I sent out a twitter message a while back asking for prayers for a situation at a birthday party Grace was attending out at the Anderson Rd. Recreation Area at Percy Priest.
One of the children in attendance (a teenager around age 16) named Ernest got in trouble swimming and went under. There were several other kids close by who tried to hold onto him and pull him back up, but they were unable to do so, and given the time frame, all indications are that he has drowned.
This is a horrible event which will have consequences in the lives of all in attendance and the family of the young man who has apparently lost his life. I ask for your prayers for all.
This is the second time someone in our family has been directly touched by a drowning. My wife Kay (who is currently on the scene offering support to the mother who was throwing the party) experienced a counselor that she was supervising in a summer daycamp program drowning in an area lake. This is hitting very close to home for her, and she could use your prayers as well.
Life seems eternal when you are 15 or 16, and no one ever imagines at that age that something like this could happen. The girl for whom the party was being given had known Ernest since they were in third grade and they came together to celebrate her sweet sixteen with all the hope and joy in the world. The reality of life and death have come crashing around them, and all of us who hold our children tightly knowing that at any moment, we could be the ones receiving the phone call. There is no way to make any sense of this, or find any redemption in the midst of the pain. All we can do is sit by the waters of Babylon and weep.
Live blogging Sally Morgenthaller’s presentation to the TN Annual Conference 2009
- Starts out with a clip from Ice Age
- How would you tell some of the parables in images like was done in the clip?
- Henri Nouwen saw the great painting of the prodigal son in Leningrad, which opened up the entire painting, leading to an entire book.
- Art opens up varieties of experiences, allowing the Holy Spirit to work.
- Practical matters about multisensory worship
- Start slow – maybe as little as 3 minutes a month
- Process matters – process over product
- Steps to get started
- Off Site – get off site which will allow ideas to flow.
- Comfy. Electronics available. White Board and flip charts.
- Food – People are more creative around food
- Pastors need to think of themselves as an artist, because you are.
- You build stories, metaphors, etc., which have visual and other implications.
- You are the key storyteller and theological guide
- Starting off, think of two people you can work with, who are not like you.
- Meet two times a month – two hours.
- When you meet, set a theme or texts.
- Give folks some idea of where you want to go.
- Folks have to bring some idea to “show and tell” related to that theme or text.
- Spend the first 45 minutes in float time, talking about all the various ideas.
- You can’t say, we’ve never done that before.
- You can’t say, that will never work.
- You cant’ say, we don’t have enough.
- Throw out all ideas available
- Narrow down to two or three ideas
- This is the point to talk about time limits, budget, or what resonates the congregation.
- Turn around the “we don’t have” conversation to “What is it that we DO have….”
- Deal with logistics in the second meeting
- Not trying to do a production. Trying to capture or create a moment.
- Choose your one idea and work that for a month.
- Maybe it needs to be a catalyst service.
- Outside of the normal Sunday morning time.
- Possibly done outside the normal worship setting
- Ideas from the Floor
- Last night of VBS as a multisensory worship experience
- The Unveiling
- Father’s Day – GRASS Fishing, with fish having bible verses and having the service in the grass
- Performance of Jesus Christ Superstar
- Questions and Answers
Live blogging from the stage of Sally Morgenthaler’s presentation to the Tennessee Annual Conference. Sally is the founder of Sacramentis, and a reknowned leader in the area of worship.
I’m not sure the outline form really works for this, but bullet points don’t work in this template, so bear with me…
- Are you ready to get passionate?
- Church signs are the talk back to the bumper stickers
- Should say, we are such a dysfunctional family that you will be right at home.
- Passionate worship connects the dots between what is in here and what is outside.
- Psalms – more laments than victories
- Clip from Bruce Almighty as an example of lament
- We need to tell the truth about our lives – the whole truth.
- Where is your life and ministry? It doesn’t have to do with bands, equipment, etc.
- We tell folks to come as they are, but we leave them as they are, not giving them a chance to express their hurts.
- Why do our pictures always show folks being happy and nice. What if we showed people where they are.
- In passionate worship, we connect the dots both outward and downward.
- What have you longed to do in the presence of God for a long time?
- The early church brought the psalms with them into the tradition. We need to ensure that we are using the psalms in our worship.
- How can you give them something more?
- Psalm 23 – but not in a way that’s nice. (Video clip)
- How do we make worship more real? What in your congregation do with Psalm 23?
- Congregational responses
- Painting is a good way to embellish the scripture, as is dance.
- Personal stories of those who have been through the valleys.
- Jesus was familiar with grief.
- What does it take to teach kids today?
- Visual/multi sensory methods
- How can we break out of words?
- Storytelling as a resource.
- Drama and dance
- Why don’t we do these things?
- It’s not what we’ve always done
- It takes planning
- We lose control
- Rosemary Brown – example of the person “Painting herself well…”
- The video screen can be another “stained glass window.”
- One key image is enough.
- create a photo club, give them three blocks around the church, and use those pictures during the season of Lent portraying the ways we see Jesus crucified in our community.
- When she uses a screen, she always has something interactive either before or after the video.
- Part of our Wesleyan heritage is connecting the dots in worship
- It’s what the Wesley boys did.
- We understood how to put language in the words of the people.
- How can we expand the words of the people into the art of the people?
- Recommends Spaces for Spirit by Nancy Chinn Amazon Link (Cokesbury link not available)
- We are so afraid to change, but we have to break open our forms. Folks can’t receive Jesus in the same forms. You have to change to stay the same. You have to break open and reframe the elements so that folks can take them in.
- What is the language of your folks that makes the old images new.
- We worship with all of our lives. All the time.
Live blogging from the stage of Sally Morgenthaler’s presentation to the Tennessee Annual Conference. Sally is the founder of Sacramentis, and a reknowned leader in the area of worship.
- Revelation 5 as a model of passionate worship.
- What are you passionate about?
- Sally’s recent passions – Family
- grandchilds: Nathan and Roman
- Family is a passion – the things that we go through with one another that are our passions
- Mom and dad
- We all have passion, but we express them differently
- Pixar clip to demonstrate one expression of passion
- Unchurced respond to church with bumper stickers based on their image of us.
- “I found Jesus, he was behind the sofa all the time.”
- “God protect us from your followers”
- “Lead me not into temptation, I can find it myself”
- “Love the sinner, hate their clothes”
- People are trying to talk to us through culture.
- The spiritual conversation is going on, but the church is not invited.
- Passion is about the things that have the most meaning.
- They connect us to things and people beyond ourselves
- There is plenty of spiritual hunger, but the church doesn’t seem to be invited.
- Bono – We are stuck in the moment but can’t get out of it.
- Statistics about the state of the church
- TN Annual Conference is growing, and we need to continue touching lives.
- Isn’t the U.S. a mission field.
- Video clip – Asking questions
- Conversation on what was heard in the video
- You are the equipment
- Movement in the dark with light of hope
- Voices disconnected from the rain in the background.
- Do we hear what people are saying? Do we know when to speak and when to be silent?
- Doubt
- None of this is easy.
- Folks don’t come out for a good show anymore. It’s getting harder and harder.
- Romans 12: 1-2 = 24/7 worship.
- All the time we worship . . . we worship all the time.
- If people were experiencing Jesus in us all the time, then we wouldn’t need advertising and marketing.
- There is a lot of spirituality happening in our world (shared statistics from Newsweek poll)
- Some of us are doing well in our church. Some aren’t.
- Why do folks say they are in worship every week even though statistics suggest otherwise?
- Folks basically lie about church attendance.
- Average weekly church attendance in TN: 23% National Average: 17.5%
- What does it mean to worship passionately if we aren’t involved in our communities.
- Passion
- Where is God not?
- We have disconnected what happens here (church) with what happens with the rest of the world.
- Jacob at Bethel – angels going up and down ladder
- There are a lot of Bethels where the people we call unchurched meet God
- Where is Jesus in the midst of our passions?
- Jesus didn’t spend a whole lot of time in sanctuaries. Rather he was out with the people, getting his sandals dirty.
- Jesus’ life was outwardly oriented.
- Philippians 2:5-11
- This is the direction of worship. It is always toward those who need grace. The problem is that when we define it as something that happens in an hour, we will never expand the kingdom of God.
- The Call of Isaiah
- Every encounter of God has an outward result (Here I am, send me)
- The Annunciation/Magnificant
- The outward response of Mary – encountered God in a unique way, and her response was to give herself over to God’s plan to redeem the world.
- How are you passionate?
- Do you experience God more outside your worship service than in it?
- We can’t craft passionate worship inside the building if we aren’t passionate outside the building. If we have lost the connection to the Christ who comes after us, we cannot create it here.
- “Thin places” Celtic expression where folks punch through the veil to God
- Worship should be a thing place.
- What are you passionate about? How much of that do you include in your sanctuary? Folks aren’t passionate about concepts. Where are our stories? Have we lost a connection to the visual?
- The new stained glass – art, film, image.
- How are people seeing and experiencing God.
- Why did Sally disappear from the scene for a while?
- Stopped experiencing God in church. Story that she didn’t think fit with anyone else’s story.
- She didn’t have anyone telling or praying her story.
- Do we take the “life out of worship”?
- How many stories are we leaving behind? Where is God not?
- Experienced God more clearly in visiting her husband in jail.
- What do you do with people’s lives – clean them up to be like us, or truly reflect with the authentic issues of life?
- Passionate worship needs to go the depths of where people’s lives are.
Some of you have been seeing my tweets throughout the day originating from CMA Fest downtown this weekend. Before I go any farther in talking about my impressions as a Nashville native, I need to make a couple of disclaimers.
First, take my tweets with a grain of salt for it is always easier to tweet about the bad things than the good. I think that part of the human condition involves sharing our pain, and some of us do that through Twitter. In spite of how it might look, I am generally glad to have the experience. Also know that today I supervised two 9 year old girls and a 14 year old young woman. That I am still lucid is an amazing thing.
Second, I have to share that our tickets were a free gift by a friend and staffer, and those who have no financial investment should be careful in their critique. The chance to attend the CMA Music Festival was something out of our ability and I appreciate greatly the opportunity we’ve been given.
Having said that, I also come to this thing as a former event manager and producer who can’t attend any event without a critical eye. I confess that I rarely am able to experience and event or concert on its own terms without analyzing it, and CMA Fest is no different.
So, with the disclaimers out of the way, here are a few random thoughts about the event so far:
- The weather has been, and will likely be a problem throughout the weekend. The fact is that this event is primarily an outdoor festival, and storms postponed a concert at the Riverfront Stage and completely shut down the concert tonight at LP Field. There really isn’t anything the CMA can do about this, but it does cast a pall over the event.
- I want to go on record with my concept ( © 2009, Jay Voorhees All Rights Reserved) for an IPhone app for CMA Fest, and other music festivals. The app should be able to work with either Wifi or 3G in order to allow compatibility with the Touch. The basic app would contain all the schedules for all the events of the festival, as well as maps and other general information. This could be updated in real time so that folks would have the latest information in their phones and IPods. What would be different is that every venue would have WiFi available, and as folks came to that venue, they could tell the app where they were (or the app could geolocate) and the app could tell them the name of the artist that is currently performing. Then, if the app user likes the band/singer and wants to buy and download their music, they should be able to click on that band’s name and either go to the ITunes store with their catalog, OR be taken to a website where they could purchase the music immediately. Any developer types or members of the CMA that want to talk to be about this further, come on.
According to my kids: 1) Dierks Bentley is hot; 2) Joey + Rory are cool; and 3) Carrie Underwood is stuck up and not friendly. - CMA needs to learn from Disney about entertainment for the waiting periods. There is a lot of waiting in lines, and the CMA should have local musicians performing acoustic sets for folks while they are waiting in line, to minimize the grumpiness factor. There needs to be a way to define waiting as an entertainment/marketing opportunity.
- CMA Fest is populated by a lot of blonde females in tank dresses wearing cowboy boots. No matter their actual age, they all seem to have the emotional age of 14 when in the presence of a hot country singer (see #3 above).
- I was really disappointed in the sound in the LP Stadium in the General Admission seats up high. My own sense is that there was too much low end in general, but not enough mid and highs to bring the rest of the instruments above the bass drum and bass. While I know that these are the “cheap seats” the least you could expect for a $35 per night ticket is sound that has some degree of clarity and isn’t muddy. After all, you can’t really see that well from the nose bleed section, so it would be nice to have good sound – but then again maybe I noticed it and others didn’t because I wasn’t whistling, hooting, and shouting “I love you Reba) every two seconds during her short set.
Okay. Enough. Tomorrow is another day, with two 14 year olds and 1 nine year old.
Pray for me.
I’ve been rekindling an appreciation of the music of John Michael Talbot, who I first encountered in the late ’70’s prior to his move toward Roman Catholicism. JMT’s music always moved me, and The Painter (done with his brother Terry) is perhaps one of the finest albums ever. Here is one of the best songs from a great album.
I’ve been re-reading Tom Frank’s excellent book, The Soul of the Congregation and while this thought is usually before me, it jumped out at me tonight as a good reminder:
…people generally do not adopt a set of beliefs called “Christianity” and then pick out a church in which to express them. People become “Christian” by practicing a variety of activities enriched by the traditions and cultures of the faithful across the generations – worshiping, singing, praying, eating, reading scripture, visiting the sick, helping the needy. But practices cannot cannot simply be deduced because there is a need for worship in the world. I worship because it is a way of life. My life may be a mess of shame and disappointment but those conditions do not necessarily eventuate in my praying. When I do worship and pray, though, I find myself welcomed into a whole world of practice – language, tune, symbol, story – that I learn more fully only over time. As Bourdieu put it in one of his most delightful sentences, “It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know.
–The Soul of the Congregation by Tom Frank, pp. 47-48
One could easily argue that the premise behind the “10,000 Doors” portion of the “Rethinking Church” initiative of the United Methodist Church is based in Frank’s first couple of sentences, in which he acknowledges that it is the practices of faith that lead one into belief rather than the other way around. The danger, however, is to somehow see each practice and an end unto itself without the deeper theological connection to the “traditions and cultures of the faithful across the generations.” More simply put, practices such as helping the needy or engaging in ministries of justice (the kinds of practices lifted up at 10,000 Doors) do not lead to faith in isolation from the more traditional practices of worship, prayer, etc. Frank reminds us that this faith thing is a holistic way of life in which all of the practices work in a synergistic fashion to help us grow in our love of God and our love of neighbor.
Part of Frank’s task in his book is to suggest that the unique practices of each congregation forms a lens through with the life of faith is both understood and experienced. The problem with universal branding efforts such as “Rethinking Church” and “10,000 Villages” is that they are unable to acknowledge the differences in identity that exist between multiple congregations. Let’s face it, the Antioch United Methodist Church is a radically different place than the Edgehill United Methodist Church downtown, and both our congregations are radically different from West End UMC in the same city. All claim a common thread of tradition, but each congregation maintains a difference set of practices which reflects a different set of values, which makes each entity unique. I would argue that the none of the approaches of any of these congregations is “wrong”… they simply are what they are, as people engage in practices that affirm those identities.
However, while each church is different and unique, they maintain a unity of identity through the common practices that have been part of churches throughout the centuries. All three congregations have different worship styles, but they all place a premium on worship. The language used in prayer probably differs from the high church environment of West End to the common farm folks of Antioch, but all believe in the power of prayer. These “traditional” practices are what makes a church a church and not a social agency or a community club. To ignore them or minimize their importance and power is to fail to recognize the centrality of these practices in defining who we are.
My fear in our new initiatives is that the conversations regarding theological and “practical” identity were never heard. Rather, these approaches to marketing were driven less by an understanding of faith and more by analysis of the marketplace and through feedback from focus groups. This analysis is important, but as Bordieu says at the end of Frank’s writing, most folks have little clue of the power of practices to create a way of life in their lives. Thus we find ourselves in danger of ignoring or minimizing the practices of faith that represent the core of who we are in a false belief that all practices are created equal.
