Resources and Comments in Response to “The POWR of Planning Worship”
In the June 14, 2010 issue of Alban Weekly (“The POWR of Planning Worship“), Barbara Day Miller examines the processes that can lead to truly life-giving worship. These processes, which Miller explores more fully in Encounters with the Holy: A Conversational Model for Worship Planning, involve holding in tension two divergent but important movements in worship preparation: the imaginative, free-form, and circular movement by which ideas are generated; and the structured, orderly, and linear movement by which ideas are arranged.
She calls the first movement “planning” and the second “ordering.” The first letters of these two words form the beginning of the acronym, “POWR.” After Planning and Ordering comes Worship itself, in which all of the liturgical elements are played out. What follows Worship is Reflection, when the worship planning team gathers to “pray and to reflect on what happened in the community’s gathering before God.”
Resources for helping you and your congregation’s worship planning team to become more POWR-ful are listed at the end of the article. We also invite you to consider the resources in the Worship and Liturgy sections of the Congregational Resource Guide. You might especially enjoy Gail Ramshaw’s Reviving Sacred Speech and Cheryl Kirk-Duggan’s The Undivided Soul.
What are your thoughts and stories on this topic? And what resources do you suggest? We look forward to hearing from you!
Greetings of Love and Peace! This article details an excellent suggestion on living in that tension between linear and circular…and it is an intercourse conversation. I do however, disagree with one concept in this piece and that is that there is only one Word for a church, each Sunday. Rather, as many open ears and hearts are present, there are at least THAT many Words of the Holy for us, each individually to hear. This requires individual journeying with the Holy, rather than only through a corporate relationship. I think the Holy relates to each creation uniquely and that diversity of experience is a more relevant and true reflection of that Holy Presence. Each of us bear witness to the Holy by reflecting our relationships with that One, and in doing so, we reveal a little more of the magnificence and mystery of the Divine-in-relationship-to-humanity. How else would generation after generation come to know of G-d, if it were not that G-d is self revealing in our world, experience, lives and perspective.
Collaborative worship planning is the most thrilling experience that I have ever had in worship planning. To see, feel, know and experience the Spirit working within and through us to create what the Divine wanted to express and our response to it, is one of the most HOLY experiences I have had in my life.
Thank you so much for this article and for the conversation!
Mark McKenzie
Miller writes: “The worship service requires order and flow that incorporate the assembly’s expressions of joy and awe and thanks and lament.” Will these expressions encourage sharing of what happens in the daily lives of the members out from under the church’s banner that evokes “joy and awe and thanks and lament?”
Wayne Schwab