Page 45 - PC Winter 2023-24

Connection
REFLECTIONS
How Well Are We Gathering for Worship?
presbyterian.ca
WINTER 2023
PRESBYTERIAN
45
By the Rev. Brian Fraser, Brentwood Presbyterian Church in Burnaby, B.C.
We Christians do this every week, at least once: we gather for wor- ship. Usually, it’s sometime on a Sunday. Sometimes, like for Brentwood Presbyterian Church’s Jazz Evensongs, it’s on a week- day night. But we do it, and often. It’s our primal communal spiritual discipline as a Christian church.
It’s more like “we are gath- ered” than “we gather.” The Initia- tor of this gathering is the Spirit of the Creator’s Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. We normally shorten that trinitarian naming to “God.” That’s what we’ll do for the rest of this opinion piece.
As we are engaged in the multi- ple levels of preparation for being gathered into worshipping well, it might be inspiring and instructive to engage in dialogue with folks who are respected reflective prac- titioners of the art of gathering and convening. Two books that recent- ly came to my attention and give us easy access to much of that wisdom are The Art of Convening: Authentic Engagement in Meet- ings, Gatherings, and Conversa- tions by Craig and Patricia Neal, with Cynthia Wold, (San Francis- co, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publish- ers, 2011) and Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2018).
Both books break down the dy- namics of getting together for a purpose without making it a task
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the other horrors brought about by Hitler’s regime? Certainly not. Can anyone imagine what that revenge might entail? Who is wise enough to administer such vengeance?
Perhaps an even more striking example of non-vengeance would be the 1995 Truth and Reconcili- ation Commission appointed by Nelson Mandela, President of
to perform, or a system to man- age, or an event to control. Think carefully. How many of those agendas are infecting your wor- ship planning? It’s not that perfor- mance, management and a degree of control are not important, but if they dominate your work on this, you may be missing the inspiring energy that enables the joyful and playful soul of our encounter with God in worshipping.
In The Art of Convening, the authors created a “Convening Wheel” to help us imagine ways of configuring the flow of meeting together well. Their purpose is to enable authentic engagement that connects and energizes people through the meaning generated by the gathering. In worshipping, that meaning is generated by God in par tnership with all those involved.
In The Art of Gathering, Parker notes that one of the first things that happens in communities “de- scending into authoritarianism” is that the right to assemble and sig- nificant par ticipation in those gath- erings are restricted or prohibited. She envisions the real benefits of good gatherings: “to put the right people in a room and help them collectively think, dream, argue, heal, envision, trust, and connect for a specific larger purpose ... places and people and what hap- pens between them [are] at the centre of every coming together” (pp. ix, xi).
Parker provides sage advice on these elements—deciding why you are really gathering, discern- ing who might be invited, being
South Africa, and chaired by his appointee Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Commission, rather than extracting vengeance for all the monstrous acts of former white regimes, brought perpe- trators and victims together for contrition and formal pardon. This event surprised the whole world in avoiding the bloodbath nearly everyone expected.
constructively active as the host, creating a temporary alternative world, attending to the logistic, encouraging “sprout” speeches rather than “stump” speeches, causing good controversy and ending well.
As I continue to explore and experiment with how this wisdom can inspire and instruct our Chris- tian worshipping, I recognize that I make three basic assumptions about the God/others/self rela- tionship as it works in our gather- ings for worship:
1. God invites us to be creative partners in the act of imag- ining and implementing our gatherings for worship;
2. In this partnership, we are ambassadors of God’s for- giving and reconciling love for the whole world, and worshipping, at its best, nourishes our souls to flour- ish in that missioning;
3. Worshipping is a joyful dance with our Creator in which we learn new steps to redemp- tive melodies, rhythms and harmonies of blessing.
With that understanding of the dynamics at work in worshipping, what benefits might our attentive dialogue with the wisdom of con-
Jesus, for Christians, is the perfect example of this wisdom when from the Cross he acknowl- edges that God alone can rectify this awful atrocity taking place. Jesus moves even further away from vengeance when in his prayer he asks God NOT to take vengeance. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23: 34).
vening and gathering yield and what questions might you con- sider to improve those benefits?
First, continually clarify the purpose for which you are be- ing drawn into worship: it is to be nourished and to flourish as blessings in God’s world. Is the whole flow of your gathering de- signed for a call-and-response encounter with God that inspires and instructs your community?
Second—and this one poses a serious challenge to the ways most of our worshipping is de- signed—make worshipping more of a conversation about the invi- tation from God to be just with kindness and humility (Micah 6:6–8) and to provoke love and good works (Hebrews 10:24). Imagine and design worshipping to be part of a broader suite of conversations that make up your church. What can you do to in- crease the space for dialogue in your worship gatherings, giving God, others, and self an oppor- tunity to contribute a voice to the encounter?
Third, consider making your worship more like a jazz gig. Mon- ty Alexander, one of my favourite jazz pianists, once described the dynamics of a jazz performance
Vengeance and its always pre- sent partner, hate, are what lead finally to such awful consequenc- es, as we are presently witness- ing in the Middle East. The murder and kidnapping of the innocent in the kibbutzim, the shelling of hundreds of Israelis, the present siege by deprivation of water, food, electricity of millions of Pal- estinians, the bombing of hospi-
this way:
“[A jazz gig] at its best is a
situation in which the participants willingly support each other, working together as one and go- ing along with the ‘driver’s’ di- rections, each player bringing virtuosity, optimism, mutual re- spect, good will, and, of course, the desire to ‘make it feel good’ for all human beings in the gen- eral proximity. ...There should be that intangible ideal ‘to take flight.’ The marvellous gift of increased camaraderie comes about from this shared ideal.”
I am firmly convinced that worshipping is meant by God to generate the same good feelings, to inspire and instruct its par- ticipants in how “to take flight” in their calling to be blessings (Exodus 12:3b) in the care of creation.
There are lots of examples of this kind of convening and gather- ing in congregations that I know. I won’t give them here. Rather, I invite you to assess what’s go- ing on in your congregation and ask how you can use some of the ideas in this article to improve the hospitality through which you partner with God in generating hope and healing.
tals, all make it clear that we sinful humans cannot be trusted to turn our wrath, our vengeance, into justice. Leave that to the One who has the ultimate love and wisdom to accomplish that transfigura- tion. “I am the Lord.”
Christians, Jews, people of all faiths and humanists of no faith must unite behind a better policy, a hopeful alternative.