It has been fashionable to decry cermonial garb; however, we might be a bit more alert to some simple wisdom enshrined in the tradition…

Enclothed cognition means that clothes can exert influence on the way the wearer feels, thinks, and behaves through the symbolic meaning associated with the clothes. Many pieces of clothing carry a symbolic meaning: For example, the robe of a judge signifies justice, an expensive suit signifies power, and a white lab coat signifies a scientific focus and attentiveness. Therefore, to the extent that a religious leader associates his or her symbolic garment with faith, dedication, and assuming a responsible leadership role in the religious community, the leader may indeed be more effective at carrying out his or her tasks and inspiring followers when wearing this kind of attire.

via How Important Might It Be for Religious Leaders to Wear Symbolic Garments? – Science and Religion Today.

I found this article helpful in identifying the genealogy of the Vineyard styles of service so popular in current Evangelical and Charismatic circles.

This order for church services grows out of historic “revivalism,” a movement that finds its primary roots in the awakenings of the early 19th century. Often, its “father” is deemed to be Charles Grandison Finney, who implemented “New Measures” for bringing about “revival” in church meetings.The basic revivalist meeting order for the service looks like this: The time of preparation is designed to “warm the heart,” primarily through singing. The sermon is the high point of the service and is designed to lead those in the congregation to a crisis of decision. The service concludes with an invitation to make a decision for Christ. This may be a decision to become a Christian or to dedicate one’s life to Christ in a fresh way.

I hadn’t quiet made that connection before. It enables us to ask the question, though, whether such an order is likely to be helpful for Christian formation in the longer term rather than crisis-based decision prompting (and does that have resonances for good or ill with advertising?). Of course the ‘tweak’ has been to offer ministry-time at the end having ‘provoked’ a decision that one wants to ‘do business with God’.

Now I’m not sure that the criticism that the author makes that sometimes the sermon is too specific and not inclusive of all the congregation is entirely fair: I’m not sure it is realistic to expect every single time that everybody will be fairly specifically ‘touched’. However, that does raise the question of ‘curriculum’ and that in turns evokes the question about lectionary.

I’d also want to question a wee bit the alternative scenario -or rather the description which issues in  the characterising of the ordo of a meal with friends as:

Entering. Word. Meal. Sending.

My question would arise from the observation that the ‘word’ section as described in the scenario (chatting before the meal) is probably more preparatory than acknowledged and that the real ‘word’ (and indeed whatever we might characterise as prayers) takes place woven through the meal. I fear that the author has tried to squeeze the reality into the liturgical shape that Eucharistic worship has gained since it cut adrift from real eating-together-meals.

I’m more than a little interested in this at the moment as I’m involved in working on liturgy for cafe church. There we’re trying to get away from a cafe church default where it basically becomes a sermon where people sit round tables with coffee to listen rather than in some variant of a lecture hall.

So here has come the question: how do we do appropriate liturgy for a situation which can encompass as cradle sharing of drink and some food and ‘godly conversation’. And the other factors we think are to do with building community rather than simply letting individualism and simple prima facie affinity rule. The difference between going into a cafe and a corporate liturgy resides hereabouts, I think.

via The Order of Christian Worship | internetmonk.com.

Makes me wonder how best to recruit and maintain the ‘naivety’ of child ‘mystery worshippers’. This would also be a model for some theological students visiting strange-to-them worship events. What this doesn’t do much of is drawing out the understandings that are conveyed connotatively. This, it seems to me, is one of the hard things to do with kids: they know what things mean by connotation but they’re often not able to link it with the verbal-reasoning part of their mind. In fact, it’s part of what hermeneutical education involves in adults often, too.

CHURCH A

1. When you are singing the first song the pastors walk down the isle and the first is holding a gold cross that is placed on a wooden stick thingy.

2. One of the pastors walking down the isle and close to the end is holding a very pretty looking bible. When she gets to the stage she places it on a wooden table.

3. The pastors are dressed in decrotive robes.

4. The church does not have a screen that has the words of the songs and passeges and prayers. instead they have a little books that has all the songs and prayer in them.

5. The pastors sit on little wooden chairs and listen to who is talking.

6. They have time to confess their sins and the pastors sit on their knees.

7. One of the pastors prepares the table for cumuan.

8. During cumun someone in a plain white robe holds the bible.

9. They say this during cumuan “Christ has died and Christ has risen Christ will come again”

10. The pastors bow after they finish talking during cumuan.

11. When you are taking cumuan there is one cup that the adults drink from and after the person that is holding the cup wipes it.

12. When church is almost over one of the people in the plain white robes holds the gold cross and when it goes down the isle you have to bow.

CHURCH B

1. They have 3 screens

2. In the back there is a little station that does the lights and screens

3. There are 2 girls singing. And when you sing the lights turn off and these cool lights go on. The music is really loud.

4. In the seat in front of you their is a poket and in that poket their is a welcom thingy and an evolope wich you can give money with

5. There is no cross in the front

6. Their are cool but weird things on the walls

7. Very cool set up

8. There is a coffee shop

via Worship Through a Child’s Eyes – SKYEBOX.

This mini-lecture is useful in outlining simply and easily an evolutionary biologigical approach to the origin of language in a way that makes connections with culture. There is a hint of a possible connection with mimetic rivalry. However, there isn’t really an actual genesis moment, just an explanation of why language makes evolutionary sense. The mechanisms would be an interesting theory ….

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity | Video on TED.com.

Slow church is a catchy way of thinking about it, the concept is not necessarily new; much of this is what we would hope to help liturgical leaders be formed into during training.

Slow Church, then, means to be Church mindfully. It’s not about speed, necessarily; but to really think through what you’re doing and why you’re doing it will take time. And it isn’t only leaders who need space for thought: particularly in the act of worship, participants need open places for pondering: what am I doing? Where have we been, and where are we going, in this hour, this season, this year?In worship planning, one area in which we can be more mindfully Slow is in how we connect to the past. If ritual seems irredeemably boring or lacking in spontaneity, the solution is not to be impulsive, but rather more aware of what liturgy means. Learn where liturgy comes from – read the source materials the original recipes, as it were, and see how they have evolved over time. Picasso could not change art until he knew how to draw. A slow worship leader bathes herself in the traditions of the past so that she can shape the future of her community’s experience with God.

A lot of potential and actual worship leaders come with a sense that they can’t make use of the inherited style and so simply dump it all -often quite disdainfully. Rightly this quote calls on us not to ignore that a way of doing things may not connect, but to recognise that things don’t get done a lot if they have nothing to commend them. Ritual is a bodily art and bodiliness is deeply connecting. Our task is to re-work, re-combine and re-culture worship by learning the best of new and old, conventional and radical.

via Slow Food, Slow Church — Clayfire Curator.

Theology, ideology and the way that we build and use our corporate spaces interact.

In the days of the Constantinian settlement, the newly established church took the Roman basilica as the model for its now-public buildings, rather than the house [one suspects, the dining room] that had been its previous abode. The basilica was a law court, and the Christians swapped the magistrate’s throne for an altar and sat the elders in the tribune behind it, thus imaging God as both judge and Emperor, surrounded by His government. We have been haunted by that decision ever since. We still build our churches with an important end, where the leaders are and God is implied to be, faced by everyone else. Our buildings tell us that the people at that end are more important than the people at the other, have a greater right to speak and be heard, are more representative of God. To make a church look like ‘a church’ is to impose a set of implied power relationships on our community that may not be desirable or in their best interests.

It is easy to see how this means that worship spaces are analysable in terms familiar to cultural analysts: in terms of solidarity, power, compliance and resistance, hegemony. Theologically we then have to ask whether the results are theologically valid and in turn whether the ‘message’ embodied is missionally justifiable.

In this article, Steve Collins poses some interesting questions about ‘new’ worship spaces. My question is, though, what’s being said about power  and solidarity?

This creedal style statement has some nice touches, among them:

…The Spirit overshadowed Mary of Nazareth,

Filling her with a new song and new life.

She came upon Jesus at his baptism

As he was named the Father’s beloved.

She came down out of heaven on the day of Pentecost,

Manifest in tongues of flame and of speech. …

via We Believe In the Holy Spirit – A Creed | Clayfire Curator.

I like this idea of flashmob congregations. It seems like an idea for both worship and also for encouraging outsiders to reconsider what worship and church might mean.

YouTube – Pentecost Guerilla Worship.

A neat example of the co-evolution of artefacts and mores; the conversation between things and usages in culture.

Language Log » Phone Etiquette 2.0.

Sounds as if it could go disastrously, but it actually looks really good as a well thought-out piece of liturgical craftsbeingship.

The Sci Fi and Fantasy Service Liturgy « Avril at Romsey.