Worship Weblog
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Conversation on Worship and Spiritual Formation
Symposium 2007 sparked a great conversation on worship and spiritual formation, and we want to keep it going. We’ve collected some of your questions you submitted on 3-by-5 notecards and will be posting responses to them in the weeks to come.
In the meantime, please post a comment with any follow-up thought or question you have after listening to any of this year’s presentations on spiritual formation.
We look forward to continuing this crucial conversation on how worship forms us to serve God faithfully.
Presenter’s blog on Symposium
One presenter filed these updates (one and two) from Symposium last week at his blog.
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Monday, January 29, 2007
Youth conversation at Symposium ‘07
Report from Betty Grit:
On Thursday evening after worship at Symposium, almost 100 high school and college students from around the world gathered for food and conversation. Students from Greenville (Illinois) College whose choir had led us in worship, joined students from Morehouse College in Atlanta, high school students who had traveled from Covenant Christian High School in DeMotte, Indiana and the Worship Apprentices from Calvin College to talk about worship, their role in worship and what they hoped to learn at Symposium.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Symposium ‘07 5
In closing worship we shared the Lord’s Supper together, and prayed:
In peace let us pray to the Lord. O Lord our God, we give you thanks for uniting us by baptism in the body of Christ and for filling us with joy in the eucharist. Lead us toward the full visible unity of your church, and help us to treasure all the signs of reconciliation you have granted us. Now that we have tasted the banquet you have prepared for us in the world to come, may we all one day share together the inheritance of the saints in the life of the heavenly city.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
We give thanks for the many attendees who traveled hundreds and thousands of miles to be with us, and for all those who gathered with us to worship, and we pray for their safe return home.
Look for resources from Symposium on our website in the weeks to come.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Symposium ‘07 4
We’re all going to sleep well tonight, after the busiest day at Symposium! Above, drama students from Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, proclaim the Word from Exodus 16 in evening worship. They were followed by their director, Jeff Barker, proclaiming the Word from Luke 12.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Symposium ‘07 3
At the Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship seminar today, we explored the Psalms in song, readings, chant, harp, jazz, mime, multimedia, exegetical study, and responsive readings (to name a few). Look for many more Psalms resources to come on our website in conjunction with the new book Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship by John Witvliet.
Seminar Description: The Psalms are a font of inspiration, encouragement, and instruction in the life of both public and private prayer. From Basil to Bonhoeffer to Bono, the enthusiasm that emanates from wise Christian writers of every historical period points to the Psalms as one of the richest sources of wisdom for the practice of worship. Yet we often dismiss the Psalms as too complex for worship or too associated with music that is unsingable, and thereby miss their spiritual sustenance and missional breadth. This session will explore ways that all churches—contemporary or traditional, seeker-driven or liturgical, ethnically homogenous or multi-cultural—can recover the Psalms as a source of vital worship, along with resources for teaching, preaching, reading, dramatizing, visualizing, and singing the Psalms. John D. Witvliet, host, with James Abbington, Carol Bechtel, Reggie Kidd, and Stephen Breck Reid
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Symposium ‘07 2
We began a day of seminars with morning worship, as the Calvin College Orchestra led us in music that was, fittingly, given our theme, glorious. Scott Hoezee gave us a stirring message on “The Glory We See,” stating that God’s glory is not restricted to moments in worship, but is as it was in the incarnation: in the flesh, in the everyday.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Symposium ‘07 Update 1: Check-in begins!
Prayers of the People in Morning Worship at the Seminary Chapel
This morning we gathered for worship in the Calvin Theological Seminary chapel to welcome many of our overseas guests. We sang “Holy, Holy, Holy”—the first verse in English, the second in Japanese, the third in Indonesian, and the fourth in a blend of languages, each worshiper singing in her own language. We were led in prayer by Juswantori Ichwan from Indonesia, Anastasie Maponda from the Congo, and Emmanuel Mumtaz from Pakistan.
Listen to their prayers here(mp3)(3.24 MB)
Prayers leading up to Symposium
We are eager and joyful for Symposium to begin (officially right about now, as we start to check in our guests for tomorrow’s seminars!)
But our hearts were also weighed down with these griefs this week:
http://www.calvin.edu/weblogs/worship/more/preparing_to_pray_at_symposium_2006/
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Monday, January 22, 2007
GR Press on Symposium 2007
The Grand Rapids Press published this preview of Symposium 2007:
GRAND RAPIDS—The Calvin Symposium on Worship celebrates its 20th anniversary this week.
Hosted by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, the symposium, which runs Thursday to Jan. 27 on the Calvin College campus, features more than 80 artists and about 1,600 participants.
Presentations by Keith and Kristyn Getty, Irish composers of worship songs, highlight next week’s event. Keith Getty’s hymns include “In Christ Alone,” sung in churches around the world. The pair will present a concert on Jan. 28, at Grand Rapids Christian High School’s DeVos Center for Performing Arts.
“We never could have imagined how the symposium would grow,” said John Witvliet, director of the worship institute for the past decade. “I’m especially gratified with how people from such completely different kinds of churches are able to be part of this conversation—from urban and rural, long-established and brand new, North American and beyond North America.”
Witvliet said he’s especially pleased with the number of international guests. More than 100 participants are flying in from overseas, with approximately 25 already here in the states attending Calvin or for other reasons. Participants are coming from 34 countries, including Argentina, Namibia, China, India, Iraq, Pakistan, Scotland and Taiwan.
Alban Weekly on “Living Your Story”
From Alban Weekly: Diana Butler Bass on leadership:
For three years, I researched vital mainline Protestant congregations. Armed with a grant from the Lilly Endowment, I studied fifty churches to determine if there existed a common pattern of spiritual vibrancy and shared practices that strengthened communal life. Sifting through thousands of pages of data, my team pieced together both an overall pattern and leading practices in the study group, thus developing a picture of religious change, emerging vitality, and potential futures for mainline Protestantism. ...
My research team did not directly study leadership in vital congregations—we hoped to make that the topic of a later grant. Early on, I actually tried to avoid questions of leadership, feeling vaguely inadequate to address the topic and having no specific data to share. I worry that leadership is difficult to discuss and prone to “magic bullet” solutions of quick-fix gurus. The questions kept coming, however, and although I had no hard data, I realized that I had observed good leadership in the participating congregations. In The Practicing Congregation, the first book published about the project, I identified an emerging style of “narrative leadership” for congregational renewal.
Narrative leadership is a deceptively simple principle: know your story and live it. Some people know stories and tell them well but live without intentional connection to those stories; others simply experience quotidian life with no reflection on larger stories of meaning. In vital mainline churches, leaders knew their stories and lived them—thus turning the power of narrative into a source of and resource for change.
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Friday, January 12, 2007
Resources for the Prayer of the People
A friend asked me by e-mail what resources I would recommend to him for his prayer of the people in worship on the 28th. In case others are in a similar search, let me share the links I sent.
My first stop would be the sample prayers and prayer outlines from The Worship Sourcebook, also excerpted separately as Prayers of the People (encourage your church or organization to get one or the other for planning purposes if they haven’t yet).
A good second stop, especially for churches using the Revised Common Lectionary, is The Text This Week. Click on the date in the left-hand corner, in this case January 28, 2007, and scroll down to “OnLine Worship and Liturgy Resources” and then “Prayers, Prefaces, Litanies, etc.” These resources will help your prayer writing weave naturally into the theme of your overall worship service that day.
Another good overview of the purpose of the public prayer is the pamphlet “So You’ve Been Asked To Lead In Prayer”—another useful resource to encourage your church or organization to get for its library (it’s part of Faith Alive’s valuable So You’ve Been Asked To… series).
There’s much more to recommend, but this is a start.
Of course, we always encourage adapting an existing resource or outline to the purpose, circumstances, tradition, etc. of your worshiping community.
Responses to Recent Publications
We’re grateful for encouraging responses to two new CICW publications, The Art of Worship by Greg Scheer and Stilling the Storm by Kathy Smith.
The Art of Worship was reviewed at Byron Borger’s Hearts & Minds BookNotes blog:
[This book] helps anyone involved in crafting contemporary worship to do it better, with greater doctrinal integrity and attention to liturgical aesthetics. And yet, it is one of the more “nuts and bolts” books done, with very nice descriptions of different kinds of vocals and harmonies and tons of good recommendations. He makes suggestions about different kinds of instruments and percussion. He lists oodles of resources ... This will be a book that is talked about for years. It is rooted in a thoughtful, Biblical worldview and emerges from his work in very respected congregations. While the theological underpinnings are discussed in greater depth elsewhere, this book is a reliable and user-friendly guide.
continued…
Stilling the Storm is currently the featured book at the home page of the publisher, The Alban Institute, and was excerpted in a recent edition of the Alban Weekly newsletter.
We pray these and all of our publications can be used to enrich the worship and ministry of the church.
R&E Newsweekly on National Gallery of Art exhibit on diptychs
From Religion & Ethics Newsweekly:
BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, a new exhibit in Washington of a special kind of Renaissance religious paintings. They’re called diptychs—two panels hinged. Our guide is John Hand, curator of northern European Renaissance painting at the National Gallery of Art.
JOHN HAND: The exhibition “Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych” consists of religious paintings produced under the umbrella of the Roman Church and spans the 15th and 16th centuries.
A diptych consists of two panels of the same size that are framed and hinged so they can be opened and closed like a book. They could have been used for traveling, or they could have been simply put away at a desk or drawer, taken out when needed.
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