How are stories acted out in your worship events?

by | September 26, 2011

A couple weeks ago, our theme was “story.” This week, our theme is “dramatic arts.” What’s the difference? These two are related, but not the same.

A story is an account of events – real or invented – that is written or told.

A drama is a story, acted out. “Drama” comes from the Greek dran, meaning “do, act.” Dramas involve actors, not just readers. Dramas involve action, not simply description. Dramas involve three, spacial dimensions. A story in a book literally lies flat.

The dramatization of stories happens everywhere in our culture. The media of television, music video, film, and of course the stage all utilize the dramatic arts. But how are the dramatic arts used in church? What does drama have to do with worship?

The first thing that comes to my mind when someone says “dramatic worship” is ritual. My memory scans back to the times I’ve sat in a Roman Catholic mass or other “high” church Eucharist and witnessed the presiders performing “high” drama. The vestments, utensils, and gestures of the celebrant mimic the costumes, props, and physical actions of the actor in a stage play. The story content is different, but in each, the narrative is brought to life by real-life action, not just words.

“Dramatic worship” also makes me think of the that old 1990’s formula for successful drama in church:

… use a six to eight-minute contemporary sketch (comic or serious) to introduce the topic the pastor will address. -Steve Pederson, Drama Ministry, 19

It’s easy to be critical of this particular use of drama for worship, however I have personally experienced sketches in church that made a powerful, lasting impression on me and the others present, helping promote the transformation that worship is supposed to bring.

How else is drama presented in worship? Some churches write, direct, and perform full-length plays, either in a regular worship service, or as a supplementary event. Others take portions of scripture or other poetic writings and divide them up for a number of people to deliver verbally as a “reader’s theater,” with emotion and expression that isn’t typically present in a regular reading of text.

How exactly are stories acted out in your worship events? Which of the forms discussed in this post have you tried successfully? Are there others you use regularly that aren’t listed here? Share with our readers your experience with drama in worship in the comments of this blog post.

Which dramatic arts are used in your worship events? (Choose all that apply.)

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Image © iStockphoto

Share
Share
Categories: Q of the Week Leave a Comment

A Thousand Voices. A Single Story.

by | September 22, 2011

There was so much hub-bub recently surrounding Rob Bell’s book (Love Wins) about heaven and hell. Either people were wrestling with what they perceived as “universalism” or some groups struggled with what seemed to them to be an obvious and long standing theory about spiritual afterlife. I have absolutely no desire to rehash those talking points, but I have to admit how fascinated I was by the fear that seemed to resonate from my own tradition (Evangelical) that was masking as preservationist. It got me thinking – as a follower of Jesus and somebody’s who’s tied my life to the Nicene Creed – that the conversations that followed Rob’s book were as close to Interfaith Dialogue as some of us might venture.

What a pity.

There’s a Native American proverb that sits on my inspiration board: “It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.” The power of many being greater than the power of the one. The ideas and experiences of many being more potent and – maybe even more necessary – than the experience of the one.

We have started to embrace this idea in worship… and to accept what comes with that: the messy expressions, the ambiguity of mystery, the humility it takes to receive another’s experience as something that informs our own. Pulling this philosophy into our exploration of GOD and spiritual formation is something that we’re still working out practically, even if working on it theologically is still the sticking point for some of us.

But what if it’s absolutely true that it takes a thousand voices to tell this Story? In Paul Knitter’s book “Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian” he starts with the idea that our development and spiritual and emotional maturity will naturally find a place to settle, to make ourselves comfortable, and to become stiff, unbending and unlearning. Unaware – to use my own word. The challenge is to venture out on a spiritual quest of sorts, to intentionally and purposefully venture into the traditions and philosophies of another faith and carry back into our own tradition what is enriching and beautiful and true.

All truth is GOD’s truth. All beauty is GOD’s beauty. How can one not read the works of medieval rabbis or the Sufi poets and not encounter that transcendent element? What might be the obstacle to that practice?

As we contemplate the idea of interfaith dialogue, especially from the perspective of worship curators and artists, maybe it’s best if we let go of the notion that dialogue is talking and embrace the idea that dialogue often begins with deep listening. Start with letting the poetry and sacred texts of other faiths sit with you as prayer or meditation. Challenge your experience with the low drone of listening to fervent men in prayer.

I love that image that Knitter brings… of venturing into another territory and drawing the most beautiful and true resources to carry back in the hopes of enriching my own tradition and exploding my naturally shrinking GOD-box. What would this look like in your context? How can you draw from the thousand voices to tell this Story? We could start here – with dialogue between our traditions, sharing resources, and celebrating our experiences.

Peace to you on this great spiritual quest.

Image © iStockphoto

Share
Share
Categories: Curation Leave a Comment

The Story Wall

by | September 15, 2011

I’m sitting in a room with a large group of relative strangers watching as their pens move very thoughtfully over the paper in front of them. In about fifteen minutes, this group will have their names changed from Mr. Blue Plaid Shirt and Ms. Fabulous Hair to Dave Who Learned To Play Guitar As a Response To The Bullies and Nancy Jo Who Marked Childhood Decembers With an Advent Wreath. My newly acquainted colleagues are working through an exercise to capture their stories on paper – but not the way we tend to tell our stories. No, this is a chance to take them from a chronologically contained relaying of the cognitive and anonymous and move into a fluid unfolding, move them into the vulnerable beauty of their unique human experience. Some of their prose makes me laugh. Some of it moves me by it’s tenderness. And some of it scrapes like fingernails along my skin with its tragedy and grief.

This wasn’t simply an exercise to nurture our creativity, even though we’re sitting under the projected image of The Art of Curating Worship and I’m here to prompt people’s sacred imaginations; it seems that we are exercising our ability to open up, to be compassionate, to challenge our expectations of who we are and who that is sitting next to us.

The pieces are hanging on the wall now, moving slightly in the blow of the creaky air conditioner. This section of dry wall seems animated with spirit and soul, dancing under the stories that dress her. It’s hard to not notice it. It’s harder to not be curious about the hearts laid bare on paper.

Story is such a powerful tool. It seems to be woven into our deepest humanity. No wonder Christ used story as his greatest practice for awakening the soul! It draws us out of our assumptions, our selfish expectations, our own limited (and sometimes limiting) experiences. Story has the unique potential to serve as a portal to the mysterious and transcendent, to affect us in a holistic way. Reading these narratives fluttering on the wall engaged my heart in people’s experience, provoked my imagination with their pictures and landscapes, challenged my prejudices – and in turn, my body responded with goosebumps, sinking stomach, bubbling laughter. Story draws us deeper into an experience of our humanity by inviting us into an experience of another’s.

The invitation into experience and out of myself is powerful. And possibly transformative, depending on the story we’re telling.

Worship breaks down to a beautiful story of a GOD pursuing humanity with a reckless love – at least once the props are pulled away and the theological arguments quiet. How does it change your work as a curator if you approach worship as a storyteller? What words would you use?

Pulling the story of GOD out of either an emotional moment in time or a chronological relaying of historical events and into a prose and flow of encounters, experiences and insights into the heart of GOD makes the worship narrative a profoundly reshaping experience – and the narrative makes room for everybody. It can invite everybody. It can provoke everybody.

So be a bard, a story-teller, a poet. It is, after all, the first language of our souls.

Share
Share
Categories: Curation Leave a Comment

The Better Story

by | September 14, 2011

When I was eleven, my best friend and I had a weakness for tween romance novels. So, we decided to write our own, naming our main character “Chrystal.” My friend would take home the composition book one night and write a chapter then I’d take it the next to add my chapter. But it was finished after only three chapters. Because it went like this:

Chapter One: Chrystal starts at a new school
Chapter Two: Chrystal sees a boy across the classroom and hopes he likes her
Chapter Three: Boy expresses his love for Chrystal
The End

We didn’t have time for conflict or suspense. The only thing we cared about was the kiss i.e. resolution. It was the worst story ever written.

Which brings to mind one of the best stories I’ve ever read, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Early in the story, the claim is made that this story will make you believe in God. Quite a tall order! (As the narrator, himself, admits.) Without giving away how the author attempts this, the following excerpt gives some insight into the author’s appreciation of the connection between God and story:

I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: ‘White, white! L-L-Love! My God!”–and his deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story. p.64

As Life of Pi and many other great books have shown me, story has the power to help the reader experience God and, as such, can inform our theology. In conversations with my academic friends, when we’re sharing about important books which have shaped our faith and theology, I’m often surprised by how many of mine are stories.

Here are a few which have been life-changing:

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
The Princess and The Goblin and The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Silence by Shusaku Endo (scheduled to be released as a major film by Martin Scorcese in 2013)

Read excerpts from these or books from this list at a worship event, or invite a few individuals to share a spiritual kind of book review (i.e. ask them to share how the book helped them see God in a new way).

Consider the bible’s overarching story (Creation, Fall, Redemption, The Church) and invite responses to it by asking questions like:

  • Why, if God knew that we would turn away, were humans created in the first place?
  • Why did God wait thousands of years between that moment of Fall and the fulfillment of the promise through Jesus to restore us?
  • And why, once we’d been restored to God through Jesus, did God decide to keep the world going for thousands more years?

Experience stories from the bible as the characters lived them: without knowing the resolution. Be Joseph in prison without knowing he would one day become second-in-command over the kingdom. Be Abraham at the altar with his son before he saw the ram in the bushes. Because that’s how we experience our own stories – they’re incomplete.

Invite worshipers to write a story of how God has worked in their own lives in the way bible stories are often told.

How can you view the whole service/worship event as a narrative? Consider elements of a story like setting, characters, sequence, exposition, conflict, climax and resolution to create your story-event.

Share
Share
Categories: Curation Leave a Comment

Story: Easier Access to Truth

by | September 13, 2011

Two scriptures: 1 Corinthians 13 and Luke 15:11-31.

Both reveal the nature of God’s love. Both describe the extraordinary, counter-intuitive lengths to which true love will go in pursuit of the beloved. Both very different in the way this message is delivered.

The first, the famous “love chapter,” has endured as one of the most known passages of the bible. Most weddings I’ve attended use it as part of the celebration, either read aloud by someone or at least printed in the program. There is poetry – meaning a ‘special intensity of feeling’ – in this group of verses. Part of this comes from the arresting imagery. A loveless, tongues-speaker pictured as a “clanging cymbal.” The power to literally “move mountains” through faith recognized as “nothing” when compared with the power to love.

Perhaps, part of the long-abiding nature of this passage is its sheer density. It is not a lengthy treatise on love. It is a chapter on love – and a short chapter at that. In most of the New Testament epistles, one is hard-pressed to find such a focussed and essential group of verses on a singular theme.

The second scripture passage, the parable of the “prodigal” or “lost” son has also endured. In fact, it may be the most “famous” of Jesus’ parables, inside and outside the Church. As with most of Jesus’ parables, it is simply told. He does not elaborate on the meaning (at least not in the biblical document as it stands). Jesus just tells the story.

And, this one is full of connection points with the human experience. Each one of us desires success. At some point, we each feel compelled to strike out on our own, becoming separate from the ones who brought us into the world, attempting to find our own fortune. We also each experience failure, which is often accompanied by that feeling of the need for forgiveness. But there is one thing this story illustrates that many of us have no experience with, whatsoever. That is, unconditional forgiveness from the one whom we’ve offended.

These twenty verses in Luke’s gospel are similar in length and theme to the Corinthian love poem. However, there is a fundamental difference between them that makes one a better communicator of godly love than the other. That difference? One passage is abstract. The other is concrete.

It turns out, that when it comes to communication, “concrete” is not the impenetrable barrier it is in the world of construction. On the contrary, it is like an open door. In the realm of communication, “concrete” refers to a noun that embodies a particular quality, instead of referring to the quality itself. The quality itself is considered “abstract.”

To put it another way, the quality or idea of “love,” by itself, is abstract. On the other hand, an actual example of one who loves – such as we find in the character of the prodigal’s father – is concrete. Through the concrete actions of the lover, we learn infinitely more about love than we do through love’s definition. We can discuss what love is using abstract terms, even poetic ones. Love is patient. Love is kind, etc. This is truth. It is powerful truth, if one can get at it. Not all of us have the patience (or, frankly, the intellect) to get at it.

The other approach – the one taken by Jesus time and time again – is to embody the abstract using story. In the story at hand, Jesus chose not to philosophize about love’s nature, but to illustrate it. Love is not merely discussed or described, it is embodied in character and plot. Love is not rationalized and quantified in any sort of scientific way, by Jesus. And yet, the hearer of the story Jesus tells comes away having deeply internalized the reality of love, even as it cannot be articulated in rational terms or measured with accepted standards.

What we’re arguing here is simple. Story is a better method for communicating truth. Story is better than philosophical argument. Story is better than an abstract treatise. Story is, we could argue, even better than the poetic approach. By “better,” I mean that story provides easier access to the wisdom of God as it successfully provides flesh and bone to ideas that are otherwise wispy ghosts, flitting in and out of our field of vision and range of grasp. Story has the power to still those ghosts before us, allowing us the chance to observe the idea in action.

Now, we should probably stop for a moment. I realize that it is very possible you consider the abstract point of this post a little hard to grasp. Allow me, if you will, to try explaining it another way:

Once upon a time, in a land, far, far away, there once was…

 

Image © iStockphoto

Share
Share
Categories: Formation Leave a Comment
Next Page »