In Christian circles we like to quote Romans 12 and say worship is a lifestyle and not really about music at all. In fact, my blogging comrade Arron wrote a good post about this last week, and I agree with the points he makes.

However, while we say this, we plan “worship services” which usually include mostly music and a sermon. The budgets for “worship” and the “worship staff” and “worship programs” are often some of the largest in the entire church. And many meetings, conferences, blogs, and books revolve around rehearsing, resourcing, and relevant-izing these 15-30 minutes of music each week.

One of my friends plans to start a church that moves away from this focus. In fact, he plans to include no music in their weekly gatherings at all; instead he’ll include observational and improvisational comedy that he believes will connect more easily and more genuinely with a non-Christian crowd.

He asked me to join a small team for a day-long meeting to brainstorm about this new project, and I’d love to hear your thoughts before I fly to California next week.  Why has singing and playing music become the only method for corporate worship? Is it a problem for us to know that worship is an attitude of honoring God in every moment but to talk like it’s singing—preferably with ecstatic emotion—for 20 minutes on the weekend? Are there other, equally biblical ways to “do church”?

I would rather scrub toilets than work on most church staffs. I’d even prefer cleaning the bathrooms at the church. But I might change my mind if Church of the Incarnation came calling.

This new congregation just held its first services this past Sunday at St. Matthew and St. Timothy church, an Episcopal congregation near Central Park. (You’d know all this if you received the CS enews. Sign up here.)

In keeping with the more formal (and beautiful) worship space there, Church of the Incarnation has adapted a liturgical service style. Of course, this is also user-friendly to the many unchurched New Yorkers with Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican backgrounds. Services combine prayers of confession and responsive readings with songs from a variety of time periods. You can find examples of their liturgies here.

“The new church has an old name for a specific reason,” says Orchard Group, the church planting organization that helped to start COTI. “First, ‘Incarnation’ ties the community and its vision to the heart of the good news in Scripture—God taking on flesh in Jesus Christ in order to renew all of creation. Second, ‘Incarnation’ ties the community and its style to practices of worship shared by the ancient church. New churches in the city who are more contemporary in feel are healthy and effective. Yet Incarnation is taking a different approach by retrieving a range of ancient practices in the hopes of providing a hospitable environment for New Yorkers who might not gravitate towards more contemporary expressions of faith and worship.”

I love this, and I can’t decide if I’m more envious of Rhesa Storms, who plans the weekly services, or Jonathan Williams, who organizes service projects, book clubs and movie groups. If you guys need any help, give me a call. Bathrooms are negotiable.

I’m always pleasantly surprised by the simple but effective ideas my church comes up with for meaningful worship. Perhaps churches without instruments try harder? More likely we’ve just been blessed with leaders who understand that thoughtful and on-theme don’t have to mean expensive and complex.

Before singing When I Survey at a recent mid-week service, the worship leader and I read a short “rewrite” of each of the hymn’s four verses. The reading set the traditional hymn in a fresh context, causing us to think about the familiar words in a new way. It was effective for the listeners, I hope, and certainly helpful for us as leaders of the experience.

It’s also easy—I wrote the one below in 10 minutes, start to finish.  And as a public service to every worship leader who’s avoided verse two because of fifth grade boys who giggle at “raising their Ebenezer,” I selected Come Thou Fount. I’m on your side, folks.

Source of all blessings, help me to praise you. Your mercy always pours over me, and you deserve big thanks, loud thanks. Thank you! Teach me how to worship you. There is no one but you who deserves my worship. You have redeemed and loved me.

I proclaim your victory and help! I know you will continue to guide me until I leave this earth and meet you. After all, you loved me when I was just a stranger to you, and you died to rescue me from my mistakes.

So I am in debt to your grace. Your goodness is overwhelming. Even though I still have a sinful heart, help me, God; help me to follow your goodness and not wander away to follow my own paths. Here’s my heart. It is all yours. Protect it and keep it.

In his book Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, Jeremy Butterfield lists ten of the most irritating phrases in English, including “it’s not rocket science,” “with all due respect,” “fairly certain,” “I personally,” and “shouldn’t of.” (It’s shouldn’t have, folks, as in “I shouldn’t have slept through so many English classes.”)

I’d add another to his list: “out of the box.” The phrase isn’t just a cliche; I think it’s also become counterproductive.

All creative endeavors require boundaries—rules, even. In addition to correct grammar (shouldn’t have), effective writing requires various elements: paragraphs have topic sentences, sentences have nouns and verbs, and an English sonnet is always fourteen lines of ten syllables each. Music, whether it’s Beethoven or Beyonce, involves time signatures, rhythms, musical keys with specific sharps and flats, and much more. (So much more that I had to get a tutor to pass music theory in college.) Painting, photography, filmmaking—every creative enterprise is grounded in certain parameters.

Research backs me up; if you’ve read Made to Stick, you may recall the Israeli research team that asked three groups of novices to brainstorm ad campaigns. One group received no training, one participated in a two-hour free-association class, and one was trained for two hours on templates the research team had already identified as central to 90% of award-winning ads. Then each of the groups submitted their ideas to an independent creative director who had no knowledge of each group’s training.

Who created the best ads—the team without any boundaries, the team with two hours of encouragement to think outside those boundaries, or the team with instruction in six boundaries? You guessed it—the CD rated the third group’s ads 50% more creative. A few carefully-chosen boxes produced the most out-of-the-box results.

This means if you are leading a worship arts team planning Christmas services, the least helpful thing you can do is convene a brainstorming meeting and ask your team to think “out of the box” with “no bad ideas” and a “blue-sky” approach to a “blank page.”

For one thing, even as you urge this you already have an idea, however vague, of what you want Christmas at your church to look and feel like. You might even be one of the lucky few whose senior minister decides what he’s going to preach on before December 21. So if the two of you are thinking about a retro “Peanuts” Christmas feel with a straightforward gospel message, why waste 45 minutes of everyone’s time sharing ideas about how other cultures depict the incarnation? 30 minutes of discussion about favorite Christmas movies is fun, but only helpful if it’s on theme. And if you know the service will have an acoustic vibe, why burn brain cells figuring out where to rent a harp?

In other words, establish the box to channel creativity productively, not to stifle it. Of course, if you don’t know what key idea you’re going for, you’ve got bigger issues—figure that out alone or with a smaller group, then bring it to your team for brainstorming. With all due respect, I personally am fairly certain that’s the way to go, because it’s not……well, you know.

You don’t have to spend much time around this blog to know I write about worship a lot, so I was excited to get an email invite to “Sunday Setlists.” True to its name, this new site invites worship pastors, non-worship pastors, tech crew members, and just plain folks to blog about their most recent worship experience. Participants share the order of service from the past weekend including the songs, sermon topic, media, and other elements.

With its many links to worship leaders and attenders around the country, the site is a great way to get ideas for your own worship planning and to see how others are grouping songs together and building flow around different topics. Depending on the blogger, you may even gain some insights into the worship philosophy and planning process of that church. Check it out here. Sunday Setlists founder Fred McKinnon also started The Worship Community, also very much worth your time.

Wow, I think my last post scared some people. Okay, for something lighter from the “in non-essentials, liberty” department (and I dare you to find a better first line to a news story):

Norco church lets worshippers bring their horse to service

The Rev. Alton Vance’s 8:30 a.m. Sunday worship service is punctuated with the sound of snorting, the odor of manure and the sight of congregants decked out in cowboy hats and spurs.

The outdoor “cowboy service” at Norco Christian Church is not for those who prefer button-downed services in a hushed sanctuary, but it fits well into the lifestyle of many residents of the city that calls itself “Horsetown USA.”

Horse owners can tie up their animals at metal hitching posts or a wooden fence. Dogs are welcome. Pastor Vance preaches in front of an Old-West wooden façade and sings bluegrass hymns, sometimes while playing the banjo.

“Some people didn’t come to church because they wanted to ride their horses instead,” Vance said. “We decided we’d give them a good reason to ride their horses to church.”

The cowboy service at the 53-year-old church began in 1989 on patches of artificial grass laid out on a dirt lot. The façade and six small Western-style buildings — all doing double-duty as aesthetic touches and storage sheds — were added later.

Most worshippers sit on metal folding chairs on concrete, while the horses watch from an adjacent grassy fenced area, some with their owners beside them.

On hot or rainy days, only two or three horses might be there. With the sunny, unseasonably warm weather on Sunday, 25 horses attended, some munching grass or neighing as Vance preached. A few owners had to calm down animals that were restless or weren’t playing nice with their equine neighbor.

Becky and Len Conway were a few feet away from their two 5-year-old horses — Tryggur and Katherine Hepburn — during the whole service.

“We need to sit in front of them to make sure they behave,” Becky Conway said. “If they start messing with each other, we can take care of it. They sometimes start to bite each other or kick one another or make too much noise.”

And to think I’m annoyed by a few children in worship.

Authors like Brian McLaren and Robert Webber have written about “ancient-future” worship and spiritual practices. Many churches have added more contemplative vespers or chapel services in addition to the guitars and SermonSpice videos on Sunday morning, and Taize prayer services have started to pop up everywhere from the Unitarians to the Presbyterians.

Tim Timmons is another One Of My Friends I Think You Should Know. Tim serves as one of the worship leaders at Mariners Church, the congregation where I worshiped in California, and he’s also experiencing success as a singer, songwriter, and recording artist.

Tim’s not only talented, though–he’s also the real deal, kind and humble and fun on stage and off. During my recent trip to Mariners he gave me fruit leather, endured my pestering to share three good things about his day, and took time from a staff meeting for an impromptu, and very meaningful, conversation about spiritual issues.

My favorite song on his newest CD is “Uprising.” Check it out on iTunes and imagine it playing during the cardboard before-and-after moment below………goosebumps.

Your uprising is my uprising……
Uprising from the meaningless
rising from the hopelessness
rising from the stains of our sins

Uprising from the restlessness
rising from the loneliness
rising from the fear within

Uprising from the brokenness
rising from the wandering
rising from prison and rising from the pain

Uprising from the evil one
rising from discouragement
rising from my failures
and rising from my pride

Uprising from the prejudice
rising from abandonment
rising from the worries
and rising from the lies

Uprising from confusion
rising from insignificance
rising from death to life

Uprising to contentment
uprising to hopefulness
rising to freedom
and rising to rest

Uprising to significance
rising to gratefulness
rising to a newness of life

This is a long-but-worth-it video from West Seattle Christian Church. I keep telling you, folks, it doesn’t take money to create powerful worship moments.

I love my church for many reasons: excellent preaching, consistently intentional and creative worship planning, an emphasis on community service. But I’ve never been prouder to call Woodmont Hills my church than I was this past weekend.

On Friday night, in honor of the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, our choir partnered with the choir from across town to present an evening of multimedia, personal recollections, and freedom songs. After each choir led the congregation in worship, the two groups united to sing some of the famous songs of the Civil Rights Movement—We Shall Overcome, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around, Wade in the Water. While they sang, screens displayed hundreds of black and white photographs from the era, like the devastating one above. 

We also watched Dr. King’s March on Washington “Free at Last” speech in its entirety; by the end people in the room were shouting “Amen” and when it concluded the entire room stood and applauded. (Preachers, if you haven’t already, consider studying his speaking technique. The man gets standing ovations from jaded 21st-century audiences watching poor-quality, grainy video.)

Best of all, the evening’s narrator and special guest was Charles Neblett, one of the original freedom singers who shared stages with Joan Baez and Harry Belafonte—and who also experienced jail cells and beatings during his protest days. It was moving to see his quiet dignity, and to watch him sing along with every song.

Not every church has the staff or the resources to pull off this kind of major event. But every church could extend an open hand to believers of a different color and organize a prayer gathering, worship service, or joint project. The point isn’t singing a spiritual, the point is singing together, and making it a regular thing. We plan to spend more time with our brothers and sisters from Temple Church, and that may be the biggest reason I love my church.