Worship Without Music
After I asked “What would it look like if we had worship all week without a worship leader?”, Eric just kind of stared at me. Then, he got this gleam in his eye and I got my notebook application ready to go. I had a feeling that Eric was about to start some serious brainstorming (click to see the list).We spent about an hour talking about what worship was, what it wasn’t, and how to do it without a music leader.
After talking for a while, we decided to table the discussion and recharge our brains. We got in the car, headed back to High Island, and immediately started talking about it some more. It was actually getting kind of exciting. Weird, I know.
In the end, we decided to do a couple of different things:
- Have a bonfire on the beach Sunday night.
- Have the participants bring something from the graveyard and talk about it.
- Have each of the four teams be responsible for leading worship one time.
Normally on an AIM trip, we have music worship twice a day. This time, we weren’t planning on ever having music worship. This doesn’t mean we weren’t going to have music in our worship, we just weren’t planning on it. Does that make sense? This way, if there was music, it would be a part of worship, not the only thing.
I’d have to say that the most important thing we did was to get High Plains Church and the Mares family caught up with us and officially on board. So, we spent Saturday evening telling them the story and getting them thinking about what worship really was. I mean, we talk about it, but have you really thought about how the people in Acts did church? There was no professional clergy to tell them what to do and to run the show for them. They had to get together and worship…whatever that meant.
Here’s what we did:
- Sunday – went to church with St. Matthew’s UMC and had a bonfire that night
- Monday – Morning – had a share time. Evening – Travis Shannon’s team from HPC did a skit, had some sharing time, then he talked for a bit.
- Tuesday – Morning – prayer circle*, Evening – we got together and talked about the things that people had found in the graveyard. People found something interesting at the graveyard and brought it back with them. We talked/prayed about what the object meant about the person that brought it.
- Wednesday – Morning – people shared verses they liked. Evening – we went to church with FBC High Island.
- Thursday – Morning – shared verses, had some music from an iPod. Evening – Tori and Connor led worship music and then we had communion with St. Matthew’s and then final trip debrief.
*We sat in a big circle. There were five people holding candles. We were supposed to pray for the other people in the group. If you had a candle, you gave it to the person you were praying for. With this, the candles were continually passed around the group. We did this for about twenty minutes and this was the worship time that people liked the most – as I remember it.
I’ll be posting a “What we learned about worship” blog soon.
i may be telling Christy that i won’t be needing a worship leader – ever – after that trip.