Spent the weekend at New England Folk Festival. Tired, and all sung out. Will write tomorrow on several workshops of interest to readers of this blog, including: easy four-part gospel, new rounds, northern tradition shape note hymns. More soon….
Category Archives: Engaging worship
Spare ribs, fried rice
Commenter Dwight offers these alternate words to the tune of “Spirit of Life”:
Spare ribs, fried rice, warm pot of tea,
Moo goo gai pan, crispy noodles dipped in duck sauce.
Hoisin chicken, wings — hot, sticky,
Chopsticks in hand, giving fingers tiny splinters.
Shoots of bamboo, fortune cookie,
Spare ribs, fried rice, pot of tea, pot of tea.
The words may seem a little choppy if you just read them, but sing them out loud and you’ll see that they fit the tune quite well. I shall sing this as a grace next time my dad and I partake of the all-you-can-eat buffet at our favorite Chinese restaurant. Thank you, Dwight.
Jazzing it up
During the workshop I was co-leading on Friday and Saturday, someone asked if I knew guitar chords to play along with “Spirit of Life,” the Carolyn McDade song that so many Unitarian Universalists are in love with. After ranting about how much I dislike that song because of its boring harmonic structure and banal melody, I finally admitted that I did not know of any good chords to play along with the song.
But that question kept bothering the back of my mind, and so tonight I went up to the church to borrow a piano and see if I could come up with pleasing chords. I looked at the piano arrangement in the current Unitarian Universalist hymnal, but it’s the kind of arrangement that begets a dirge-like tempo and breathy-voiced singing. So I looked just at the melody, which consists of three eight-measure sections, and I decided each eight-measure section could take the same basic chord progression: C Dm G7 Am C Dm G7 C (or I IIm V7 VIm I IIm V7 I) — a pleasantly folk-y but still boring harmonic structure.
But then I got to thinking: Maybe if you jazzed up those chords a little, you could create a little more movement in the song. Like this —
C9 Dm7 G7 CM7 Am7 Dm9 Gm9 FM7
C7 Dm7 G7 C7b9 Am7 Dm9 Gm9 FM7
C9 Dm7 G7 C7b9 A7 Dm7 Gm7 CM7
— played with a Charleston rhythm (1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &) [progression modified slightly 4/17].
Well, it’s better, but I haven’t got it quite right (although it does fall nicely on the guitar fingerboard). Maybe someone who is a much better musician than I can come up with a chord progression that makes this song sound good. Or maybe it’s a fatally flawed song that can will always sound dreary. Your comments and ideas, as always, are appreciated.
Basketball hoops, puzzles, and the liberal church
It happened entirely by chance, but by far the best thing I did in my twelve years as a religious educator was something I did at the Unitarian Universalist church in Lexington center, Massachusetts. At some point, I noticed there were lots of rabid sports fans in that church. I’m not a sports fan, so at first I just ignored the talk about football, baseball, basketball, soccer, blah blah blah — but talk about sports pervaded all aspects of church life, from the Sunday school to the youth group to adult committee meetings and social hour, and it finally sunk in to my thick head that sports was central to the lives of about half the church members.
So I got approval to install a basketball hoop. Kids from kindergarten up through high school started to play Horse after church was over. Adults didn’t play, but adult sports fans watched the kids playing. One young person, someone who had been something of a troublemaker, said to me, “Finally we have some sports at this church,” and then sighed with a mixture of pleasure and relief.
Why was this one of the best things I ever did? Because by getting a basketball hoop installed, I acknowledged that religion is a matter for the whole person. If you’re into sports, or if you’re simply an active person, having to sit through a typical worship service at a liberal church means having to deny the bodily-kinesthetic intelligence with which you are blessed. I speak from experience — I am not particularly good at sitting still, and when I am not leading worship I try to sit in the very back of the church because I know I am going to have to fidget and move around.
Psychologist Howard Gardner has developed a theory of multiple intelligences. Gardner claims that we human beings possess at least eight different, including linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist intelligences. Whether or not you accept Gardner’s theory as valid, it does offer a useful description of the kinds of knowing that we human beings can do; and helps us understand that each person has a unique constellation of strengths and weaknesses among these types of knowing.
But most liberal religious worship services that I have had to sit through focus on the linguistic, musical, and intrapersonal (i.e., internally reflective) intelligences — and that’s about all. If you stay for social hour, you might get to exercise your interpersonal intelligence. If the church is a pretty building, you might get to exercise your spatial intelligence.
Most liberal churches pretty much ignore those of us with strengths in bodily-kinesthetic and logical-mathematical intelligences. Sure, maybe you get to stand up once in a while to sing a hymn. Yes, maybe the minister will offer an interesting logical argument once in a while (but given current homiletic trends, that’s increasingly rare). But that’s about it.
So that’s why we need basketball hoops at church (although some of us with bodily-kinesthetic needs would prefer just to work around the building, but you get my point). And, come to think of it, that’s why we need puzzles at church (personally, I would be much happier sitting through a typical Unitarian Universalist worship service if the order of service had a really good puzzle in it). Religion should engage the whole person, not just bits and pieces of the person. With that in mind, although I can’t install a basketball hoop in this blog, I think maybe I will plan another puzzle….
Emergence in Chicago
Two posts about the same worship service at Micah’s Porch, a Unitarian Universalist emerging church/ mission in Chicago:
In a comment on ck’s blog, I noted that this sound not unlike what Rev. Hank Peirce was doing in the 1990’s with his punk rock worship services, held at a club in the Boston area. Except that Hank wasn’t “preparing to launch a spiritually progressive church,” he was just holding worship service — oh, and the Ramones are not U2.
No assumptions
Thinking about UU Emergence (an awkward term, but there it is) means thinking about what will draw emerging generations to our churches. I remember when I was a 20-something attending a UU church, many of the cultural references in sermons had no emotional resonance for me: I didn’t get why the Korean War was fought, I didn’t remember the day JFK was shot, etc. Fast forward two decades: now I read Beloit College’s very useful Mindset List, which attempts to help us older folks understand the worldview of this year’s 18-year-olds:
Beloit College’s Mindset List® for the Class of 2011:
Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead…. [etc….]
Beloit’s list is a little tame. Over on the blog Charlie’s Diary, Charles Stross and commenters offer their own additions to the Beloit College list, often from a U.K. perspective:
Nobody they know expects to ever hold a job for more than three years.
Homosexuality has always been legal. Abortion has always been legal….
Nobody they know who is under 36 and not already a home-owner expects to ever be rich enough to buy a house….
Not that preachers can’t make references to Watergate and Sid Vicious, it’s just that we can’t assume that anyone will know what we’re talking about. Maybe that’s a more general issue with postmodern culture: there are fewer things we can assume that everyone knows….
Socialist sermons
Since 1992, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Standford University has slowly been issuing The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., a multi-volume series of King’s writings; new volumes come out as they get the funding for research, editing, and publication. The most recent volume, published in January, 2007, collects King’s sermons. In an article titled “The Prophet Reconsidered: 40 years after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., new studies emphasize his economic and social philosophy,” Christopher Phelps reports that King’s sermons are far more leftist than you might think:
The most recent volume [Vol. VI of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.] comprises King’s sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King’s immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled “Will Capitalism Survive?” King held that “capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide “whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe.” He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta’s gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (“There is still hope for the future … ,” she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”
This is a very different MLK than we get in the popular media these days! More about the book, including how to purchase for approx. US$40. Thanks to Fred for sending me the January 18, 2008, article on King.
UU Emergence overview
Here’s a brief excerpt from the sermon I preached last night at our 300th anniversary bash. In remarking on the many changes our congregation has seen over the years, I gave a brief overview of how we’re incorporating Emergent Church theories and techniques into our worship services. After the service, a 20 year old man told me he liked these Emergent Church ideas, and that they express the needs of his generation (at least, as he experiences those needs). Based on his response, I thought it might be worth sharing this excerpt here.
Over the past two years, the Religious Services Committee and I have been experimenting with new ways of conducting worship services. In initiating these changes, I had been inspired by the innovations of the Emergent Church movement.
The Emergent Church movement started when a number of evangelical Christians realized that an entire generation of Americans, Generation X, was drifting away from church. The majority of Gen-Xers were steeped in a postmodern mindset that questioned authority; questioned absolutes and demanded multiple points of view; was more interested in aesthetics than ontology; and loved the feeling of ancient and medieval religious forms. And so the Emergent Church movement created worship services that questioned authority by bringing the preacher out of the unassailable pulpit and down on the floor among the congregation; included many voices in the worship service, not just the preacher’s voice, to present more than one point of view; emphasized the arts and new media rather than systematic theology; and brought the feel of ancient and medieval religion into their services. And because the Emergent Church movement knew that Gen-Xers did not grow up in churches, they explained every element of the worship service.
I had been inspired by this Emergent Church movement, and the Religious Services Committee and I started using some their ideas in our worship services. We brought the minister out of the pulpit for parts of the service. We began using worship associates, so you’d hear more than just one voice. We’re working on including more arts in worship: poetry, and fabric arts, and lighting up our Tiffany mosaic, and putting art on the cover of the order of service. Fortunately, we already have this neo-Gothic building, so we already have that medieval feeling. And we have begun explaining every element of the worship service.
None of this has changed the eternal and permanent truths of religion; indeed, all these changes in our worship service are evanescent and impermanent, and will be swept away by future changes. But in the mean time, we have begun to attract people in their 20’s and 30’s to our worship services….
Intergenerational installation services?
Recently, someone asked how to have child-friendly installation services for new ministers. There’s no one answer to this question, but drawing on the dozen years I spent in religious education, I offered some ideas on how it might be done — and I thought I’d share those ideas here, especially because some of my readers might have even better ideas on how it might be done.
Here are some of my ideas on how to create an intergenerational installation service….
(1) 60 minutes tops First and foremost, someone has to keep the installation service to 60 minutes, tops. This is absolutely the hardest thing to do — installation services have a tendency to go on and on, often lasting for 90 or 120 minutes, which is too long for many young children. In my experience, you can limit an installation service to 60 minutes if the minister being installed and/or the installation committee tell each participant exactly how many minute the participant will be allowed to speak. (Scroll all the way down to find a sample schedule, from my own installation service in 2005.)
If it is impossible to limit the service to 60 minutes, and if there is unwillingness to select at least a few speakers who are known for being able to relate to children, then in my opinion it is best to arrange for the children to leave partway through the service and go off to other activities.
(2) Kid’s order of service I often try to create a Kid’s Order of Service for intergenerational services. A Kid’s Order of Service has puzzles and games and coloring pages, often with a religious theme. I like to give out the Kid’s Order of Service with a box of crayons (the cheapo boxes with 8 crayons are fine), along with a couple of colorful pipe cleaners. The kids like to get this packet of goodies, and it helps makes them feel welcome in the service.
A sample Kid’s Order of Service might have the following:
- A page with the order of service in large type, with simple explanations of each item. (aimed at about age 9-11)
- Two or three coloring pages using copyright-free material. I have used Beatrix Potter illustrations (she was a Unitarian), designs based on Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass (he was a Unitarian), and pictures by members of the congregation. (aimed at younger children)
- Two word search puzzles, one easy and one more difficult, with Unitarian Universalist theme — I often use the Puzzlemaker Web site to generate the puzzle for me. (aimed at 8 and up)
- Three or four mazes, ranging from easy to hard, and I might place a flaming chalice graphic or graphic of our church at the end of the maze — again, the Puzzlemaker Web site will generate mazes. (aimed at 6 and up)
- A copyright-free story on a religious theme, such as a fable, or a story from Ellen Babbit’s book of Jataka tales (aimed at 9 and up)
- Other pages of activities to total a dozen or more pages.
(3) Let parents know it’s OK to bring kids Of critical importance is selling the parents on the whole idea. They need to be assured that an intergenerational service is good for the kids. Parents should be reassured that it’s OK to bring quiet toys for children to play with during the service. Also, be sure to let them know that there will be childcare available in case older kids melt down. If possible, have a “cry room,” a nearby room where parents can take fussy babies and toddlers, and where they can hear an audio feed of the service.
It really helps if the minister also encourages parents and children to attend together!
(4) In case kids make noise… It’s important to prime several of the speakers to be ready in case a young child or baby vocalizes during the service. Have speakers primed to say something like, “It is wonderful to have children in the service to make us aware of the future of this church,” or “The sound of babies vocalizing in the service brings home to us the importance of future generations,” or the like.
(5) Minister’s commitment Finally, I can’t emphasize enough that the minister being installed has to be committed to an intergenerational service. For my installation in New Bedford, I let everyone know that I was fully committed to intergenerational community, and I have to acknowledge that I got a certain amount of criticism for inviting children in my installation — therefore I wouldn’t blame any minister who decides not to do an intergenerational installation!
Those are my ideas — what can you add from your own experience?