Apart from playing risk all night, and falling asleep during the (very good) keynote speech (having never ever fallen asleep during anyone’s talk before) the other highlight of the weekend was the worship.
When I saw the programme for the weekend, it seemed to me that there was a lot of worship, I didn’t know how I would be able to run away and hide. I don’t like worship, or, I don’t like the worship that I assumed was meant – specifically, I don’t like singing songs that make me a hypocrite because i don’t believe in them. My assumption was wrong. The worship wasn’t sitting in a circle and singing happy lovely isn’t god wonderful songs to a badly played guitar, it was creative and real.
It involved plastercine and pipe cleaners.
I like creative worship, because there is no expectation of what people get out of it – when singing songs about God, it is expected that the worshiper will get closer to God, and will dispay the emotions contained in the song, there is a certain expection of how you act during certain songs, raising hands to praise God, clapping, doing actions ect, and there is little room for other emotions that aren’t contained in the song. None directive and creative worship is different, you can get from it what you want, if you want to praise god using plastercine, then you can. If you want to rage at god using plastercine, then you can. If you want to make aliens on unicyles, giant snails and ducks and generally act like a small child – then, you can. And each expression of worship is as valid as the next.
But that said, I also love liturgy – especially common worship night prayer (which was used on friday night) – I grew to love it whilst doing it in the church of fools, and I think I will alway associate it with the fellowship i found in the 3D church – and just the lovely words, the fact it doesn’t change night by night which makes memorising it much easier. That and the fact that it’s a late night prayer, and I’m a late night person, so I attempt to do it or at least a part of it every night.
I think that those last two paragraphs kinda contradict each other – one critises the narrowness of set words for worship, and the other seems to affirm it. I suppose the difference between the more evangelical sung worship that I don’t really like and the liturgy is that the liturgy seems to me to have a wider range of emotions than most modern worship music does. The same goes for older hymns and other forms of worship music such as taize and the songs coming from emerging church groups.
There will be an SCM conference part 3 about the trade justice stuff, just in case anyone at all is interested, but as it’s half eleven and I’ve been running on empty all day I’m going to sleep.
Good night.