sustain:if:able kiwi

spirited anti-perspirant

Mum have an anti-perspirant deodorant. It is called “Spirited.” It is coloured red (the colour of flames and fire and passion and Pentecost).

Tonight I will offer a benediction;
I will offer to make the sign of the cross,
on people’s hands,
using my Spirited deodorant.
I will invoke the Pentecost spirit,
the flame of love, to fire us afresh with healing hands.

dub, spirituality and worship

Update: this post has attracted a stack of spam, so I am closing it temporarily. My apologies and thanks to all those who posted.

Some random thoughts that might be total rot (ie, I’d value some feedback).

Thought 1 – It struck me at the Greg Laurie Crusade (in Christchurch over the weekend) that the music was “white boy” music – more rock based,guitar driven, clear verse/chorus song structure – in style …

Thought 2 – Often the songs sung in church are “white boy” music; I’m thinking Delirious, Hillsong, Soul Survivor …

Thought 3 – Dub music is currently BIG in New Zealand; I’m thinking Fat Freddys Drop, Salmonella Dub, Awake the Dawn … the list goes on …

Thought 4 – Some of my most spiritual moments in the last 5 years have occurred listening to dub. I can construct my spiritual soundscape around Love your ways and Longtime by Salmonella Dub and the sheer power of Ho Pepa’s trombone from Fat Freddys Drop – moments when God has been incredibly real amid my personal brokeness in leaving Graceway, battling institutional and denominational powers, embracing my inadequacies before the wind of God’s spirit.

Thought 5 – Dub music seems to create a number of layers for the individual participant to move within. It is more fluid and less linear than rock. It might just be me, but dub concerts are often more communal and less alcohol infused than rock concerts. Dub often has a spiritual vibe of peace and equality and inclusivity. I can imagine deeply Christian corporate worship around songs like Ez on by Salmonella Dub, Believ’n by son.shine; Hope by Fat Freddy’s Drop…

Now, if these random thoughts have any linkages (ie I’m not talking rot), I suspect there’s a need for a widespread “Dub project” that explores the place of dub in worship in New Zealand. Any takers? Does anyone know of any churches using Dub in worship, or any “Christian” dub bands out there?

Dub is a form of music that uses extensive echo and reverb effects and snatches of the lyrics from the original version, with most of the lead instruments and vocals dropping in and out of the mix. Another hallmark of the dub sound is the massive low bass. The music is often further augmented by live DJs, and electronic sound effects. Link

passionate practice of pilgrimage

Here are some pictures from Sunday night.

We have spent 5 weeks in our 2nd cycle of passionate practices – pilgrimage – walking toward, and then walking away from, Easter. We had preached around texts following Jesus to and from Easter. Practically, the passionate practice has been to
a) Walk and pray a pilgrim prayer
b) Attend Easter Camp
c) Cyber pilgrimage using online labyrinth.

We kicked off, five weeks ago, by inviting people to step into sand, as a way of commiting themselves to walking in pilgrimage with Jesus. Easy enough to then make plaster moulds of their feet, and to lay these feet out every week. On Sunday we talked about the resurrection and how it brings colour and life. We invited people to colour their feet and re-lay them, as a celebration of Resurrection life in our walking with Jesus.

For the start of passionate practice of pilgrimage see here.

For an overview of passionate practices and spiritual formation see here.

For books resources: Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church which gave the initial theological framework and opened my eyes to passion as a way to affirm youth spirituality; God bearing life:The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry, which has excellent reflection on passion and passion in youth ministry; and Soul Tending which is stacked with actual practices.

easter journey

Opawa Baptist is amazing. As preparation for our Easter Journey they gut and redecorate the entire church. The worship space has become a garden, complete with lawn, fog, lighting, two pools, 1000 colour pannets, trees and shrubs. The Easter narrative is told through art. It’s beautiful and haunting and communal and stunning.

I’ll try and post some pictures during the week. Some observations:
– for people who, by trade are landscape gardeners or builders, setting the Journey up is worship.
– inviting people to tell a story through art invites the immediate question; “what is the story?” This is serious spiritual formation.
– so much church worship is wordbased. The Easter Journey invites the eyes to worship God.

Open 7-11 every evening this Easter week; plus 1-11 pm Easter Friday and Easter Saturday. Every evening we are holding short services, 7-7:20 pm. For more resources go here

7 things I learnt from Bono and the real life of worship leading

Early this week I suggested that Christian worship could learn something from Bono and U2; under 7 headings;
1. Connect uniquely.
2. Engage through familiarity.
3. Use repetitition to call forth prayer.
4. Secure a 5th (visual) band member
5. Create hope by drawing the best from the past.
6. Plan participation.
7. Invoke passionate practices.
The post has drawn some interesting comments (including the suggestion I might be manipulative and a bit cult-ish:))

This morning I put together the following concrete act of worship, and this afternoon I thought I should put it through the “Bono worship” grid.

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7 things I learnt from Bono about worship leading: update

Update: I have added to the post below with a second post here; 7 things I learnt from Bono and the real life of worship leading, in which I discuss the 7 points below in relation to an actual worship service.

1. Connect uniquely. Time and again on the Vertigo DVD, Bono speaks about Chicago and his memories of Chicago. It is also his birthday, another uniquely contextual layer. A wise worship leader does not start in heaven and continue to the 7th heaven. Rather they search for the unique connections that make that context, that day, that date, that time, uniquely unrepeatable.

2. Engage through familiarity. The use of familiar songs brings back layers of memory. A wise worship leader includes songs that resonnate with previous experiences and previous encounters.

3. Use repetitition to call forth prayer. Bono dedicates Running to stand still as a prayer. He concludes Running to stand still by sliding into a repetitive “Hallelujah.” It’s so easy to sing. The simple repetition enables the audience to sing with the band. Bono has turned a concert into a participation in prayer, through the simple use of repetition.

4. Secure a 5th (visual) band member. U2 concerts are no longer a 4 band show. They are a 5 band show, with Willie Williams providing visuals that add multiple layers to the experience. Not many worship leaders have U2’s dosh. But a wise worship leader will look to add not just singers or musicians, but a “visual” person to their team, charged with enhancing visual environments.

5. Create hope by drawing the best from the past. As Bono tells the audience of the Vertigo CD, We as a band are looking to the future. We’re taking the best of the past and moving forward with hope. A wise worship leader searches the past for the fragments that resonnate with a hopeful future.

6. Plan participation. Faced with 40,000 fans, Bono can draw one boy from the audience to sing to, one woman from the audience to dance with. He can use repetition to call forth prayer and he can hold the mic to encourage “congregational singing.” A wise worship leader intentionally looks for ways to turn the many into one.

7. Invoke passionate practices. Bono invites the audience to haul out their cell phones. He kills the house lights and thousands of phones dance blue. He invites them to do something, to text the Make Poverty History campaign. A wise worship leader looks for ways to turn singing into action and turn entertainment into justice.

alternative blue christmas service

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

Christmas is not good news for everyone. People die. People grieve. People consider children absent or unborn. Tonite at Opawa Baptist I’m running an alternative blue christmas service, as part of Side Door. It’s a time to play the Christmas blues in the presence of Jesus.

I’ve mixed this icon, and a story from the Moot community, with the U2 album Passengers (Your Blue Room and A different kind of Blue), borrowed from this Anglican Advent candle lighting cermony (scroll down until the heading “Blue Christmas liturgy for individuals”) and woven in a number of tactile responses (holding blue stones and blue boxes).

(I ran a blue christmas service last year, basing it around a nativity art piece in which a shepherd and an angel have the appearance of Down’s Syndrome.) Here’s the order of service for this year (if you’re coming tonight, you might not want to look).

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journey of the magi church service

Some ideas from Sunday’s service on the theme of Magi:

1. Question on large screen for people to consider as they arrive: Ponder this … To get to church today, did you travel from the North or South, East or West.

2. Sing O Come O Come emmanuel and use different languages for the first line of each verse. We used English, Korean, Tagalog and Maori. Make a verbal link to the Magi story, people who no doubt spoke a different language in their “coming” to Jesus.

3. Make stars in four different colours. Display again the opening question (Ponder this … To get to church today, did you travel from the North or South, East or West). Get the kids to give out the stars, a different colour for each direction. It takes a bit of time, but the kids love it.

4. Invite people to write on the stars something that might distract them from their journey toward Jesus this Christmas.

5. Place four Christmas trees at the compass points around the church. Have an appropriate coloured star on each one to help people’s direction finder. Invite people to place their stars on the tree in the direction of which they are heading home after church. Sing some carols while people do this. This allows space for lots of people to mingle and move. (175 people on Sunday.)

6. For the benediction, invite people to face “their” tree as they are blessed into their week of journeying toward Christmas.

All of this can be easily laced through singing, lighting of Advent candles, preaching, Scripture reading. All allow multiple ways to participate and response. Connections are made to people’s coming and going, with diverse cultures, with people’s hands and feet.

angel spotting

This worked well on Sunday evening; Context: Often the taking up of the offering on Sunday evenings becomes a time to chat and whistle, or worse, hum strange tunes!

With the start of Advent, I had placed a number of angels around the church. During the offering, I whipped up the following question on PPT; Ponder this … how many small golden angels can you see around this church?

People were looking all around, up out of their seats, counting and searching, a lot more connected than normal. The offering prayer then included a thankfulness for Advent and the presence of 8 angels in the church, and a gladness that God’s angel presence is with us all the time, inside and outside church.

A useful way to keep connection, build another layer into the service and encourage attentiveness to space and the church season.

photos of intercession

Bill emailed; he’s collected visual images from New Orleans into one place here . Thanks Bill. We used them for intercession tonite at espresso, to a song by Cold Play. As well as New Orleans I pray for Opawa, facing 3 funerals this week, and my family, with 2 sick kids.

more on colouring worship

I blogged recently about the use of colours in worship (here and here), in order to allow people to bring their weeks into the presence of God.

It’s a contrast to the worship leader line: Leave your life at the door. Colours offer us God interested in all of life, rather than a sacred vs secular divide.

Fyfe, church planting in Dunedin, has now tried it in worship. I like his comments about the need for expressionism in worship. Somehow colours do that. There is a spirituality to colour. It’s part of worship as all that we are responding to all that God is. God in all of life.

images of jesus

images of Jesus.
The domestication of Jesus saddens me.

texting communion

Further to my post on mobile worship, we had a go at texting communion tonite.

Context: Younger demographic, so high users of cell phones. Also a demographic with potential for giggle factor.

Planning: We broke communion up into bits;
Welcome
Bread Scriptures
Grape juice Scriptures
Lords Prayer
Serving bread
Serving grape juice
Benediction

Actual liturgy: We texted people, who came to the front to read the various words. These were up on the powerpoint to make it easier and also to include those who didn’t have cell phones.

We then texted more people with the invitation to serve bread and grape juice among us.

We then texted everyone the Lord’s prayer, which we all said together. We ended by texting a couple of people the Benediction and asking them to pass it on among each other.

Analysis: It took about 20 minutes, longer than I thought. This was OK, but if we did it again, I’d like to give people more visual input.

If we did it again, I’d also like the lights darker, so that we could see the glow of all our cell phones lighting up as we recieved the Lord’s Prayer.

Oh, I texted the benediction to the wrong person, someone said. I like the fact that the Lord’s Prayer and a benediction is flying around cell~space.

It had the potential to become a giggle fest, but didn’t. It certainly made commmunion more participatory and helped tune people in. I loved the randomness of it all, not knowing who would do what or when a text would arrive.

Why do it? I hope it wasn’t to try and be cool. For me, it was part of reflecting on the Word made flesh, God who so loved this world. What does it mean for the Word to become text? How does God connect with cellphone users?

Ponder this: Who was the first person to invest in global roaming technology?

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V(isual)Jing worship

This is a nice visual mixing from Sunday’s worship.

Photo taken by Jason King.

I blogged a few weeks ago about colouring our worship. People gather in all sorts of spaces. In order to honour that reality, I was inviting people to choose a colour to express their week. This colour was then placed on a cross. Look close and you can see all these dots on the green lit cross. That’s the colour chips.

The wall, wood and saw bench come from the morning. I am doing a series on leadership from 1 Corinthians. Sunday was leader as builder. One of our practical types had offered to build me a wall. It took him about 10 minutes on Saturday. Even dropped a cell phone into the visual display! Part of my talk was about building in our homes and workplaces using Jesus values of love, integrity, humility, sacrifice.

Just before the sermon, in the middle of the service, I realised that the “colour chip” cross was still lying on the floor. This was to allow people to place their dots, but in the rush, I’d forgotten to stand it up. How to recover from this mistake? Oh, I thought, I’ll place it in the building site at the values of Jesus bit of the sermon. It made quite a poignant moment. I stopped talking. Walked to the cross on the floor. Picked it up and dragged it into the building site. Walked back and resumed my talk. It didn’t need any words of explanation.

Sunday evening at Digestion, we play with lighting a bit more. The hands in the shape of the cross that are red lit are standard. Dropping the green colour light inside the cross made it stand out. It was simple and effective. It was unplanned, just VJing of various visual arrangements.