Lydia Ruffin’s music

Lydia Ruffin’s “Art and Soul Cafe” is highlighted in Ch. 10 of Asphalt Jesus, dealing with Affirmation 4 and reclaiming the arts in worship.  Lydia is an excellent guitarist/vocalist, incidentally.  If you’d like to hear some of her music or order her latest CD, you can find her at http://profile.myspace.com/lydiaruffin.

Bass, with Ripples

Affirmation 4 of the Phoenix Affirmations affirms that worship needs to be as vibrant, sincere, and artful as it is scriptural.   What gave rise originally to this Affirmation – as well as several aspects of Countryside’s worship that you may consider to be “new and different” since I’ve been on the scene – was an experience I had in 1999 at our lakeside cabin in Bandon, Oregon (Are you beginning to sense that Bandon is a very special place for my family?).  I write about that experience in the introductory chapter of my book Igniting Worship: The Seven Deadly Sins (Abingdon Press, 2004).  I don’t think Abingdon Press will mind if I cut and paste that introduction here.  As you read it, bear in mind that this was written from a particular context which is not Countryside, and reflects experiences I had there, some of which translate directly to Countryside’s context and some of which do not (For instance, I don’t find many people at Countryside sitting blankly, looking bored out of their minds in worship at either service).  I also no longer feel comfortable referring  to myself as a “liberal” minister, and more often than not use the word “progressive” (not that I’m entirely comfortable with that, either.  Basically, I’m just plain uncomfortable with any labels).  Anyway, reading what’s below may help you understand why we do some of the things we do in worship, both at 9 and 11 am.

Bass, with Ripples

Why are people totally bored in church? Why do they sit there staring blankly, looking like they’re just waiting to be released from bondage? There doesn’t seem to be any connection between worship and everyday life.

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m a minister—a mainline, liberal, Protestant minister of the United Church of Christ, in Scottsdale, Arizona. I’m also a renegade. In the summer of 1999, I and a handful of others were trying to start a revolution. We felt worship had drifted away from its moorings and become too tame, too pre-packaged. We wanted to start with a blank sheet of paper, so we asked, “What is worship?” We then began the task of refashioning it according to that vision, endeavoring to create worship for the Twenty-First century.

While on study-leave that summer, I found myself sitting at the edge of a weathered dock on a small lake on the southern Oregon Coast. I’d been staring at the surface for a long time, not knowing why I was looking at anything at all, given my normal routine of meditating with eyes shut. I guess I had been inspired by the book I’d been reading, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, an incredible exposition of God’s mysterious hand in Nature. Dillard’s words turned my soul’s gaze from the heavens toward the earth, where it was asking, “What is the basis of worship?”

As I gazed into the water, I suddenly sensed motion at the periphery of my vision: the largest bass I have ever seen! It was so big that, though it was swimming next to the sand three feet below the surface, it was causing ripples on top. It shot right past me and I gasped.

Now, I’m not claiming that God spoke to me in the bass. But, in the moment after I gasped, “a plum” seemed to “drop from heaven,” as the Buddhists say.

“This is the foundation of worship. If you can take that hour or so you have on Sunday morning and open people to experiencing just a quarter second of the awe and wonder you just experienced, it is accomplished. You can pack up and go home. You have an hour or so for a quarter second.”

Something felt intuitively right about this insight, like I’d lived my entire life and entered the ministry just to “hear” it and do something with it. Yet I wondered, “How does one organize an entire worship service around an experience of the Divine, whether the experience lasts a quarter second or an hour? It’s not like one can simply say, ‘Okay, now we’re all going to have a God experience.’”

At the end of my study-leave, I returned to my church, Scottsdale Congregational United Church of Christ (SCUCC), where we explored the experience and the questions surrounding it from many different angles. Together we realized that, although we can’t create or manufacture an experience of God in worship (and wouldn’t want to if we could), we can create a context of openness to God’s Spirit at work in our midst. A rock-solid theological premise at SCUCC is that the Spirit of the Living Christ (the Holy Spirit) is really present in worship. Not only is the Spirit present, but it is waiting for us to open even the smallest crack in our hearts so that it may enter within us, stirring the deepest waters of our souls. Thus, we concluded, our job as worship leaders is to organize worship in such a way that it’s kind of like sitting at the edge of that weathered Oregon dock: You can’t predict when, or even if, a bass is going to swim by, but you can set yourself up to be awake and attentive, with eyes wide open, so if it does swim by you don’t miss it.

We started a second service based on this premise and called it The Studio, which is built on an experience-based platform. The Studio is a multi-sensory worship service drawing upon a wide variety of artistic resources, including music, painting, poetry, dance, drama, sculpture, multimedia, film, literature, as well as other “sacred” and “secular” elements, both ancient and modern. The aim is not so much to teach people about God as to open us all to experiencing God in a way that resonates with, and transforms, our everyday lives.

The experiential platform of The Studio makes it different from most “traditional” and even “contemporary” services in the United States today, which are commonly built on a message-based platform. By comparison, most services present a relatively fixed liturgy in which the sermon stands at the apex.

At The Studio, the liturgy changes each week and is organized around the kind of experience to which we are trying to open people. Thus, if the theme is “God as Creator,” the worship team does not ask, “How can we teach people about how God is Creator,” but asks instead, “How can we help open people to experiencing the Creator God during the time we have together, or at least model what an experience of the Creator might be like?” We understand that the resources of the entire world are at our disposal for doing this.

Furthermore, preaching takes a different form at The Studio. Instead of a pastor standing up and delivering a sermon for twenty minutes or so at a fixed point in the service, the pastor acts more as an interpretive guide throughout the service, reflecting briefly at various points on what has just happened to us, or providing an intellectual bridge between elements. Strong use is made of laypeople as well, who provide reflections (often in dialog with a pastor) and prepare or lead the congregation through various segments. Laypeople also play a critical role in helping plan The Studio.

Since The Studio was introduced in September 2000, our church has changed in wonderful ways we could scarcely have imagined. I can hardly wait to get to church on Sunday morning! Worship has become an expression of our entire community. Lives are being transformed on broader and deeper levels. Many people who had “given up” and left whatever church they were attending long ago have made their way to The Studio, are becoming breathtaking disciples of Christ.[1] Even our “traditional” service has been enhanced through worship insights gleaned from The Studio. Most importantly, we have found that by bringing elements from everyday life into worship, we begin taking worship with us into our everyday lives. All of life has become worship, just as worship has become all of life.

---

[1] Worship attendance has nearly doubled in the last four years, with approximately 80% of those new to us being from the “unchurched” population.