A doorway to God

Today is the second anniversary of the completion of Light of the Lakes UMC. We celebrated this event last Sunday in church. As part of the sermon I used different images of churches I had photographed in France. The three churches I showed were Sacre Couer, Notre Dame, and Sainte Chapelle. I grew up going to Hamline UMC, which while smaller, was built (in the 1920's) in a similar style to the great cathedrals of Europe. Baxter, as a newer, younger, growing community has few examples of older styles of churches, and instead has churches built along much more modern lines. what is perhaps most striking to me is the effect of these different worship spaces. From what I understand, a lot of modern churches are built to make people feel comfortable and at open. Theater style seating and corporate style atriums remind people of other buildings and places they are comfortable going. The cathedrals of hundreds of years ago were built along very different lines. Rather than wanting to make people feel at home, they were meant to convey the majesty of God, to transport one's soul and spirit towards Heaven, to reveal a bit of the Divine to humanity. Do our churches today help give us a sense of the divine? Or do our churches instead become something mundane? In an effort to make people comfortable and at home (important things to do) do we loss something that makes church exceptional, special, something more. I would b e the last person to advocate overly for the sacredness of church. I think that God can, and is experienced all around us. The church is not the place where God lives, nor is it the sole place to experience God, but it must be a place to experience God. I think the challenge today is to make sure that our places of worship help bring a sense of the divine to our everyday lives and help transport people, at least for a moment out of our everyday lives into something extraordinary, into a place of worship.

Touching God

I have been pondering the story of Thomas and the resurrected Christ for the last few weeks know. I love the first Sunday after Easter because there are some very powerful stories that we get to read, the road to Emmaus, where where Jesus is known in the breaking of the bread, and the story of Thomas, where he reaches out to touch and believe. Woven into Thomas' story is the idea that believing without touching is an even greater expression of faith. I agree with this, but I also think it is important to remember that each person needs to experience God differently.
I am a person of ideas and thoughts. The concept of God can be made known to me and derived at some level a priori, that is before experience. Other people are much more grounded in their senses. This is not a bad thing, but just a different way of experiencing and learning about the world. I think is important to remember that for many, God cannot be known without experience, without something they can touch, hold, see, or hear. I think the challenge that Thomas gives to us worship leaders and pastors is to remember that in addition to simply talking about, praying about, and singing about God, we need to find ways to make God physically known to people.
Unfortunately, most people will not have the opportunity to touch Jesus, to place their hands in his wounds, and come to know his love and his relationship for us through such a tangible interaction. I do not believe this means all experience of God must be filtered through words, and certainly not simply through worship. But I think we need to find ways to make God real to people.
Worship needs to involve both a mental and a physical interaction with God. My favorite line of liturgy without question, is one that is often spoken during Communion, "taste and see." There is a powerful reminder in those words that when we taste the bread we are tasting God, we are touching God. I guess that is just something I really want to see more of in worship is sounds, sights, and objects that can be experienced as a reminder of God's presence in our lives. I think Thomas speaks to me so much because he reminds us that there is often more to our faith than just hearing it, that it takes something more to make God real in our lives. Each of us in our own way needs to find a way to reach out and touch God.

A Slave to Technology?

One of my projects for the week is figuring out how to make my computer record the worship service so that I can take the sound files and translate them into mp3s to be put on the website as well as burn them into CDs for archiving purposes. This will be very helpful I believe but will also make the service more dependent on technology. Sunday I had a problem with my dependence on technology. I managed to print thewrong copy of the bulletins for the service because I forgot to save the most recent version before sending it to be printed. The result was that we basically did not have bulletins for the service. This was easily overcome by making quick copies of the call to worship and songs for the day. It raises the question, are we becoming too dependent on technology? Or perhaps if not too dependent, unneccesarily dependent. Perhpas I am wrong in this, but it seems that the service went fine even without bulletins.
There are two reasons to record the service ... archiveal purposes and to let people know what our worship is like. A number of people, myself included like to be able to listen to the pastor and the worship service as a way of checking out a congregation. These are both good things for a church, but are we adding too much extra? Suddenly there is one more thing to work on, one of more thing to go wrong each week. Are we building up a culture that is dependent on technology and in doing so limiting ourselves from simple, authentic worship. As soon as you beginning recording services there is a temptation to make sermons more than just worship but also a marketing tool. Meaningful theology can easily be exchanged for sound bytes. I am a begin fan of technology, but as I sit here typing on my laptop using wireless internet, I am just left to wonder if it is easy for it to go too far.

Worship Size

I was meeting with a parishoner today and was struck by something that he said. As we were talking about our church and our hopes for it, he mentioned that while it was tempting to want the church to grow to have hundreds of members and a huge sanctuary, there was also something appealing about simply having several smaller services and focusing offerings not on the cost of the building and expanding it, but instead on mission, "which is what being Christian is really about." (Not perhpas an exact quote but close to what was said.)
I find the idea of several smaller services to be highly appealing to me. I have a lead worships of many different sizes, never more than a 250 or so, but I know that while there can certainly be more energy at a larger service, there is also something powerful about even just a service of 10-20 people. There are challenges to creating a church that has lots of smaller services. Building connections between individuals at the services is important. There is also more work required of a the pastor to lead so many services. People also prefer larger services at times, it lets people drift into the background more.
All of these are excellent concerns, but I also like the point that having more services allows a church to better use a smaller space. Rather than needing huge sprawling campus, churches can make do with a much smaller area. Instead of pouring all its money into building campaigns, people can be spending more money on mission instead. Most churches have building funds, which often have amounts in the tens of thousands of dollars, if not more. How many churches have similar funds for missions, or even given an equivelant amount to missions?
I also like the idea of the smaller, more intimate worship experience as a way to emphasize that worship is a community experience and a participtory one. Worship is not meant to be observed, but taken part in. Smaller services help to create a stronger connection within the church. I think an emphasis on smaller size helps to increase what can be done in worship, since smaller size tends to allow for more flexibility with space.
As I reflect on all of this I realize that part of what is at stake is how worship seeks to live out the mission of the church. Different styles and such are certainly useful, but we should not be concerned with models and styles so much as whether the worship service is moving the church forward in its mission.

Beyond mere work

It is Saturday, and my agenda for the day consisted of writing a sermon, liturgies, bulletins, and newsletters. Today was exceptional in that I got to the bulletin before Sunday morning. The bulletin is something that gets done as my brain wakes up and prepares to preach on Sunday morning. It is part of my routine. Today I decide to get it done early. As I sat an watched a movie I folded bulletins and newsletters. There was something incredibly peaceful about this time. Bulletins are usually hastely folded as people file into church on Sunday morning. The bulletins at Park church, where I am associate are usually folded by the secretary. As I folded the bulletins I was overcome with a sense of satisfaction and peace. Not because there was something special about these bulletins. Despite my best efforts I am sure there are still typos and things I forgot to include. As I gazed at the Order of Worship that is what I saw, worship. Somehow the words, the numbers, the events, the hymns, they all blurred into one great worship of God. The bulletin was a vehicle to the Divine. I do not know how to explain it. Preparing the bulletin was not about one more task that had to be done so I could sleep well tonight, preparing the bulletin was entering into a spirit of worship. As a Pastor it is easy for God to get lost in the details, in all the little things that I need to do as part of my job. Today it was not merely work, today it really was about enabling others to worship God. Today all the little things I did for my small church seemed a part of some greater presence, a part of God's continued voice in the world. My prayer tonight is the same I always pray before worship and before I preach. I pray that someone how God finds a way to transform my work into something meaningful to someone. I pray that someone hears God in the scripture, or sees God in the lights on the altar, or in their neighbor in worship. I pray that people can just get to know God. Tonight I also pray that I do not forget what a bulletin is really about, that is never just work to be done, but is always an act of worship, the most important thing I do every week.