worship – Page 3 – wonderful exchange

come and see

7 October, 20097 October, 2009 wonderfulexchange4 Comments

The Sunday before last, we celebrated Harvest. All the usual chaos of an all-age service, with the added challenge of my using the West facing altar for the first time. Or rather: the West facing credence table. The card-table altar we have scares me: it rocks and shakes, and is too wide for the space it is meant to go in. The credence table is of course too small — both for balancing all the necessary bits, and for looking wholly dignified; but it is the best we can do for now.

… and the advantage is, it leaves lots of room for gathering around.

Well, that’s an exaggeration. The geography of St Mary’s is difficult: long and narrow all the way, with unhelpfully spaced steps at the crossing and a bottle neck at the choir stalls. There is never lots of space for gathering. But the too-small credence-table-altar offers the best bet.

At Harvest, somewhat on a whim, I invited the children to gather round so that they could see. It was mostly the 8-12 year old girls who came. I hadn’t thought it through properly, and I didn’t have words for them, so I juggled as best I could between presiding and helping them follow along, probably confusing everyone slightly.

This past Sunday, I hadn’t any particular plans for the young church. But as it happened, they arrived fractionally later than usual, and were greeted by me saying ‘is that the Young Church entering? Oh good. We’ll just wait till everyone’s here to start the eucharistic prayer. Do come to the front…’ and so on.

But when they got to their usual pews at the front, they didn’t stop. The girls asked if they could stand with me again — and of course I said yes.

I urge any priest who is thinking about children in worship to try this. It’s a revelation.

How can they join in, after all, when they spend the first half of the prayer trying to find where they are in the bookie? (assuming they even have a bookie, and even if it’s a special order of service for the day). Do they know they prayers that everyone says? And is there a hope in any-warm-place-of-your-choosing that they will be able to sing the tricky choral Sanctus that even the choir seem to struggle with sometimes?

I think not.

So I am beginning to rethink this whole thing.

They need word sheets of their own, easy print, and with no extraneous words. Things that say: ‘watch the priest, and listen for the words ‘this is my body… this is my blood… do this in remembrance of me’, then join in: ‘we now obey…’ There will be pictures, of course. And prizes for those who memorize the prayers (I’m considering a fierce competition here: which group will be able to go ‘off book’ first: the adults or the kids?)

Do you sense a flurry of gold stars?

For a while now, we’ve been talking about inviting adults (2 at a time) to join Young Church for a day to see what it’s like. At a ministry team meeting the other night, someone helpfully suggested it could work both ways: adults could invite Young Church members to stay with them in church — and then help them through the experience.

Proximity matters.

I thought I knew what the barriers were to young people feeling involved, but I was forgetting some very basic things.

And now, I have adults wanting in on the game: ‘can we stand up there and watch too?’

Oh yes.

Yes of course.

Now, does anyone have a good source of hungry wood worm for the pews?

rituals

30 July, 2009 wonderfulexchange21 Comments

There I sat, thinking ‘blog post, blog post… there must be something to say that I can say… blog post…’ wondering if the blogging bit of my brain is still in a moving box somewhere.

Various distractions. The knowledge that I didn’t want this to take to long as it’s a busy day… General feeling of being lost, and then it happened.

I felt myself do it. Deep breath, and start saying the Lord’s Prayer.

For years, I’ve used the Lord’s Prayer as a way to gain focus. I realise that this might be a dubious use of the Lords prayer, but it works. If I need to re-centre, find stable ground: deep breath, ‘Our Father…’

We need rituals like this.

On Saturday, I offered coffee at the rectory to anyone who wanted to get together to talk about particular themes that had come up in the sermon the week before, or about anything we’d been doing in worship in July. At some point, we got to talking about what happens before the service: how we prepare for worship, and it was the classic dilemma. Greeting people and hearing how they are is an important part of gathering. But if that goes on till the very second that the priest says ‘Grace and Peace to you’, then we’ve missed a stage. Most of us need a buffer zone between conversation and prayer — a way to shift gears so that we are able to be as present to God as we are to each other.

deep breath — Our Father…

I use it then too. Now, I’m the sort of person who likes a pretty big buffer zone. On those rare occasions when I simply ‘go to church’, I go almost ridiculously early. I go when few are gathered, as a way of getting real silence, and I begin with deep breath… Lord’s prayer. After that, come a whole range of things: a few specific prayers about the reality of that day; a naming of my restlessness or the shape of tensions, a naming of the things I hope and desire and resolve; and then a conscious drop into silence.

After that I resurface, look around, read the pew sheet, start deliberately noticing the people around me who (by now) have begun to arrive. By then I don’t mind if they say good morning, because I am already far enough ‘in’ that I can regain focus when I need to.

But even then there will come a time — a minute or two before the service — when I take off my glasses, close my eyes, and settle into anticipation.

Some of the people there on Saturday acknowledged how difficult it is to make space for both greeting/gathering and focusing. And I suspect each one of us has to find — and shape — our own way of doing this.

But what it a blog, if not a resource for sharing?

How do you handle that space between walking through the church door, and the first spoken words of the liturgy? What works for you?

One of the things I’m working on quite consciously right now is how we balance the needs of different personality types (as well as age groups) in worship, so I’m hoping all of you energetic extroverts there (Mother Ruth?) will also tell me if I’m missing the point, and you need to be able to talk right up to the very end.