Just going through some liturgical and worship posts from on the NousLife blog. Here’s one with a bit of reflection on a worship occasion in a working secular cafe which didn’t alienate the other clientele or the management. I’m reflecting here on the kind of role it gave to me as liturgical leader. Actually, to […]
leading
People are Resources
A very common problem in human thinking is to objectify things and forget that we or other people are subjects as well as objects. We forget, for instance, that we are part of the environment; it isn’t just out there; it is us too. The pastoral equivalent is to think of congregants as recipients of […]
What to Keep, What to Cut
It’s very unlikely that church leaders will never have to deal with this kind of dilemma at some point; having to make cutbacks in a budget. And it’s definitely not like cutting budgets in more commercial organisations; for reasons that are made clear in this section of the article: Some, including me, argued that reducing […]
Worship as Temporary Autonomous Zone
Kester Brewin’s idea is to relate TAZs to church. I’m intrigued to ask whether a smaller, though related, comparison could be made: corporate worship as TAZ? Theo Hobson’s exposition in the Guardian gives a clue: When Jesus fed the 5,000 it wasn’t an attempt at the permanent restructuring of society, it was a brief sacramental […]
Church-Futures.com:-Future-Church-Scenarios
I’m convinced that one of the challenges in church leadership is to begin to think about how we might respond to the outcomes of trends that we can already discern at work. This is something that Tom Sine (cf The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time) has been doing since […]
Worship together is a subset of service in life
Howard Marshall asks some relevant and helpful questions about corporate worship. He starts by noting the priming that our labels give: the terms ‘worship’ and ‘service’ strongly suggest that the central thing that takes place when Christians gather together is that they do something which is addressed in some way to God. They meet primarily […]
Nouslife: Pop accent, American English and worship
I wrote a bit of a reflection on accent in singing, because it impinges on worship. Do follow up the link at the end of this post to see the lot, but as a taster, here’s why I also wanted to put this here: what is the meaning of using or not using an americanised […]
Directing choice and managing behaviour
I found an interesting article about how authorities go about changing or managing social behaviour. It identifies two main strategies which I think have resonance for liturgical occasions -which, after all,- are about communities managing their behaviour together in pursuit of God together. The terms being used are ‘nuduge’ and ‘think’, and there is a […]
St John’s Nottingham theological college Commissioning Service 2010
Our college, with some reason, says of itself: Worship is at the heart of our life together as a college, as we seek to honour God in every aspect of our life as individuals and a community. And so, today, we held our annual Commissioning Service to mark an official ending for those moving on […]
Goffman: Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
I set quite a lot of store by the recognition that liturgical leadership has an element of ‘performance’ in it, even if only at the level of ‘learning to be yourself in public’. So Goffman’s famous work has a contribution to make to our reflection on leading worship. It is useful, then, that someone has […]