The Next Worship (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

What does worship look like for a college student movement seeking to reach out to the campus in all of its ethnic diversity? What might it look like on their campuses, at their leader­ship training camps or when they gather thousands of students to mobilize them for global mission? To get an idea, let’s first take a look back.

At InterVarsity’s earliest Urbana Student Missions Conferences in the 1940s and 50s, worship reflected both the student population at the gathering as well as the churches they attended: organ, piano and choir. As the years passed, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA and InterVarsity Canada, the hosting organizations of Urbana, saw the opportunity and embraced the challenge of adapting the worship to reflect the changes in our North American context. Historically, music had been led with a piano on one corner of the platform, organ on the other and the worship leader at the middle. Music at Urbana was sung from a hymnal; primary hymns, and later black spirituals and short choruses were sung.

A shift occurred in 1970, when the worship leadership moved from being a white male to an African Canadian, who led until 1987. Then in 1990 a band was introduced, which was composed of a multiethnic team, but led by a white male. There were many stakeholders in this transition, and change is always hard. As Alison Siewert, performing arts director for Urbana 15, reflected on that era she said, “It was messy, incomplete, and fraught—it was funny to think back about how many swamps we had to wade through and to be grateful again that Jesus got us through them.”1

Urbana 93 brought a significant change with the introduction of shared leadership. Using ethnically diverse leadership of both women and men allowed each to fully utilize his or her gifts. One leader was gifted at pastoral direction for congregations, another excelled in arranging music and a third was passionate about developing leaders on the team. In 1996 these same leaders were able to put processes and structures in place that set the foundation for worship teams that followed. They also expanded the selection of global music, using a few foreign-language songs, but the default was the dominant culture. They also recorded a live CD to be used as a training tool for the movement. Every decade brought significant transition that affected both the conference and InterVarsity’s worship culture across the movement.

Dr. Monique Ingalls, an ethnomusicologist and professor at Baylor University, describes Urbana as “earthly rehearsals for the heavenly choir” in her study on how our worship shapes our under­standing of what is to come.

On the opening night of the triennial Urbana (Missions) conference on December 27, 2006, I sit in the midst of an excited crowd of an estimated 23,000 college students gathered in St. Louis’ Edward Jones Dome. Attendees stream into the stadium, filling the sloping bleachers on three sides of the dome which face a wide front stage. The gathered participants cheer loudly when the twelve members of the Urbana Worship Team ascend the left side of the stage. . . . After leading the gathered congregation in two upbeat gospel-inflected and rock style songs, the team begins to play an energetic, jazz-inflected instrumental introduction, with two trumpets playing close harmonies over a chord riff established by the band’s guitarists. The excited crowd begins clapping on the offbeats as the worship band vocalists sing in unison a prayer for the strength “to exalt and to extend Jesus’ name globally.” The vocalists break into three-part, gospel-inflected harmonies to express the chorus’s petition: “Cover the earth with Your glory/Cover the earth with the sound of heaven.” The second verse of the song continues the theme of the first: a prayer that the “sound of heaven” be used to extend God’s kingdom on earth. . . . In the Urbana participants’ singing of “Cover the Earth,” a song that juxtaposes eschatological imagery from various biblical sources, the dominion of God’s kingdom covering the earth is represented by sound. The chorus’s repeated prayer (“Cover the earth with your glory!”) asks for God to bring God’s kingdom to earth, represented sonically by a “new sound” being released from heaven—a sound that is then extended to earth through the agency of singers serving as God’s “instruments.” Speech, song, and shouting—the joyful sounds of the faithful—are all sonic agents in preparing the way for God’s kingdom to come to earth.2

Worship in the context of InterVarsity’s campus fellowships was dramatically changing too. John, a student from a university in Wisconsin, was seeing more African American and Hmong students in his fellowship.3 He, like many other student leaders, needed to expand his worship practices, evangelism and leadership to adapt to the increasing diversity. John connected with the newer students, local leaders and worship leaders within InterVarsity who had been leading in a multicultural context. In local fellowships, college students and campus ministers were also attempting to explore what glorifying God looked like in diverse settings.

In each season of the journey for InterVarsity the question asked was not, What do we prefer in worship? or even What do students prefer in worship? As a movement they had to reimagine worship for a changing student generation. Today, many of our churches and worshiping communities are wrestling with these same questions. Our denominations and parachurch organizations are feeling the same growing pains and maybe even encountering the same messiness. It is no longer a question of whether we like or want diversity. The church is diverse. And congregational worship should reflect the diversity of God’s people, even if a local congregation itself is not diverse.

I was one of the InterVarsity student worship leaders during the seasons of change, so I know it wasn’t just about being ahead of the curve. I was heavily involved leading a small group, a worship team and a gospel choir. I attended camps and conferences. I remember Urbana 96 as a volunteer staff, and I stood on the stage with fear and trembling as we led students in worship during Urbana 03. Questions about worship and culture shaped me. I have leaned into these questions as I’ve collaborated with worship leaders across the country for events such as Christian Community Development Association gatherings and Evangelical Immigration Table prayer summits. And I have collaborated with colleagues to imagine worship for the changing church as I’ve led worship and facilitated seminars for the Willow Creek Association and Calvin Symposium on Worship. These opportunities and challenges so deeply affected me that as a seminary student I took them into my classes on church history, theology, preaching and worship. We have explored this messy way forward in the Evangelical Covenant Church and the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), with whom I’ve consulted and had fellowship.These burning questions drive people to my seminars on multiethnic worship and reconciliation. Sitting with these questions, creating new paradigms in community and exploring opportunities to shape people’s imagination in diverse worship for almost two decades has led me to deep values and principles that I want to share with everyone.

I wish I could offer “Multicultural Worship in a Box,” but it doesn’t exist. I offer only stories of roads walked, painful blisters and things learned along the journey: a breadth of application based on principles and values. This book describes a range of options and contexts. I have had the honor of working with worship leaders from varied ethnic, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. They too have walked, blistered and learned with me. I write this book to honor them and the work we have done to develop resources for the church. I’m writing now because this is the right moment.

Because this is a topic with a variety of opinions, it feels like a huge risk to write about it. But I think the time has come to explore this together. As you read, I hope you will think of your own stories and examples. None of us has the answers—it’s not one-size-fits-all—but collectively we can imagine new ways.

Expressions of worship help capture the imagination of congregants. And through worship we experience the now-but-not-yet of God’s kingdom: unity, freedom and justice now—but not yet. Therefore we must create worship services that enable prophetic imagination in which people can see the future reality of God’s kingdom breaking into the present. Justo González says, “Christian worship is, among other things, the place where we catch a glimpse of ‘the future Reign from which and toward which God calls us’—a glimpse that both supports us in our pilgrimage and judges us in our attempts to be too settled.”4

Worship is the communal gathering of God’s people in which we glorify God for his person and actions. When I use the word worship I will be speaking of the congregational aspect, not of the holistic definition, which includes every aspect of our lifestyle. This definition has been shaped by time spent in the Scriptures, in community, with mentors and other authors on worship. The following are two other definitions of worship that have influenced me.

Worship refers to the self-expression of a particular church community in a public celebration of its faith. It has both vertical and horizontal dimensions: one’s relation to God and one’s relationships with fellow worshipers. It is an...