the list. We can obviously incorporate the "bigger", livelier songs in the larger group gatherings on Saturday nights and in the future if we do this more regularly at the Front Porch or elsewhere.

As I mentioned in my original email on this topic, we must learn to balance "authenticity" with cultural sensitivity to those to whom we are reaching out. Too often, authenticity is an excuse for not expanding our tastes and abilities, but rather to continually fall back on that which is comfortable. May each of us do our part in "building our capacity" to embrace and embody new expressions of worship in our own personal lives, so that we will be able to authentically express our worship to God in fresh, inspiring ways corporately--even to those who are "missing" from the Body of Christ.

Also, I just finished a blog story related to this topic on my blog, if you all are interested in hearing my story as it relates to music and worship.

Much love.

Matt