Celebrating Lay Leadership of Liturgy

In just over a week's time I have to give a workshop on the title of this post. I think an important question to guide my preparation is 'What can we do to ensure there is something to celebrate?' The answer involves developing, nurturing, training, honouring, and trusting lay leaders of our worship. My surprise in the church as I move around parishes is how little there seems to be to celebrate. I think there are less lay leaders of worship than there used to be (say) 10 years ago. Yet there is something to celebrate because the lay leaders I sit under are doing a great job.

My mind is often exercised by the question why there are less leaders. There are some answers around the busyness of people, the difficulty of getting people to commit to certain responsible tasks, let alone to sign up to extensive training. But I do wonder if a key for transforming the situation is a renewed vision among clergy for developing lay leadership.

Will keep you posted.

Text and sub-text

Many messages, perhaps every message consists of more than one message. There is the message (text) and an associated message (sub-text). A simple example could be a child saying, 'Mummy, I want a hug' with the sub-text being 'Its windy outside and I feel a little bit frightened.' A more complex example could be a TV programme of the mid-evening variety, say set in a hospital or family business, which sets out to explore an issue, say, abortion (text) but the sub-text is, say, the acceptability of abortion or the right of a woman to choose without restraint of moral or family concerns.

When we preach its worth thinking about the sub-texts of our messages. Both thinking about sub-text(s) we intend to be communicated and which are good and holy and worthy things to say, and about sub-text(s) we do not actually want to communicate.

We might set out to preach about God's expectation that Christians forgive each other. Along the way we provide illustrations which encourage our hearers to forgive one another with the (good and holy and worthy) sub-text being the message that a forgiving community is likely to be an attractive community for the gospel as people see how we love one another. But we might also take care because we realise that if we tell story X we will be giving a reasonably obvious sub-text about situation Y where it is well known to the congregation that some unfinished relational business needs to be conducted!

Sometimes we might bring the sub-text right out into the open. (Perhaps it is no longer a sub-text after that)! Our church might be enmeshed in a large building project which is a little bit controversial. We are going to preach on Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem. So right at the beginning we acknowledge the building project, acknowledge the differences of opinion, and then launch into Nehemiah. In this kind of case, not to mention the building project and its controversy could be to make members of the congregation feel that they are being subtley got at - that the message we were really bringing was not about Nehemiah but about the situation at our church. The problem with the sub-text then is it is likely to get people's backs up and they will fume way at the sub-text while the text - the message about Nehemiah sails over their heads!

Great construction

Yesterday I participated in a family service in an Anglican church ... do not try to guess where (unless you were actually at the service)!

Participated is a good word as the congregation not only sang songs and shared in communion but also enacted certain parts of a dramatic reading of the stilling of the storm, offered contributions to the intercessions, and exchanged the peace together.

All in all it was one of the loveliest and best constructed services I have been to for a long time. It had a theme and that theme informed each part of the service (with links being made, e.g. to a particular choice of song, being well explained).

It was a family service and I expect such services to (a) be concise to the hour (it was), and (b) be crisp in communication of message(s) (it was, with the sermon being particularly crisp and to the point).

And there was an excellent morning tea to follow - proper cakes and thick sandwiches!

Oh, and another point: the sound system worked well. How many services suffer from poor sound?! (Incidentally, its nearly always to do with the person responsible for the sound and not with the equipment).

The church was warm too.

Marvellous.

Good questions

The Ship of Fools website runs a Mystery Worshiper survey. Included in it are two great questions (here with answers from a visit to a church in Sydney):

Which part of the service was like being in heaven?
The choir was very well coordinated and in complete harmony. One of the best choral performances of Byrd's "Mass for Four Voices" I've heard.

And which part was like being in... er... the other place?
The deacon's painfully slow and soft chanting of the Gospel, which at times was completely out of tune. And communion was so rushed that the chalice was presented before one had a chance to consume the host.

Now, what if we used the questions to prepare our services and our sermons? That is, how can we make as much as possible like being in heaven and as little as possible like being, er, elsewhere!?

Hard times coming

Have been away for a few days (wonderful to be away, wonderful places visited, wonderful people met), so some time to reflect on all sorts of things.

A day does not go by now when we are not reminded about rising fuel prices (not all bad if it makes oil last a little longer), rising house prices / costs of mortgages and rents, and, the daddy of them all, rising food prices.

I am not much of an expert in world history but I think food shortages have played a role in the causation of wars.

Are we heading for another world war? We have antagonism between cultures, civilisations, and world religions. We have aspirations that cannot be met. We have a dire shortage of great political leaders. And we have the prospect of a permanent shortage of food or lack of access to food.

What does a preacher do in this situation? In the Bible we find models in which the preacher-prophet is called to be a watchman, calling God's people to face the facts of imminent catastrophe. We also find encouragement to preach messages of hope in the face of realised or prospective disaster.

Cliches about living in interesting times come to mind!

Constructing outstanding worship services

Tonight the Crusaders lost their first game of the Super 14 rugby series. They had been on a winning streak but they met a better team and they made more mistakes than the other team. They could not build a winning game from the the blocks of rugby (gaining the ball, moving the ball forward, distributing the ball, retaining the ball at the breakdown, etc). I mention this in case any reader think I am obsessed with constructing outstanding worship and nothing else ... I could talk about how to win a game of cricket, and an election too. But you probably do not want to hear from a non-expert.

Not that I am an expert at liturgy, but I know a thing or two. In particular, like you, I know what I like when I am the participant rather than the leader. In my present role I participate in more worship services than I lead. From that vantage point I see construction ... and deconstruction of worship services. (By deconstruction I am thinking of the things we do which distract us from meeting with God ... a late start for instance ... too much of one aspect ... screeches from the sound system, etc). Along the way I am developing some ideas about how to construct outstanding worship services.

Here is one. Work on all aspects of the church's life. Is great worship possible when harmonious fellowship is lacking? If silly things are happening Monday to Saturday and people are grumbling, ought we not to sort out the silly things and transform the grumbling before we think that Sunday's worship service will aspire to much. I have experienced some (considerable) dissatisfaction when the cheery lead from the front of church makes things to be rosy when I darn well know they are not!

Here is another. Deconstruct a great service and work out what made it a great service. One case in point is the service I grow to appreciate more and more as the years roll by, "page 404" in the (red) Anglican prayer book of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia. This is one of three eucharistic services. It is an excellent blend of ancient liturgical traditions (e.g. the Kyries, Gloria, Creed), Anglican peculiarities (does any other tradition pay as much attention to the Confession as we do?), and modern touches (such as the 'Open the Gate of Glory' post communion prayer), spread in perfect balance of the Ministry of the Word and the Ministry of the Sacrament. This service is readily deconstructed into its constituent parts and ready answers come to hand when we ask 'why is this there?'

More to come!

Be honest about the source of your sermon

Here is an interesting point about sermons!

You struggle for suitable material to work up into your sermon. A little searching on Google and, hey presto, here is just what you need. Actually it is a complete sermon saying what you want to say. A little bit of editing here and there to excise stories relevant to far away and incorporate tales readily understood by your congregation. Just the ticket.

But after the service people come up to you. 'Excellent sermon!' ... 'Well, done!! That's the best I have heard from you.' Whoops, what are you going to say? 'Actually it was really a sermon given by Billy Graham/John Stott/Joyce Meyer.' Or, are you going to smile and say nothing, confused as to what people would really think of you if they knew how little of your sermon was original to yourself?

My first piece of advice is to be a little bit smart. If you can source a sermon off the internet then your hearers can do a little googling themselves and check their hunch that you have pinched another's work. The smart thing to do is to acknowledge your source, to share the credit with the one to whom it is due!

Here is my suggestion. Somewhere in the sermon - but not in the first sentence - acknowledge your debt. 'In working through this morning's passage I am going to use some powerful reflections developed by X' or 'Here are the three main points in the passage according to Y' or 'I am grateful to Z for his insights into the passage, insights which I feel strongly we should take on board here at St M's today'.

And when folk come up afterwards with their compliments, say something like this in response, 'Thanks, I was really helped by a sermon by N which I read in preparation for this morning.'

The use of other people's sermons is an ancient custom. The problem is not the use of sermons prepared by another but the honesty of the preacher. To receive credit for work which is not yours is - not beating about the bush - dishonest. The internet makes it easier than ever before to locate a pre-prepared sermon apt for this coming Sunday's needs. But the issue of honesty needs addressing.

I am hearing too many unattributed sermons these days. Its time to start proper attribution to the elves of internet sermons!