Over the last few months, our conversations among our friends called to Pittsburgh have taken a turn toward what we might call "back to basics." We decided to turn our conversation toward three things that will undergird everything we do as a faith community in urban Pittsburgh. Those things are: Worship, Prayer, Stewardship.
We start with Worship and the Missional-orientation of Worship. One of the things I kind of like about the whole "Missional" conversation (as well as the Emerging Church conversation lo, those many moons ago) is the perspective that has taken root regarding worship. The missional church conversation isn't obsessed with style and yet there is an expansiveness, maybe inherited from the Emerging conversation, with a simplicity that endeavours toward a worshipful experience in a "worship gathering." I think most significantly, the missional/incarnational orientation is interested in context and culture and while renewal/redemption is a key aspect, it's welcoming and not all about themselves. Thus, a missional-orientation begins with a reversing a common phrase: the church doesn't have a mission, the Mission of God has a church, right? Of course, as we've seen this changes our perspective on many things, and worship is probably a key one.
So: where would being missionally incarnational orient us - posture us - in terms of worship?
I have several specific suggestions in terms of trajectories to explore and discover, but I want to start with a bigger perspective.
First, the missional orientation seems to assume a public context for the Missio Dei, and so that goes for worship as well. In the churches with which most of us have experienced and been a part of, the primary context is private. Worship many times is done (and thus modeled) and witnessed as a part of some kind of inward aspect of the church. There's nothing particularly wrong with this sort of trajectory until it runs into individualist worship experience momentum and consumer critique. Yet I think worship in a missional orientation would assume a much broader landscape. It would worship in the presence of and for the sake of the world because we are joining God's Mission in and for the world. There is a "priesthood of the believer"-aspect to this that Mark Love has been really helping me explore and I want to really get into that a few posts from now.
But I'm wrestling with how exactly missional worship would integrate all of life, and thus perhaps a connecting point between God and us and the world (again, more on that in the next few posts). Also, in keeping with this integrating-impulse and what The Tangible Kingdom significantly invested in: missional worship would welcome the stranger, the sojourner. This is also about the Presence of God-factor, which undergirds all of life as worship, with God, His People and the world set for redemption. The Presence-factor oriented missionally, seems to be involved in all three, and not to the exclusion of any one.
But what does that look like? For today, perhaps this takes us along three distinct trajectories:
- Service: This expansive trajectory has to do with life as an on-going act of worship, which would include seeking justice as an act of worship and the Romans 12 issues of "being a living sacrifice" as we live our lives...this is our spiritual act of worship.
- Hospitality: Maybe if we can see hospitality as something more than just the "welcome person" at the doors of a Sunday gathering or the person making coffee? If so, we might see that hospitality would include what Jesus did so much of with strangers and sojourners: table-fellowship as a center of worship experience. This is the place of God's welcome. At weekly, monthly and seasonal parties in ancient Israel (Sabbath meals, harvest festivals, etc.) it was a place to welcome the marginalized, and be inclusive of the poor, the widow, the orphan, the priest. It should be a place where faith, hope, and love are put on public display, right?
- Creativity: some of the more immediate questions regarding worship, intersecting the really significant creation of space/place and aesthetics in a fuller worship experience of God beyond (but astill including) corporate music: creating space for creativity: so poetry, painting, dancing, etc., that instead of always being "performance art" might look a bit more like a jam session.
So questions to start us off: What do you think about some of the actual practices that this orientation suggests so far: worship gathering with expansive and inclusive art/music (something like what our friends Bill and Ashley Hoard have hosted at home in the past that had an invitational and inclusive nature and this sharing nature about the gathering. This - to me - resonated with what I hear as the organic nature of a gathering (by no means the only way to do it, of course) in 1 Corinthians 14 - where when such a gathering takes place, each one has a song or inspired word or something they have learned or a testimony of God's action in their lives or lives of their friends, etc.; and what can we imagine regarding serving the vulnerable as an act of worship; and what about dinner-parties/house parties/neighborhood block parties are public acts of worship? What are other concrete practices and initiatives that we can be intentional about as a community? Are there other large, organizing impulses and practices for worship that inform our incarnational, missional and relational orientation?
[to be continued...]
