Thursday, August 04, 2011

worship when a changing world means a changing mission

Last night was the second week of the Adelaide mission shaped ministry course. With 2 new faces, there are now 47 registered. With the nerves of the first week gone, there is momentum in the air. My task is to lead worship and the hope is that all the worship is done in ways that are different, ways that offer possibilities.

The theme of week 2 is the mission of God. So I begin (the call to worship) with the teaser from the movie Up.

It seems to capture mission as risk, surprise, adventure. And so we say together, a missional paraphrase of Romans 8: This resurrection [mission] life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?”

The next task is the task of prayer. This is offered as an invitation to either ask/intercede or thank/praise. On every chair is a balloon. Half have words from our “changing world” homework, a word texted in by us, which I have written on the balloon. This becomes the task of intercession. As Jesus breathed on the disciples in the sending of the Spirit (John 20), so the invitation is to pray by breathing on our world, to blow up the balloon, praying for the mission of God in our changing world.

The rest of the balloons have words from the week 2 course notes – Scriptures that speak of mission, names of mission moments in history, words from the Anglican 5 marks of mission. This becomes an invitation to praise, to give thanks. As Jesus breathed on the disciples in the sending of the Spirit (John 20:21-23), so we are to breathe thanks, to blow up the balloon, thankful for the mission of God in which we participate.

And so the room begins to breathe. As we finish our prayers, we tie our balloons, our breathe prayers. And we repeat together, the missional paraphrase: This resurrection [mission] life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?”.

And we bat the balloons around the room, our joyful, playful, participation, our worship, when a changing world means a changing mission.

(Note, this might also work as a Creationary: a space to be creative with the lectionary if the Bible texts were John 20 or Romans 8). For more resources go here.

Posted by steve at 10:16 AM

2 Comments

  1. I think this is great and I am so sad to have missed it. When it got to batting the balloons around the room I couldn’t help but smile. Definately a great worship idea for an extrovert. Thanks for sharing

    Comment by Ruthmary — August 15, 2011 @ 3:01 pm

  2. Thanks Ruthmary.

    steve

    Comment by steve — August 15, 2011 @ 10:12 pm

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