I believe the Church is desperately in need of a different model for putting worship together, regardless of the style of worship being pursued. It is time for worship leaders to undergo a renaissance in the way they approach their task. I’d like to suggest we move from seeing ourselves as worship leaders, to describing ourselves as worship curators, and becoming all that this new model implies.
Several years ago I attended an art exhibition that totally changed my approach to worship.
The entrance to the art gallery had become a dressing room. We were each fitted with a clear plastic body suit (stapled to fit our contours), with plastic bags tied over our shoes, surgeon’s rubber gloves put on our hands, and the outfit topped off with a white hardhat with full clear visor. We entered through a door of hanging plastic strips into a huge white space: floor, walls and ceiling were all white. Large floor-to-ceiling flexible mirrors along the walls distorted our movements. About ten large circular children’s paddling pools were spread around the space. Each of the pools had a fountain — spurting paint — and was filled with a different coloured paint. Paint sprayed down at random intervals from shower roses hidden in the ceiling.
The space and audience were splattered in paint!
It was confusing – not what I expected in an art gallery – and wonderful – I was part of the installation.
A participant not just a spectator. The installation was called, ‘I Had a Thought’, and I certainly did! All I could think about as I slipped around the paint splashed floor between the fountains and pools, and stood under paint drips and sprays in my child’s-play version of a space suit was: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could do worship in a setting like this.’
It wasn’t that I wanted to paint my church auditorium multi-coloured and set up some pools of paint. I was, however, interested in the possibility of creating worship that was this interactive and open-ended. Worship that involved active participation and allowed for a very open-ended interpretation. Worship that provided room to move physically and cognitively by providing a creative context and content with which to interact. Andy Warhol goes to church!
The more I thought about my paint-pond experience, the more I began thinking about the possibilities of art as worship, and more significantly, of worship as art and in particular, of worship preparation as an art.
What would happen to the worship I prepared if I looked at the task differently? What if I saw the task not as a mechanical, logical, modernist one of putting stuff in the right order so it ‘progressed’ through a form to give a predetermined message with an anticipated outcome, but instead saw myself more like the curator of an art gallery. An art curator is one who considers the space and environment as well as the content of the art and who takes these elements and puts them in a particular arrangement, considering juxtaposition, style, distance, light, shade and so on. In a worship setting a curator would become:-
A maker of a context for worship rather than a presenter of content.
(The content would be prepared by others.)
A provider of a frame inside which the elements are arranged and rearranged
to convey a particular message for a particular purpose.
And, just as in art gallery settings viewers take away different messages from the art and the exhibition, so the specific message of the worship service may or may not be overtly obvious. The message perceived by one worshipper may not be the one taken away by anyone else, or even be the message that the curator intended. But, the worship curator trusts that the Holy Spirit will make the ‘exhibition’ (the worship) uniquely real, alive and appropriate to each participant.
This approach raises questions about whether all interpretations are equally valid, and if it is possible for an interpretation to be wrong — for worshippers to ‘misread’ the worship, and for historic Christian faith to be misrepresented. No, all interpretations are not equally valid, but that doesn’t stop people from having them in current worship services anyway. There has never been any guarantee that every worshipper will ‘get’ the message, particularly the one that the worship leader has decided they should get from that service. And yes, it is also possible for historic Christian faith to be misrepresented. Again, this has always been the case. As with any worship, the main safeguard must be that it is based around the stories of the Bible.
These stories of God’s involvement with people through history, and in particular of Jesus’ dealings with people, are the core of Christian faith, and if we use them as the core of our worship we are unlikely to wander too far from the centre. (Providing we resist the temptation to always ‘explain‘ what the stories mean rather than letting them speak for themselves. I have great confidence in the Holy Spirit to ‘explain’ all that is necessary and to make applications of which I am totally unaware.)
So instead of being a worship-leader, or worship-planner, I have become a curator of worship. I provide contexts, experiences of worship for others to participate in.
At Cityside we have a team of worship curators. This is not a change of name for the person who leads songs!!! She/he is responsible for whole service, from opening the doors to locking up.
My working definition of worship is very simple:
Worship is a person or persons responding to God — heart, soul, mind, strength.
This definition doesn’t cover all the bases but it provides a clear focus that I can keep in mind when I curate worship. My role as worship curator is to provide settings in which people can respond to God. In other words, settings where people can listen to God, meet God, hear God, sense God, and respond — heart, soul, mind, and strength – to God. (Passion, prayer, intelligence, and muscle in The Message translation.) The purpose of the curator is to enable people to respond to God with all their being, and the huge range in people types, personal experiences, time on the journey of faith, learning styles, faith stages and so on needs not only to be allowed for, but catered for in this worship.
These understandings have revolutionised my approach to ‘organising church services.’
I believe that in a world where individualism, privatism, pluralism, relativism, and institutionalism reign supreme, only radically different approaches to our church life and worship life will enable us to create communities of faith that can interpret the gospel in ways that can be understood by our culture/s.
I believe worship curation is one of those approaches. Curation gives people an opportunity to experience God, not just to hear about someone else’s experience of God. But curation doesn’t stand alone. If it is going to make any significant difference to how we do our worship it needs to intersect with, interact with, and depend on, a whole raft of supporting and under-girding values. Some of these values are described and alluded to in other places in this resource. Without these other values, curation becomes little more than new icing on the old cake, or moving the deckchairs on the Titanic.
(Further material on Curation can be found in The Prodigal Project pages 64-68, by Riddell, Pierson, Kilpatrick, London: SPCK, 2000.)