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.