Christmastide: Prayers for Advent Through Epiphany

If you are looking for a way to bring deeper meaning and a healthy rhythm to the crazy commercialism of the American Christmas experience, grab a copy of Christmastide: Prayers for Advent Through Epiphany by Phyllis Tickle. This modern adaptation of the sixth-century Benedictine Rule of fixed-hour prayer puts preselected prayers, psalms, readings, and refrains in your hands for everyday of the Christmas season. The daily offices are for morning, noon, and vespers.

Simple Suggestions (for churches with pews): Music

Idea One:

I think of singing as a spiritual discipline that can be used to mine the depths of Christian history and theology. Unfortunately many churches miss this rich opportunity and wind up focusing simply on a specific style of music (i.e. only singing songs published by Passion or Integrity). Music unites disparate lives into a single body while exposing hearts and minds to bigger truths. Music can be a great reminder that God, not ourselves, is the center of all things

Idea Two:

Write your own music! Have people create lyrics or melodies that address the uniqueness of your church and its journey. Explore themes relating to your core values, create lyrics based on a scripture passage, or write a unique song to sing each week that bolsters your sense of identity such as a benediction or call to worship.

Idea Three:

Create your own music book that reflects who you are and what is important to you. If you have multiple worship leaders or teams, this will help keep some consistency in the weekly worship. In addition, the congregation can take copies home in order to sing or play favorites during the week.

Simple Suggestions (for churches with pews): Not Singing

Idea One:

Not everyone enjoys singing. There are a wide variety of gifts represented in the congregation beyond music. Each of these gifts can be used as an act of worship during the time allotted for singing. Simple stations can be set up that allow worship through drawing, painting, journaling, guided prayers, etc.

Idea Two:

Use twitter as a means to offer live and unedited prayers and praises during the service. Hook a computer with internet access up to a projector or TV, set up a twitter account, and let the congregation express what is on their hearts as the Holy Spirit moves.

Idea Three:

Have people sign up to lead an element of the worship service. No strings (or predetermined methods) attached! Allow the volunteer to express that element of worship in any way he or she chooses. Use a volunteer coordinator to organize and touch base with the volunteers. This works when you truly allow people to lead an element of worship with no limitations placed on their creativity. The liturgical piece should be re-imagined and executed in any manner the volunteer chooses (are you catching the emphasis yet?). It is the ultimate in community participation and requires radical trust on the part of the staff who are used to planning and being in control the service. Occasionally things will bomb, but over time people will begin to discover their giftedness.

Free Images

I got a few emails asking for a good place to get free/low cost (and legal) images to use in worship. I get my free stuff from Stock Exchange and my cheap stuff from istockphoto. Istockphoto has a little bit higher quality images than Stock Exchange, but with some patience I can usually find what I need on Stock Exchange (for free). The key to Stock Exchange is sorting your search by the highest number of downloads or the highest number of comments. This brings the cream of the crop to the top of your search.

Simple Suggestions (for churches with pews): The Sermon

Idea One:

Do sermon preparation as a group and not as an individual locked in an office. You might have a small bible study on the assigned passage prior to the sermon being written in order to allow the Spirit to reveal issues from within the body.

Idea Two:

When a preacher asks questions of the congregation during a sermon, the questions often become rhetorical in the silence that follows. Instead, use seeded interviews to start a conversation. Prepare one or two people with the intended question in advance of the service. Call on them to speak first. This breaks the silence and gives everyone else time to contemplate the question before answering.

Idea Three:

Expand the use of narrative especially in the sermon (or in place of a traditionally structured sermon). Abduct people’s imaginations so that they see their story within the context of the narrative being shared. People more readily walk away from a sermon with a story that is internalized as opposed to three easily forgotten bullet points.

Jesus Creed

I intentionally took a several year hiatus from reading books on the topic of church while I was in school. With graduation finally under my belt, I decided it was time to break my fast and begin exploring what I have missed.

I ran across a book by Scot McKnight entitled Jesus Creed which I greatly enjoyed. It was quite a refreshing look at being a follower of Christ and I recommend it. In the process of reading the book, I discovered that McKnight writes a blog on Jesus and orthodox faith in the 21st century. It covers quite a diversity of topics and I mention here because it might be something that you would also enjoy. Plus, I realized that he is a professor at my future school and it never hurts to do a little ground work.

Simple Suggestions (for churches with pews): Quiet Practices

Idea One:

Occasionally incorporate silences, listening, and centering into the service. Explore a different rhythm to life and worship. A byproduct is that you will equip the congregation with several spiritual disciplines they can practice at home.

Idea Two:

My personal favorite is using Lectio Divina in the place of a sermon. Lectio Divina is an ancient Christian practice which is a slow, contemplative reading, praying, and listening to scripture. Lectio Divina can be practiced individually or corporately. If you are unfamiliar with the practice, Google and Amazon have plenty to say on the topic. In a worship setting the Holy Spirit does the teaching (instead of a preacher) through praying the scripture, listening in silence, and then small group discussion. This reinforces the ideas of stillness and silence while also allowing folks to interact in the pews.

Idea Three:

Do a visual Lectio Divina by using a painting or photograph on the main video screen. In today’s visual culture, this can be surprisingly powerful. It is one thing to read about Isaac as a sacrifice, it is quite another to see the Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio and interact with it.

Simple Suggestions (for churches with pews): The Video Screen

I’ve decided to offer a short series entitled Simple Suggestions. Simple Suggestions are worship related ideas aimed at the pew-bound that have the goal of broadening participation in worship by creating more trip points into God’s presence.

Idea One:

Take advantage of your video screen and use it for visual metaphors pertaining to the week’s main sermon/scripture idea. Use a series of images under the song and sermon slides that reinforce the main push of the day’s theme/message. For example: show a series of images that move from darkness to light as the service progresses or black and white pictures that transition into color, or crosses that become empty.

Idea Two:

With the proliferation of digital cameras and flip camcorders, allow the congregation to participate in creating these visual metaphors. Publish a list of future sermon topics and scripture passages. Have families or individuals come up with a series of images to help illustrate their interpretation of the scripture passage and theme. The same can be done with art instead of photographs.

Idea Three:

Magazines like Time or Newsweek use small sidebar articles within the context of a larger main article. These smaller, related articles are usually what I read first and they enhance what I get out of the main article. The video screen can be used in the same way. Instead of putting up an outline of what the preacher is saying during a sermon, why not put up quotes, scripture passages, prayers, images, etc. that reinforce the main idea of the sermon, but say it in different words.

Pray Without Ceasing

I have recently discovered the daily office or more accurately, I have finally started practicing the daily office after years of mild curiosity. I am hooked. I love this spiritual discipline and am sad I waited so long to start.

Simply explained the daily office (also called fixed hour prayer or the liturgy of the hours) is a set of beautiful prayers prayed at specific times throughout the day. For the hardcore, you can do this seven times a day. I like doing it three times a day.

Fixed hour prayer is the oldest spiritual discipline in the church stretching back to ancient Judaism. This type of prayer was regularly practiced in the early church, the medieval church, and even through the Reformation years. Fixed hour prayer fell out of use in American Protestantism, but is alive and well in Orthodox, Anglican, and Catholic traditions.

I use s series of books called The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle instead of an actual denominational prayer book. Tickle prints everything you need for three sets of prayers each day. A Prayer book comes with a steep learning curve and requires endless flipping back and forth to find the assigned prayers and readings.

Are these long winded time killing affairs? No. In a rush I can pray an office in 5 or 6 minutes. Taking time to contemplate and drink more deeply from these prayers takes longer of course. I was surprised to find that when I miss a day, I become miserable and long for those moments spent in beautiful prayer.

Labyrinth Reloads

Years ago I discovered Group Publishing's Prayer Path kit (we call it the labyrinth in a can). A friend named Keith Peeler and I used to set it up and and run it for youth groups, retreats, etc. It is a great resource and we witnessed God touching many lives through it.

After a while I started writing "reloads" for the prayer path. Reloads are new themes and stations for the prayer path labyrinth. However, you don't have to own Group's version in order to use the reloads (Click here for how to build your own labyrinth). You can use them in a your own labyrinth design, for a retreat, a prayer walk, worship service, etc.

The photo links to the right show reloads I've written for several different groups. If you are interested in using a reload that's already been written or in having one created for your church or group, drop me an email.

Building a Chartres Style Labyrinth

Labyrinths are truly one my most favorite spiritual exercises to both create and participate in. There are many websites out there that will teach you how to build a traditional prayer path that is a simple pathway to a center point and back.

However, I needed a labyrinth design that allowed room for interactive stations to be placed along the path. Group Publishing has a design that allows for this, but it was often too big for the rooms I used. So I created a new design based on the 800 year old labyrinth found in the Chartres Cathedral in France.

I designed this labyrinth as a square instead of a circle so that it would be easier to construct and built in space for nine stations. Click here for for instructions on how to make it.

My Favorite Reading

For the past several years, my favorite resource concerning changes going on in business and culture is called Trendwatching. Incredibly, this amazing resource is free.

Trendwatching uses 8,000+ trend spotters who scan the globe for emerging consumer trends, ideas, and insights. While the intended audience is business focused, the content allows amazing opportunities for the church to glimpse what's going on in the world around us and in the lives of our congregations.

Trendwatching does an incredible job if identifying and summarizing the forces and desires that shape our culture and institutions. For the church, it is helpful tool for understanding some of the tension between 21st century post-Christian culture and the modern church's structures and culture. It is also offers valuable insight into the types of theologies we need to develop in order to reach this new post Christian world.

Book of Common Prayer

Want to have some fun? The Anglican Church has preserved this amazing and beautiful little prayer book call the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). There is an online version of the book which can be found at BCPOnline. It is full of wonderful prayers and liturgies, some of them dating back to the early days of the church.

If you've never played with the BCP before, I am inviting you to give it a whirl. I think you'll dig what you discover in there. When you clink on the link above you'll arrive at the intro page with an index to the left. If you click on links like the Collects, the Daily Office, or Prayers and Thanksgivings you'll find some great stand alone prayers you can use in a variety of settings from individual to small group to corporate.

The real fun, however, is The Holy Eucharist service. Click on that link and navigate your way to Rite II. This is a standard worship service for an Anglican Church. It is a beautiful service. You can do it just as it is written-OR-you can run wild with it and make it your own.

I love giving this service to a group of folks and telling them to use the Rite II liturgy as the overall structure, but to express the individual elements of the service in anyway they can dream or imagine. Then I get out of the way and allow the Holy Spirit to go to work.

Purification

This is one of my all time favorite prayers of Confession. No matter how many times I read it, there is always something new to chew on. It is a Puritan prayer from the book Valley of Vision. You can pick up a copy from my bookstore.

The entire book is filled with incredibly rich and deep prayers like the one below. Most are too long for typical church use, but I still use selected parts or rewrite them into meditations and responsive readings.

LORD JESUS,
I sin-
Grant that I may never cease grieving because of it,

never be content with myself,
never think I can reach a point of perfection. I
Kill my envy, command my tongue, trample down self.
Give me grace to be holy, kind, gentle, pure, peaceable,
to live for thee and not for self,
to copy thy words, acts, spirit,
to be transformed into thy likeness,
to be consecrated wholly to thee,
to live entirely to thy glory.
Deliver me from attachment to things unclean,
from wrong associations,
from the predominance of evil passions,
from the sugar of sin as well as its gall,
that with self-loathing, deep contrition,
earnest heart searching
I may come to thee, cast myself on thee, trust in thee,
cry to thee,
be delivered by thee.
0 God, the Eternal All, help me to know
that all things are shadows, but thou art substance,
all things are quicksands, but thou art mountain,
all things are shifting, but thou art anchor,
all things are ignorance, but thou art wisdom.
If my life is to be a crucible amid burning heat, so be it,
but do thou sit at the furnace mouth
to watch the ore that nothing be lost.
If I sin willfully, grievously, tormentedly, in grace
take away my mourning and give me music;
remove my sackcloth and clothe me with beauty;
still my sighs and fill my mouth with song,
then give me summer weather as a Christian.

Stock Exchange

Good (& legal) worship graphics are hard to come by. I can't tell you how many watermarked photos (i.e. illegal) I've seen in worship services across the country. Several years ago I stumbled across a great free graphics site called Stock Exchange (www.sxc.hu).

Anyone can post photos to the site, but each photo must pass a quality review before it will be added to the site. Many of the submisions are from true professionals. Most of the other submissions are still heads and shoulders above what you'll find at the typical photo-album-online site. Once you register online, which is free, you have access to watermark free, royalty free graphics. These are accessed through a great search engine as well as multiple catagory listings.

I like to type in a word or words that visually represent a theme for a worship gathering. The ensuing results allow me to build a coherant graphic representation of the planned worship journey. That way the images used for the music, prayers, sermons, liturgies, etc. all reinforce and add to the worship experience intead of being a a random mix of disjointed pictures.

Textweek

Here is a fun website to get the brain jucies flowing as you plan a worship gathering. It is called Textweek and it is this massive gathering of links to resources including art, movies, lectionary readings, commentary, writings, sermon prep, group studies, reflections, and more! You search by entering a scripture passage or by the lectionary readings for a certain week. It will take you to a single page that shows all of the links that textweek has gathered for that passage or week.