Alternative worship ponderings

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 30 August 2005 07:39:06

Before I decided to have a go at wiblogging, I had no idea how I would go. I'm enjoying it, and really appreciating the comments, but I'm discovering there are some times I just feel I don't have anything to write about, so there will be the odd weeks silence now and again.

This last Saturday I went to a regional “resourcing” day organized by my church. It was great, particularly one elective on “alternative worship”. As I have been involved in co-ordinating my church's worship for several years I found the following two comments engendered really fresh thoughts for me as I thought about my worship planning.

"What's already on your piece of paper when you start planning worship?....and what would it be like to give that up?"

"The more I look at it, the more I see alternative worship as a blank sheet of paper. It's really a place of experiment rather than a particular form of church. It's more about a methodology with a change of culture than any particular style of theology"

I liked the whole idea of alternative worship looking at ways to tell the Christian story that encourage people to put their own stories along side it.

In our worship, the ancient rituals and stories of our faith have been surrounded with words and images that will give us knowledge and understanding to deepen our faith. But more and more people are telling us that they don't make sense of their lives and faith in these ways at all. Instead of being persuaded by a system of belief, for instance, or wanting information or explanations about the stories of faith and their connection to life, people are looking for worship that simply offers an encounter with the stories of faith in a space that encourages them to play with them, question them, twist them, stretch them, and discover God within them.

The session leader had been doing some research into why people are leaving the church, the following reason given invites some pondering, don't you think? ”I havn't left the church because I've lost my faith. I've left because I want to keep it.”