The Risky Business of Worship

I recently read Richard Foster’s classic The Celebration of Discipline. If you’re not up for diving into all 12 disciplines, can I invite you to read just his chapter on worship?

Brace yourself: it’s convicting.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I’m on staff at a church, so Sunday mornings are one of the most hectic times of my work week. I’m often filling in for missing Sunday School teachers or throwing together puppet shows or craft activities at the last minute.

Truth be told, sometimes I’m hiding in the choir loft by the time worship rolls around. Or at least sneaking coffee hour snacks from the Fellowship Hall.

Foster reminded me that praise is a sacrifice that we offer to God, and the praise we offer together as a community is impacted by the state of our individual hearts when we walk into the church building.

We need to be practicing hearing God’s voice all week so we will be more open and ready to hearing it from the pews on Sunday mornings.  Worship is to “permeate the daily fabric of our lives,” as Foster puts it. If we aren’t accustomed to inviting the divine into our own mundane moments, we won’t be ready for it in corporate worship either.

I’ve been carrying that conviction around inside me for the last few months, and I can tell you: it’s been changing the way I enter into worship on Sunday mornings.

I want to be ready to be changed, not only because I’m entering a sacred space of communal worship, but because I’ve been tending to my spirit throughout the week. I am grateful to those who worship with me that they, too, are bringing their vibrant spiritual selves to the sanctuary.

As Foster writes, worship “is not for the timid or comfortable. It involves an opening of ourselves to the dangerous life of the spirit.”

Thank goodness we’re on the adventure together.

How do you prepare your own heart for communal worship? Do you think Foster is right that worship is a risky business? Have you ever found yourself hiding in the choir loft?

Why I Told My Truth

I did something really scary (so scary I pretty much stopped talking about it right after I did it):

I told the truth.

Actually, that’s not entirely correct. I wrote the truth. The truth of my story, which is really the only truth I know.

I wrote it down and sent it to someone else to read and then suddenly I was in a crowd of other young women of faith writing the truths of their stories, and now suddenly we’re here.

We’re here sharing our stories with anyone who wants to read them. We’re here sharing our stories with you.

After I did this horribly scary, possibly foolish, completely uncomfortable thing, I wasn’t totally sure why I’d done it.

Why risk telling the truth of my story when it might end up really hurting or embarrassing me?

Why write it down in a way that it can’t be forgotten or edited or hidden under a mountain of rocks somewhere, never to be recovered?

Why talk about what it means to really live my Christian faith — in the gritty, authentic, this-is-not-a-fire-drill kind of way that’s easier to hide than to admit?

I wasn’t sure why I’d written my story until last week when I mentioned this feat of stupidity courage to two of my close friends and co-workers.

I told them I had a secret I wanted to share, and then I told them I’d written an essay that was getting published. They, predictably, squealed and praised before asking why I’d keep something like that a secret.

I wrote about my personal life, I told them, and how it intersects with my faith. I wrote about how the church can be overwhelming and suffocating at the same time as it can be welcome and grace-filled.

All of us, the dozens of truth-telling women in this book, wrote about these things. We wrote about sex and abuse and dating and love and marriage and fear and relationships and desire and purity.

Not in an abstract, clinical way, but in a raw, honest way. We wrote about our own experience with these things. My friends understood immediately why this was something terrifying for me (but they didn’t take back their squeals and praises).

And then? Then we talked.

It was like some secret door had been opened in the space between us and suddenly they both wanted to tell their stories, to speak about their experiences with religion and taboo.

Our stories were different; our lives are different. But each story matters, and we were all relieved and excited to have someone to share with.

People are hungry to have this conversation! They are searching for a safe space to be honest about their lives in a way they often feel they can’t be. We are all longing to be our whole selves, right where we are, and to share those whole selves with each other.

After my conversation with my friends ended, I realized that was why I had risked telling my story. Integrity is not an easy thing, but it is a precious and powerful thing.

Every time I have taken a step into a space of courageous authenticity, I have found that so many shining, sparkling souls are standing right there with me.

We are already standing right here with you. Come share in the story and be part of the conversation.

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Want to learn more? Check out these posts by the editors, Enuma Okoro and Erin Lane or go visit the Indiegogo site for Talking Taboo to watch a video of these fabulous ladies chatting about the project.

Human Broken Church

Human

Advent is a good time to be human.

This is a gritty, earthy time. Born out of the tradition of Lent, Advent is a season of dust and ashes, of humanness, of bodily incarnation.

Sometimes I think Mary, who would have been now eight months pregnant — tired and swollen, overwhelmed by her duty of bearing so much divinity and humanity all at once.

At this point, she was still carrying all of that inside her. She was waiting for this birth, and now we wait for it, too.

And when this birth comes, it is not sterile or easy. It is impromptu and uncomfortable. This peasant couple, far from home, welcoming a miracle into their family, into the world.

I think of Mary, leaning against her midwife, muscles clenched and brow sweaty, leaning into the possibility of new life. Glorious. Perfect.

These are the universal experiences of humanity: birth and death. And here we are, centuries later, celebrating them over and over.

Broken

Because it is a good time to be human,

because being human means being built of the dust of the earth, breathed with the life-breath of God,

because we are waiting for this perfectly imperfect birth again and again…

Because of these things, Advent is a good time to be broken.

This same body that is born will be broken, like bread, will bleed, like wine, and will die. This body is like ours: dust.

And we will celebrate this body’s death, over and over, like we celebrate its birth.

We will bow before the mystery that divinity, too, could look like this. That grace could come as this child and move as this man and die as this savior. That the story goes on, far beyond that death.

Church

When that body is dead (but only in one sense), the story will spread and grow, and lives will be pulled toward it, will be pulled into it, will be changed by it.

We will call them, too, body. They will be also human, also broken, also glorious.

They will long to speak the words that Jesus spoke, to live the love that Jesus lived, but sometimes they will fall short.

This, too, is universal: heartbreak.

The seeds of forgiveness must be planted deep and tended well enough to grow into fruit. This body must be gentle with itself, welcoming all its parts into the whole, lest one is forgotten and lost.

Advent is the re-beginning. Here we can start again, fresh as newborns, expectant as mothers. We can lean into the possibility of new life – our new life.

We can welcome God to come walk among us, to show us how to live in this body.

Advent is a good time to be human, a good time to be broken, a good time to be the church.

So let us wait for the Word together one more time.

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Folks are sharing stories of redemptive brokenness over at Prodigal Magazine for the Broken Hallelujah link-up. Please take some time to go visit…

When ministering ministers to you

I hung it on my office wall because I wasn’t ready to throw it away.

I hung it on my office wall because I put so much time into the worship I plan, and then the actual worship goes by so quickly.

Whether a worship activity flops or flies, it’s still so hard to let go of after the fact. It’s hard to believe how small a thing it can seem to others, my Big Idea or my Long Term Project.

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But I didn’t hang it on the wall because I needed it.

I didn’t hang it on the wall because in the planning and set-up and facilitating it can be hard to find time to sink in myself.

I didn’t hang it on the wall for those reasons because I didn’t know they were true.

But then the week got difficult and my heart was heavy, and I saw it: that prayer chain my youth group made for a late-night worship service last week. Hanging on my office wall.

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I walked over to it and read some of the prayers they had written for peace and unity, and my soul was flooded.

How precious and prophetic are the voices of young people in our churches. Their vision is incisive, cutting to the very heart of the matter. Their love is deep and wide and welcoming, in a way the church’s often struggles to be.

I stood there in my office, reading their prayers, and I worshiped. And I felt my heart held and nourished by the words that weren’t meant for me but still were.

I realized then that I hung that prayer chain on my office wall because we are in this together — connected, linked. Our worship is amplified by each other.

In the end, those to whom I minister are no less ministering to me.

The church is the people

It’s only my second week working in my new church in a new town.

I’m still trying to connect people’s names and faces to the 3-year-old photo directory that was left in my office.

But worship still feels like homecoming, like returning to my roots. I’m surprised at how familiar the liturgy is, the sung and spoken responses, the prayers and creeds. They slide easily off my tongue like familiar childhood bedtime stories, all deep and nostalgic.

I stay for the entire coffee hour, wanting to make sure I write down this person’s prayer requests, and meet that family’s new baby, and listen to stories from that person’s recent hiking adventure.

When there is no one left to help clean up, two mothers volunteer, and we stand in the kitchen together, trying to figure out where bowls and coffee cups go. As I stash the extra banana bread in the freezer (between the communion bread and the freeze pops) I ask how the system usually works for coffee hour volunteers.

“We’re almost perfect,” one woman tells me, and they both laugh. “Someone always steps up to help.”

This week, I guess, it is the three of us, even though I’m too new to know where anything belongs.

The other woman puts down her towel and turns to face me. “It’s like that song…” She sings,

I am the church. You are the church. We are the church together.
The church is not a building. The church is not a steeple.
The church is not a resting place. The church is the people.

I smile, nodding, and fill a ziploc bag with extra kettlecorn to take home for later.