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I’ll be at #churchtechcamp today at Fuller Seminary — it is "a localized unconference for people of faith to gather and share their own best practices and "in the field" insights."  Looking forward to meeting all the people and hearing what they have to say…

I made the mistake of watching pedagogical rock star Michael Wesch’s video a couple weeks back. It got me thinking about transforming one of my fall classes more fully into Web 2.0. I began tinkering with my Church in Mission course (with help) — it is a course I teach once a year to 60 MA students at Fuller Seminary. After talking with friends, I decided to create a couple of new things in the course this year, both in terms of web platform and content.

Web Platform:
Instead of a blog for the home page, students will access the class on a wetpaint wiki. This allows them to add to and change class resources easily. Students may upload course notes for each lecture up to the wiki (and therefore collaborate on the class notes). Students will also use netvibes to track their twitter feeds, wiki changes, diigo bookmarks, and youtube videos for class communication and research. Student group projects will include creating and maintaining a wiki and a youtube video.

On the content side:
I’ve changed the course to connect the disciplines of ecclesiology, missiology, postcolonial studies, and race/ethnic studies. In the class, student groups will reflect on the historical and contemporary church experience for particular ethnic groups in the US or overseas (along denominational or regional lines), and create group wikis and youtube videos that explore how the following postcolonial themes manifest in that particular tradition: diaspora, identity, race, cultural difference, hybridity, gender, sexuality, feminism, postmodernism, nationalism, globalization, and empire. Students will collect and analyze the stories of these communities and explore how we might be the “sent” people of God in the midst of these powers.

The class starts next week and runs for ten weeks — I’ll give an update as the quarter progresses. I made changes to my other fall class — I’ll write that up in the next few days.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been part of a six member team (and now seven) re-thinking worship at an elderly congregation. One of our insights came to us as we shared about our hopes for worship. “How do we connect our music to the young people?” was one of the questions asked. We had maybe ten junior high and high school youth, and they pretty much checked out during the whole service. They came because their parents were there. It tended to be one of those things they needed to endure. Our worship group naturally wanted to see them involved.

But asking what kind of music should we play asks the wrong question. It has no possible answer… because our churches consist of many age groups and many cultures (not to mention church cultures), and trying to be relevant to each is impossible. It would leave everyone frustrated, as many blended worship gatherings do. The same goes for preaching the relevant sermon, playing the right video clip, or dressing up the announcements. Trying to reach the the audience with the right cultural element when our congregations today share so little of the same culture is an exercise in futility.

Instead of trying to create worship a service for them, in what we perceive to be their culture, the right question to ask is how do we create a space for them to express their own worship to God. We don’t need to figure out how to do it to them, if they are doing it for themselves! We create a venue for participation rather than produce a show for them. They are the new creators, the ones we want to see engage at deeper levels. We do it together.

The relevancy issue takes care of itself if people create worship for themselves. In planning for worship, we don’t need to strategize every aspect of the service, spend money on demographics, take polls on felt needs, blah, blah, blah. What our congregations really need are deep encounters with God in worship. They experience God when they become active co-producers of worship. Our role as worship facilitators is to create that space for them and with them.

Result? At this particular congregation, the youth now look forward to ‘family sunday’ – it energizes them, stirs them up, and connects their faith to their everyday reality. It is the one service a month they do not want to miss and they do not soon forget. Not just with the youth, but with the whole church, we became relevant when we gave up on relevance.

I always get questions from students — how do you transform worship in a
church that has a very fixed format or doesn’t really want to change?
My answer is – transform whatever and wherever you can — push at the edges, and avoid messing with the sacred
cows. Where is there permission to start something truly alternative — in the youth group, the Sunday night service, or in a small group? You never know, If you create something really meaningful, it may, like a
virus, spread throughout the system…and if it doesn’t, at least you created something compelling for the participants of that group.

For the last seven months, I’ve been part of a five-member team
rethinking worship in a elderly 100-year old Presbyterian congregation with 75-100 attendees every week.
About half the congregation is over 70, and the other half are scattered
amongst the younger generations. Our elderly component are Japanese who
lived through the internment, the rest of the congregation is mixed,
consisting of Asians, Whites, and African-Americans.

Where did we start? First, we got a team in place. On the team were three people who
knew the culture of the church at a deep level — one staff member, and
two elders. Another member is a former worship pastor of another church, and I was the fifth. A sixth, a new Fuller student, just recently joined us. For us, it was essential to have church insiders, who desired change, as part of the group. Their insights helped us see where we could push and where we needed to
pull back. It was a real dance back and forth. "Yes, we can do that, no, that is too much."

Turning the regular Sunday service upside
down was never a real option. But — what we did have on the calendar was a vaguely understood, ill-defined Sunday each month, ‘Family Sunday’. It was a time where the whole church was to worship together (no
Sunday school). It was also understood that somehow the youth would be more involved on that Sunday. However, it really was not utilized at all. Maybe a little less formal, but that was it. Family Sunday would be our means for transforming worship.

Beginning with the five of us, we started to meet two hours each week to talk about worship. What were our dreams? What did we like about worship, and what didn’t we like? We were in no hurry to begin an alternative service, so we met weekly until we could share a similar vision of where we wanted to go. We were not on the same page, but we wanted to learn from one another. Different desires were expressed – more kid-friendly worship materials, more connecting with the youth – more involvement with the old people.. Some were happy with a fixed liturgy and another wanted to abandon it. But we were flexible to hear from the others and we were all transformed in the process.

This process of talking, thinking, and imagining took us about six weeks — before we could even begin creating the first service. We became one in the process — and in all our brainstorming we received one direction from these early meetings — one driving question that would influence every aspect of our worship planning from there on out. Our question: how might we create spaces for deep levels of participation within every aspect of the worship service?

That question created quite an adventure for us and for the church. I’ll talk about what that looked like in a subsequent post…