Emerging Worship, Who Gets to Play?

I came across this post recently Emerging Worship is about Who Gets to Play from Chris Gonzalez

I think is it worth some conversation. Ryan Bolger (coauthor of Emerging Churches with Eddie Gibbs) writes:

I remarked recently that I had attended a near lifeless traditional church. More recently, I attended a traditional service that was filled with life. What was the difference? It really came down to who got to play and who didn’t.

Taking my cues from the Alt Worship network in the UK, new forms of worship do not equate to candles and coffee, videos and tables, stations and art. Rather, it is about access and inclusion. Who was invited and empowered to create and participate in worship? Was worship from the people or from the experts? Was the door open for any to come and share in the worship planning and execution? Did the worship itself invite a bodily encounter between a person and God, thus facilitating an engaged form of worship? Was there a deep sense that this is the people’s worship and represents our collective offering to God? Was worship from us, the average Jane and Joe in the congregation, or was it from the priests performing rites for us, to us, but not with us?

These are the primary contributions of Emerging Church worship, but that is not to say that it hasn’t existed in other movements and at other times. But I would say it is more explicit here than I have observed in other movements in the recent past.

I think Bolger is right as far as he goes, I share his affinity with the UK emerging church. But he doesn’t speak to the lack of inclusion in the emerging church of non Anglo worship contributions. Also absent is the question of the differences in how cultures express inclusion. What inclusion looks like to people of color may not be the same for Anglos. I buy what Bolger is describing but I also know it doesn’t resonate across all cultural and racial-ethnic experiences and faith expressions. I wish Bolger gave fuller expression to his statement about the emerging churches current worship practice.

My friend Steve Argue  adds another important perspective to this conversation in his post Worship… Expression and Controversy where he shares his thoughts on the book Diverse Worship: African-American, Caribbean & Hispanic Perspectives which addresses the question of how the contributions of non Anglo cultures  to Christian worship has been largely ignored. Steve writes

My Hebrew prof used to remind us that we really begin to get to know a language, not when we read it, or when we speak it, but when we dream it. I think there’s truth in that. When the language begins to permeate our very being, then we have hope of beginning to see things through other’s eyes.

For whatever reason, this is hard for us to do. Some are just not gifted in languages. But the problem is not intellect, it’s the heart has of us have a problem with moving beyond the comfort of our own cultures into the “unknown” of other cultures. Some of us might even be afraid that “other cultures’ might begin to shape “our culture.”

It hurt to read in this book, to learn how these forms of worship are striving to recover from years of oppression (intentional or unintentional) by euro-American, puritan pressure, that viewed certain forms as “spiritual” and others as not. It reminds me that expressions of worship and expressions of church are issues that run much deeper than whether we like the music or not. It seems as though we continue to perpetuate the abuse of control and power in our churches elevating personal preference to “theological conviction.”

The result is a community that becomes fearful of the outside world and is suspicious of anything that is different from the familiar. Even bigger, it keeps us from ever being stretched to grow outside our cultural boundaries and theological discovery.

I’ve always been grateful or people like Steve who are willing to read stuff outside of EC required reading list and incorporate it into their thought and perspective.

One of my continued concerns about worship in the emerging church in North America is the incredible lack of awareness of other worship perspectives outside of the the teach don’t preach, does some hymns read some liturgy and  add a djembe  and candles approach. Granted this is a generalization but to to much of one. Often African American and other worship styles that don’t fit the emerging church sensibilities are criticized and modernist and manipulation. There may be some truth to that but if we are to avoid racial constantinianism, we need to look at the post colonial story as Brian McLaren says and see how those worship forms we developed out of a response to a very oppressive and exclusion cultural perspective that i thinks till exists in  the church and is present in some ways in the emerging church.

So who gets to play? and What we do we get to play? Important questions to ponder.

Tags: emerging church, faith_expressions, inclusion, people_of_color, spiritual-practice, worship