Categories: uncategorized
Date: 08 February 2006 23:04:43
Homegroup last night.
I was meant to be doing worship, and I had the ghost of an idea that might be quite interesting. I'm a bit fascinated by variety and diversity at the moment. On a Sunday morning we all get together and worship as a body, so we're all singing together etc. Which is of course good and right, but do we really know what makes each other tick? Even people we know pretty well, how much do we talk about how we really engage with God and worship etc?
So on Sunday I asked people from homegroup to be prepared to talk a bit about this, and find a song, or an artwork, or anything really, which speaks to them of God or helps them worship or whatever. (Trying to be as non-prescriptive as possible.) Some people I e-mailed at the last minute yesterday.
I was going to get maybe three people to say a bit about whatever they'd brought, and then.... well I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do, although I felt there had to be something which was actually worshipping rather than just chatting about it. (False dichotomy? Not sure but it needed something, anyway.) But although I intended to give this a lot of thought and come up with something appropriate, it just didn't happen.
So off I went, feeling woefully underprepared. For some reason the person doing the bible study didn't turn up, so we had all evening. So everyone got to talk about their thing, whatever that was. We had:
- an obscure japanese scratch DJ
- a photo of a local landscape
- a Steeleye Span track
- some very obscure indeed jazz trumpet type stuff and a book of pictures by
this man
- a Super Furry Animals track
- some guitar playing and talk about harmonics and other things
(Anyone reading who knows my homegroup, feel free to try and guess who was who).
So fairly diverse, which was great.
Then there was a bit of pause, and I explained that I had wanted to do something else as well to bring it all together but hadn't really fathomed what. So the guy who leads it suggested that we put a cd on in the background and just sat quietly to see what would happen. (He didn't quite put it like that!!) So we did - we lowered the lights and lit a candle and put Music for Airports on - and people prayed a bit, and read various verses (very impressed with the amount of scripture people had memorised - put me to shame rather). And we ended by several people reading the doxology at the end of Romans 11, very slowly with lots of pauses and time to reflect.
It was absolutely brilliant. And exactly the kind of thing I probably would have wanted to do, but I would shy away from suggesting because I just assume that people prefer the jolly guitar playing. Everyone felt it had been a brilliant evening, and they'd got a lot out of it. And I do feel we wouldn't have engaged with it so well if it hadn't been for the chat beforehand, as we'd really got an idea of what worship meant to different people.
I am very very encouraged. There was even talk of doing something like that on a Sunday morning. I feel my plot to introduce my church to the Labyrinth has taken several giant leaps forward.
The only downside was that I caught myself being so busy thinking "this is brilliant. this is totally me!" I probably wasn't as engaged as I could have been. How hilarious is that?