Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Lenten practices: using 40 as a worship resource

40cover.gif Here’s a Lenten DJed worship resource, that morphs into a spiritual takeway. It’s from my weekend, where I used it three times; as a call to worship at the start of Brian McLaren, as an introduction to communion on Sunday morning and to focus our evening service on passionate practices during Lent.


It’s based on the “40 CD” which offers 40 different hand drawn images, reflecting on Jesus spending 40 days in the wilderness preparing for ministry. 40cover.gif (You can buy the 40 CD here, through the future church nz website.

The CD comes with background music, which I used as I clicked through the 40 slides one by one, over about 6 minutes. Here’s another one of the slides;
40x196.gif

I had written a sort of poem; 28 phrases like,
Jesus took 40 days to prepare for ministry;
by living at a different pace;
to remind himself of the scale of project God was working on;

which I spoke over the music, to give some narrative to the images. Many phrases were repeated, so it sort of became like a spoken bass beat.

Some of the phrases were based on various practices that one could embrace for Lent. I sourced the practices from the excellent book; detox cover.jpg Peter Graystone’s Detox your spiritual life in 40 days. (You can also order the book here here or from the publisher here.)

In addition, I had made a simple postcard, with the 40 visual on one side and more information about these practices on the back. This was intended so people could take it away to “practise” over Lent.

So, in summary; I was
a) DJing three sources; the Scriptural narrative, the 40 CD, and practices from Detox your spiritual life;
b) in a way that could be used in layers; both as worship; and as a spiritual takeway. (for more on the theology and practice of spiritual takeaways, see Postcard 5 : Spiritual Tourism, from my out of bounds church? book.

Feel free to download the worship words I used. And again, if you want to buy the 40 CD resource; (go here to the future church nz website).

Posted by steve at 02:58 PM

2 Comments

  1. I wish I could have been there to worship with you – what a great idea! 🙂 I am thoroughly enjoying reading about your worship experiences and ideas. Thank you for the inspiration. It gets me excited about our service more and more.

    Comment by Makeesha — March 7, 2006 @ 4:37 pm

  2. Thanks for this Steve. The introduction to Brian McLaren was a very powerful call to worship. At our Sunday morning service it provoked someone (else) to give a ten minute meditation on what you said. The quote you give about pace and the scale of the project was an excellent preparation for Brian’s message. A great effort on the whole weekend too by all involved – much appreciated, Thanks

    Comment by Graeme — March 8, 2006 @ 2:28 am

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