Inspiration…. Last week I was in Melbourne, Australia at “Babble:on” a gathering of people around the “arts and faith” banner. It was an inspiring event with a day dedicated to each of education, ministry and artists. The inspiration for the event itself was the Blake Prize Touring Exhibition – thirty finalist works commenting on spirituality. The Blake has been operating since 1951 and is a significant event in the arts scene in Australia, even worldwide.

A work called “My Prayer is…” by Cath Braid, Rolla Khadduri and the women of Chiral in Pakistan, particularly inspired me. This was a board 119 x 187 cm (4’ x 6’ in) with several hundred cloth-covered buttons on it. (See the work on this video, 3.53 min in.) Each button had been hand-made and embroidered in Arabic script with the prayer of one of the contributing women.

Simple prayers apparently (my knowledge of Arabic is zilch) like “I pray that my country gets rid of terrorists”, “I pray that my daughter gets to go to school”, “I pray that the electricity problem gets resolved soon.”

The women behind the social enterprise enable local women to sustain traditional skills to break the cycle of poverty while still being able to maintain their family life.

I found this work moving in both its simplicity and back-story. I also saw the potential for making use of the art form in a worship event. Prayer-button making. Give people a small cardboard disk, a small piece of fabric a felt pen, and glue. Have them write their prayer on the fabric, cover the button (perhaps with the prayer on the inside for confidentiality?) then hang the buttons on a panel. Use as either a station or by people remaining in their seats/pews.

I would acknowledge the source of inspiration in a short sentence in the station or service notes, with a URL if possible. This helps to reinforce the arts/faith connection and lets people explore further if they are interested.

My friend Robyn Robertson has a “Prayer Cloak” she uses in a similar way. Robyn is a fabric artist. She creates wearable art. She made a large and beautiful white cloak. With the cloak she makes available cotton and needles as well as several sizeable boxes of small trinkets and a huge range of buttons.

People are invited to attach anything of their choosing as a symbol of their prayer, a commitment made, or whatever. People bring their own symbols as well. During services and at any other prayer event in the life of the church the cloak is available. Small groups will sit around it talking and praying and sewing… I once borrowed it as a station for my own worship event.

Over the last 7 years the cloak has become covered with people’s prayers and is so heavy and delicate as to be almost immoveable. It’s wonderful to be able to go to it and find symbols sewn on at previous significant occasions.

Inspiration… Art inspires worship.

Guerilla and transitional worship events also inspire worship. What is done in these events can often be brought into a community worship event in modified or reframed form. I was delighted and excited to see what Journey Church in Franklin, Tennessee did last week. They ran an event called “Space: a soul environment for prayer and calibration” that they described as a six-hour “interactive, stations-based, transitional worship space. People were invited to come and go as they pleased at this Tuesday night event, with sung worship provided between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Stephen Proctor said, “… musical led worship by sons and daughters and our friend Daniel Bashta, except we all want that part to be like another station, another layer, not the focal point. A blend of community and transitional worship!”

I think this sort of extended worship event, open to the public, but in a regular worship space, is increasingly needed today. It caters to people who, for whatever reason, can’t or don’t want to come to something on a Sunday morning at a set time. Also people who find the usual church format of sung worship and preacher hard to cope with.

I ended my book with the hope that we would see this sort of worship event being offered more and more often at locations around the world. I hope Katie Strandlund or Stephen Proctor, or others involved at Journey will tell us about it in more detail soon.

Inspiration… Transitional worship inspires Community worship.

The month before Space, Shari Miller curated a beautiful worship space at a Methodist denominational conference in Iowa. Ted Lyddon Hatten introduced this to us in his inspiring and recent guest blog post.

Advocacy Day was about immigration issues. Shari curated a complete environment where everything from start to finish contributed to the experience. People were made to feel uncomfortable as they were stripped of their familiar forms of identification at the entrance, and forced to sign documents in a language they didn’t understand. New ID cards handed out carried the true stories of local people who had struggled with immigration issues. The art work and design had significant depth and made strong political comments in very subtle and easily overlooked ways. Each station was an art installation in itself that contributed to the overall installation and to the broader transitional/guerilla worship event. Wonderful stuff. So many of her ideas are readily transferable into community worship settings.

Inspiration… Transitional/Guerilla worship and art inspire community worship.

In the same way that art can feed installation-based worship, so installation-based worship can feed regular community worship. So don’t right this stuff off as something you could never do in your setting. Pick the eyes out of what others do, reframe it, recontextualise it, steal it, make it your own.

I quoted Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules of film making #5 in my book. Its worth repeating here as a final word of encouragement. (His rules 1 to 4 could also apply to worship curators.)

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean- Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

This ends my 12 week ramble through the book The Art of Curating Worship: Reshaping the role of worship leader.

My very grateful thanks to those who have inspired me with their work, and allowed me to share it with others.

I’m taking a break from regular blogging now. I want to concentrate my sparse spare time on writing and gathering materials for a book that builds on this one. I’m talking with a number of worship artists and curators about some of their specific works of worship.

I want to introduce a range of artists and curators, and present how and why they have curated particular worship events, with a lot of images, to inspire others. There is so much wonderful worship starting to be curated – from community to guerilla – but we need a lot more.

If you have curated one or more worship events that make good use of some of the principles in my book, or know of someone who has anywhere in the world, I’d love to hear from you.

Have fun curating!

(I would like to acknowledge the good humoured support of Tilley and Lucy in putting this blog together.)