"Transformational Worship"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
December 7, 2008

Reading          Worship Design, excerpt – Rev. David Bumbaugh

Our reading this morning is by the Rev. David Bumbaugh, long-time UU minister and Professor of Ministry at Meadville Lombard Theological School.

”The central question for Unitarian Universalists is not, is it a worship service--a question which focuses on the definition of the event. The central question for Unitarian Universalists is to be found in the word service--not what are we doing, but why are we doing it--in service to whom or to what?

Worship is a public ritual response to that which has cast us into being, that which sustains us in being, that which has the power to transform us as we cannot transform ourselves, that which receives us back to itself when life has used us up. Worship aligns us with and places us in service to that reality--that sense of contingency and dependence which is species specific.

This understanding of worship is grounded in a deep acceptance of the contingent nature of our existence and the inescapable idiosyncrasy of our existence. But for the improbable coalescence of unnumbered events and circumstances, no one of us would exist. A single minute alteration in the interaction of unnumbered forces and events, would have drastically altered the trajectory of our personal existence. We are the children of chaos, improbable beings, expressions of an improbable universe, moving from an arbitrary past to an unpredictable future. Not just change, but transformation is our history and our destiny. Worship is designed to celebrate and embrace that great truth.”

Sermon           Transformative Worship  Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

I’m sure you can identify with the man who woke up one Sunday morning and turned over sleepily toward his partner and said, “I don’t feel like going to church this morning.  The services just don’t do anything for me.  We sing the same hymns over and over, the sermons are pedantic, and people there don’t really like me.”  His partner replied, “Aw, sweety, it’s not that bad.  It’s a good church, and besides, you have to go, you’re the minister!”

Well, I haven’t felt quite that badly about coming to church lately, but for a long time I have felt Unitarian Universalist worship often lacks something.  Some Sundays it’s just me, my head is not in the room, and no amount of wonderful music or fabulous preaching would reach me.  But at other services, there’s just something missing.  The participants can do their parts well, the message may be clearly stated, and still, I don’t feel my emotions have been engaged, that I heard or felt something that made a difference in my life.  As your minister, I don’t ever want our worship to feel that way to you, and I am always looking for ways to make our worship more compelling, relevant and worthwhile.

Worship that makes a difference in our lives, that helps bring about change in us as individuals and to our society, is central to our mission as a UU congregation and is why I am referring to it as “Transformative Worship.”  Transformative Worship is the primary spiritual practice of Unitarian Universalists.  What in the world do I mean by that?  Am I talking about some new kind of Pentecostalism or about drastically changing the style of service to which we are accustomed?  No, no drastic changes, not unless and until we agree on changes.  But I want to make our worship better able to reflect the powerful transformation the liberal church has made in my life and I know also in many of yours lives.  I want our “worship to move people toward lives of wholeness, service and joy.”
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As I mentioned in my Harbinger column last summer, in my ongoing quest for ideas on how to improve worship, I attended a workshop at General Assembly, and then I went looking for things we might use from different churches in the Cincinnati area.  I attended my wife Cece’s Episcopal Church of Our Savior and was impressed that the entire service was bi-lingual in Spanish and English which allowed them to really serve their community.  I went to Hyde Park Methodist Church’s “Contemporary” service in their redecorated upstairs chapel, a more intimate space than their sanctuary, and was moved by the music and extemporaneous preaching.  By far the most impressive service I attended was at The Vineyard with all their multi-media sounds and lights.  You really should go check out a service there sometime!

Before the service there was soothing music and images were projected on a huge video screen over the stage.  In the corner of the screen was a clock ticking down the minutes and seconds until the start of the service, and precisely on the hour the service began with a brief prayer.  Then the music leader asked everyone in the auditorium to stand for the first hymn, and we sang following the words on the large screens.  I didn’t know the song, and there was no musical score to follow, but it was easy to sing along and anyway, everyone seemed to know the song already.  After the opening hymn there was… another hymn. People were obviously getting into the music; some were swaying, others were holding their hands out or up.  After that, I was expecting to sit down and hear some announcements or something, but instead there was a third hymn, then a fourth, and… a fifth hymn.  We stood singing for 25 minutes all the while watching beautiful images on the video screens before we sat down and the youth minister came on to tell us about the exciting programs the teens were into.  Then there was a professional looking video with a voice over on the subject of Awe, the Vineyard topic for the entire month.

Then a man, a member of the X Generation by the look of the street clothes he had on, came out all alone and stood in the middle of the vast stage and began talking.  He was very personable, he showed no strong emotions, just stood there with his hands stuck in his pockets mostly.  He was humorous, and he told self-deprecating personal stories.  After just a few minutes, I liked him a lot!  On the overhead screens were projected images of awesome landscapes, and when he read scripture, the words were up there for all to read.  He talked for about 25 minutes about how different people dealt with making decisions; he gave us some very helpful insights.  Following him, “The Giving Tree” the book by Shel Silverstein, was projected on the screens with a voice over reading the story.  There were no children in the entire service, the story was meant to move adults, and it worked on me.  The service had gone over an hour at that point, but it wasn’t over.  The minister came back out for another ten minutes!  And this time he preached – he was much more animated when he talked about salvation.  The service ended with another brief prayer.

The Vineyard service epitomizes the style of worship popular in most of the evangelical megachurches and thousands of smaller ones.  It includes lots of Christian “praise music,” lots of preaching, high production values, and low demands on the congregation to engage theology.  This is called a “Seeker Service” one designed to be comfortable for people who are connected to Christianity through our culture or from a childhood church and who are looking for a generic Christian experience.  The music is similar to what you might hear on the drive home from work, and the video screens connect with our television mentality.  The thing that strikes me the most is how the sights and sounds and singing engages peoples senses, bringing both the body and the mind into the worship experience.  And it works – for millions of people in our country.

UUs like to pooh-pooh the evangelical movement, pointing out all the reasons they’d be bored with the message or uncomfortable with the arm waving during hymns.  Our movement used to be known for innovations in worship, but the changes that swept the country in the last two decades have mostly passed us by.  Now, I don’t think Northern Hills Fellowship is in any danger of becoming a megachurch or of embracing components of worship that would make us uncomfortable, but I do believe we should try to learn a thing or two that we can use from these successful churches, and specifically we should look for the things that make worship more effective at involving both people’s hearts and minds in a process of transformative growth.
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Now, I have a shelves of books about preaching and worship full of ideas we could try.  But we can’t just go add or change elements of our services because they make sense when we read about them or because they work for the church we visited last summer.  There is something that matters more than the content of a worship service, and that is how the worshiping community understands itself, the attitude the congregation brings to worship.  Why do you come to worship?  To hear stories of lives that have been changed? To be intellectually stimulated?  To have a spiritual experience?

This can be particularly difficult to discern in a UU congregation.  We have such a mix of backgrounds and theologies.  And asking UUs what we believe doesn’t really tell the whole story of how we would want to worship.  I have the survey done here in preparation for ministerial search, and it gives some clues, but it doesn’t make it clear to me what you might need to make worship better.  Most UUs haven’t studied worship or tried to form a concept of worship, they just know what works or doesn’t work for them when they experience it.
Even amongst UU ministers, people who create worship services all the time there are many worship theories. The Reverends Wayne Arnason and Kathleen Rolenz, husband and wife co-ministers of the Westshore UU Church near Cleveland, Ohio, visited many churches during their recent sabbatical looking for worship services that had the potential to be transformative. Here are some of the definitions of worship they collected.

“Rev. Ken Belden said that "worship is a public act of reaching into ourselves; ­it is a transformative act of deepening, and it is leading people to a place where they want to go." Rev. Laurel Hallman said that "worship is a communal ritual event with a covenanted community that both links to its past and allows for the elements of creative surprise." Rev. Dennis Hamilton did not see much difference between psychology and spirituality: "The minister's job is to help people be more engaged with life. We engage them with mysteries beyond words; mysteries that can only be engaged by music, metaphor, and symbol." Rev. Kendyl Gibbons warned us about the perils of seeking a common definition of worship. She said, "The purpose of worship is not to talk about the ineffable; the point is whether or not you can enact it. Enacting it may not require talking about it."

In these diverse responses lie both the promise of liberal religious worship, and the problem. Within our tradition, we are able to say: "Worship means praising, confessing, and discerning the word of God." We are able to say: "Worship is a private transformation done in the context of corporate ceremony and ritual." We are able to say: "Worship is when we hold up things of worth and value. It is our link to the past and a gateway to our future." We are able to say: "No matter what our definition of worship might be, we have an embodied experience of being in worship together, and that is what is most important."

All of these understandings have integrity within our tradition that honors the mystery of life and recognizes that what is invisible and essential to our lives can be made visible and manifest.”

Probably every one of the definitions we just heard struck a sympathetic chord with at least one member of the congregation.  So, how can I expect the congregation to agree on a theory of worship we can all get into?  What I and the worship committee and the Board of Trustees have to do is to learn more about what the congregation needs and to see that our worship reflects those things.  We will try new things in worship, listen to the feedback, and then try something else.  Obviously, this is an ongoing process, and today is just a beginning to it where I can tell you a little about where I’m coming from, give a little education on the theory of worship, and open a discussion that we will continue to have over the long term.
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We can’t cover all the elements of a worship service today, but let’s talk about music, for many the most moving part of worship.  In recognition of the importance of our musicians to our program, music director June Schlipf and I met with, Les Tacy, Phillip Burkhead and choir director Roger Doughty last week to talk about our musical future.  One consensus we reached in that meeting was we want more participation in music.  Participation can come in several forms: from more use of the wonderful musicians in the congregation to teaching songs from our new hymnal – when we get enough to use in services, to sitting meditatively with eyes closed during more reflective music.

Seminary professor Thomas Long writes, “The first mark of excellence in worship is a functional one.  [It is] good music, music  which empowers the congregation and gives the congregation a means to express the thoughts and feelings of their  worship.”   The key phrase in professor Long’s statement is their worship.  Music certainly sets a tone and mood during the service, but it’s main purpose is to bring people more fully into the worship experience.  And it is with congregational singing that we participate bodily, not just with our ears and minds, but also with our lungs and voices. So, we want the congregation to go ahead and let it loose when we sing, to exercise your lungs and engage the music with your emotions.  “The act of singing provides both a comfort and a challenge to our ever deepening involvement with the holy.”   And this is really what worship is about.  Worship is a moment when we are both in and out of time, when we feel the presence of something larger than ourself.
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Yesterday our Committee on Ministry, several of our Trustees and other congregational leaders participated in a workshop to learn more about the Appreciative Inquiry process we plan to use for envisioning the Beloved Community we desire for our fellowship.  It really was an invigorating experience for us, and we plan to involve the entire congregation in similar discussions in the next month or so.  We talked about our core values and how they might be recreated in the things we do at church.  One way we will do that is by incorporating them into our worship.

Our worship will affirm our central mission, val­ues, and covenants, and it will be rooted in our fellowship's history and in our Unitarian Universalist traditions.  We will find more ways to invite and include people at all ages and stages of life.  We will skillfully use the arts, particularly music and singing, to express the ineffable in ways that are accessible to our members.  We will use worship as a way of opening the heart to the presence of divinity in the world and in our lives and include silence and words that remind us of the mystery of life.  We will finds ways to recognize individual lives within the body of the com­munity, while holding the personal and the collective in dynamic tension.  And we will invite congregants to show generosity and to be of service to our wider community.

These are the ways we make our worship services a direct reflection of our congregation’s core values.  In worship we find connections between our inner selves and the awesome and often mysterious powers which create and support the web of existence.  Ann McCracken told me yesterday that she comes away from worship feeling “inspirited.”  She said she doesn’t always know exactly what does it, but it lifts her and gives her what she needs to go back into the world for another week.  May our worship inspirit you all in the same way.