gavoweb

spiritual | cultural | technological life

Worship

Warning: Don’t forget to do these 5 things when planning Youth Worship

By

This article was originally published October 20, 2011.

Recently we had our Youth Sunday service at our church. It was great, it really was, but it wasn’t without it’s headaches, stressors, and a few surprises along the way. Upcoming the last weekend of November is the ‘Student Sunday’ within the United Methodist Church calendar, which I believe is more geared for college students, but it could be a good time to do a special service with the teens leading.

So, if you are up for the challenge, when you are devising your Youth Sunday special service, here are some obvious and not so obvious things to plan for and watch out for.

1. Have Extra Music Practice.. Then more practice: With my all youth praise team we would practice at least 4 hours of the week prior, not to mention playing some of the songs ahead of time. But new songs take work and if you plan your music selections as I do, with the other generations in mind, we don’t want to just dump on them our standard praise sets. You get mad props for playing songs they like as well. If you are using the house band or musicians you can get away with less practice time, but you still probably need to set 2 hours. Music will make or break you, give it the extra attention. With that said, I give any kid a chance to sing or play. Many times they will practice and choose not to be live on Sunday, but it is open and I’m cool with it. This is a gift/talent/expression they want to share with the church, we are a safe place for them to do that. If they are on their electric guitar, however, I might incline them to keep the volume a little lower.

2. Ask if there are any strange traditions of Youth Sunday: With my most recent experience at a new church I had the service mapped out and sign ups filled out weeks ahead of time. I was feeling pretty good. When it came time for rehearsal I had some interesting to surprises “What adults are going to acolyte?” “What? None..” “Really, they always acolyte.” “Seriously??” Well, if they did before they didn’t this time, I hadn’t planned for it but in the midst of planning I never asked if there were any ‘different’ traditions of the service to plan for. Ask the question and if you get no responses you can move on.

3. Who do I need to tell to do something or not to do something? Again, in my most recent experience at a new church it was a few days later when one of the ladies stopped me to tell me that if I wasn’t going to use the ushers then I needed to tell such and such person. Good information to have now, but where were you weeks ago when I was planning this and as it was on the calendar for over a month? So ask the question, “Who do I need to tell to do something or not to do something?” and you will cover your bases and probably find out a little bit about the worship dynamics from week to week.

4. Get a Youth to do the Sermon!! This is Youth Sunday, not Youth Director Sunday, don’t get lazy and step into the pulpit (unless upon your senior pastors insistence). Pray over the service, pray for the group and ask for guidance in asking one or two to give the sermon for the service. It’s a huge leap for some kids, challenge for others, but with some coaching and some practice they can do great and the people of the church love it. Does not have to be the most theologically deep sermon, ie. don’t try and tackle the Trinity Sunday sermon (pastors regularly avoid that one). You may help in shaping this one, or it might be one of those where your pastor/s could would be willing to work with the youth on the sermon prep and coaching. That might be a great long standing relationship.

5. Rehearse step by step and write down notes: Though many of your youth, as do mine, participate in worship from week to week, rarely are they in these focal roles. So going through a rehearsal process is critical to making sure that the usher kids know their cues, even how to grab the plates (speak from experience on that one). Nothing is more scary then to look over where the youth are supposed to be and they are not there, in fact, they are still behind you.. “Oh Snap!” Go through a step by step process, it might seem trivial and exhaustive, but the youth will be thankful for it when it comes ‘go’ time. Write down notes through the bulletin/order of worship etc. so that they can reference later.

6. (wait this article says 5, I know, feeling generous) Use volunteers to focus on leading each segment. You cannot be everywhere for everyone all at the same time. So hand out responsibilities to your leadership to work with the youth on that one specific task. Your job then becomes the overseer and puzzle builder of the whole thing. So have a youth leader of yours operate the ushers, music, communion, etc. Trust me, this is important and you will thank me later.

Inevitably someone reading this will say that they don’t care for special youth Sunday’s because they exploit the youth in a fashion where we let them out of their room once a year then send them back while the big kids go back to doing church. If that is the case then I’m not in favor of that, but you need to start somewhere in integrating your youth into the full life of the church. They need to be active participants and not passive observers, so start them off somewhere. If they are already doing stuff then this becomes a neat experiment as they challenge themselves with new roles that they are not traditionally accustomed to.

 

Gavin Richardson is Digital Community Builder for YouthWorker Movement and the Short One at YouthWorker Circuit.  He has been in youth work for almost two decades now, has been a writer and consultant on numerous internet and published projects for the church. He’s often a speaker around the country on church communications and community building. His current projects are working on developing online Youth Disciple Groups and finishing a new book “Sticky Sheep.” He is the part time youth guy at Good Shepherd UMC in Hendersonville, TN.  If you ask, he will say that he is a “misfit” of the church. He lives in Nashville with his wife Erin, son Brooks and dog Crimson. You can connect with Gavin (and he’s totally cool with that) through http://about.me/gavoweb.

How Not to Burn Down the Church & Other Failures

By

We went from a quiet prayer-filled reflective room to one with giggles & a thick cloud of smoke. Ah, the joys of youth ministry.

For over a decade I’ve been putting together some really cool prayer station worship experiences for teenagers, youth workers, and regular lay adults of all ages. I was apparently pretty good at this – so good that I had some CDROM project created through Abingdon Press some years back. But all those great experiences and still two failures haunt me.

1. I was a new junior high guy to a large methodist church. This worship stuff was part of my hiring so I talked the senior director to let me set up a worship space. She agreed, so I set some of the youth into the motion of setting up sacred space. One prayer station had a cross & candle in a glass baking pan and the idea was to write on some sheet of paper and burn the paper. Yes, totally not creative, but it’s one of the stations the kids wanted to do so I tested it out. It could work. Worship starts and the youth & adults are moving through the space no problems. As things moved along I saw a sudden bright light out of the corner of my eye. One of the kids lit his little paper on fire & dropped it into the glass pan. However, his burning paper missed the pan and landed on the rest of the papers. So, being brave he picked up all the papers and dropped them into the pan. Now, instead of some smoldering papers we had a decent bonfire (ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration). We did have enough of a fire to melt the candle so now we had oily wax floating in the pan. Then comes in another brave teenager with a cup of water to douse the flames. So with the introduction of cold water to a hot glass pan (you may know that physics does not appreciate…) and Boom! there goes the glass. Thankfully that did get the flames out, but there was quite a bit of cleaning up to do.

2. We had Lent series one year and, as was customary with our Lent services, we tried to some ‘different’ type of stuff for worship. For some reason there was a lot of permission given to play with Lent (just don’t touch Christmas & Easter). We were exploring an Exodus scripture where the Israelites were ‘pitching their tents’ at the base of the mountain and God had these clouds of smoke on the mountain. So I had this great visual idea of setting up a mountain scene with a tent at the base. How cool to generate some smoke as well! So I proceeded to set up a large cooler in the choir loft, draped fabrics and papers down the sides to give a mountain look. Then set up one of my camping tents at the bottom, just behind the altar. It looked great! Just as service  began, I put in the last step, dry ice put into the cooler with some water!  A little smoke generated as worship started, “This is going to be awesome!” I said to myself.  Then, nothing… Still nothing… Worship came and went and it was very far from awesome. Dejected, I looked into the cooler, wondering “Why?” and saw that the dry ice had totally frozen all the water in the cooler. Now it was just a big block of ice. Apparently using to much dry ice can do that.

I share these perceived failure moments in my years of ministry because they are just that, perceived. People actually liked the mountain & tent visual. They didn’t know there was something else supposed to happen. I even apologized to our lay leader for not creating smoke. She graciously & honestly said, “It was great, I don’t think God needed the smoke.”

That smoky Sunday school classroom where we almost burned down the church was no longer a calm contemplative worship space, but it was still sacred. You can bet that over seven years later that is one of, if not the, most memorable moments in worship as a youth. It also became bonding moment for the group.  From that incident on, when planning worships together, there would inevitably be a statement “Let’s not burn down the church this time,” with a collective laughter following. I still think of those two instances in ministry, and that is my own issues at play. I know in my heart they were how God imagined them working out.

May you create and take risks in ministry. They might not go how you imagine it, but they will go how God imagines.

Shalom
-Gavin
Gavin Richardson is Digital Community Builder for YouthWorker Movement and the Short One at YouthWorker Circuit.  He has been in youth work for almost two decades now, has been a writer and consultant on numerous internet and published projects for the church. He’s often a speaker around the country on church communications and community building. His current projects are working on developing online Youth Disciple Groups and finishing a new book “Sticky Sheep.” He is the part time youth guy at Good Shepherd UMC in Hendersonville, TN.  If you ask, he will say that he is a “misfit” of the church. He lives in Nashville with his wife Erin, son Brooks and dog Crimson. You can connect with Gavin (and he’s totally cool with that) throughhttp://about.me/gavoweb.

Missional Drive Church?

By

I was pretty impressed with this pastor who has started a ‘Drive In’ church. Wasn’t so much impressed that he’s doing a drive in church, that seems rather silly to me. I was impressed that he is choosing to do sermons outside in the Texas heat wave this summer. That is just insane.

Vans and trucks drove into the parking lot of Lovejoy High School to be part of “Sanctuary Under the Sky,” Rev. David Ray’s new drive-in church.

“The sound is transmitted over the car radio so they just tune into the frequency that it’s set to. They can hear, they’re encouraged to participate. Everything that the congregation is asked to do is printed in the bulletin,” said Ray.

Ray, pastor of Presbyterian Church of the Master, stands in the parking lot conducting the service as churchgoers watch through their dashboard windows.

What caught me by surprise with this story is that he was a Presbyterian pastor. Not the normal kind the norm of worship for a mainline minister. So as with any bored moment I went and looked up ‘drive in church‘ and come to realize, he doesn’t actually know how to look for others doing the same thing (claimed in article that he’s only one doing this that he’s aware of), because it seems other churches have driveinchurch.net websites. Turns out a Disciples of Christ church has been at this for almost 50 years. In their history this is their reasoning for a drive in church.

The purpose of these services was to reach a large number of people with the good news including tourists, the physically challenged and provide an opportunity for the whole family to worship together. The Drive-In Church is new and different, yet it is deeply spiritual and reverently worshipful. As our Pastor was quoted in The Washington Post in a recent article on our church. “We worship outdoors, by the sea as did Jesus.”

So has me wondering, is this like the first emergent / missional / emerging / post-modern church?

Or maybe, is the car such a comfort buffer that we prevent ourselves from ever actually being community because we never get in proximal distance to one another?

Add Theater Class to Seminary Training

By

I was reading this not so exciting article titled “Why ‘Boring’ Preachers should be Fired” and it stirred some old thoughts in my warped brain.

Before I get into my warped brain let me disclaimer that I do think some preachers should be allowed a graceful exit. They have in many cases served God’s ministry well and are probably in need of walking away to heal and be fed instead of being held to a commitment where they have to feed while being barren themselves. By ‘preachers’ I am also batching together a preacher, priest, pastor not just a teaching pastor whose only responsibility is to preach.

I used to constantly rib one of my pastors I had served with about showing me his MBA. He knew where this was headed so he’d respond with a “keep looking” or “I know, and they still hired me.” Because my point who on earth would hire someone and put them in charge of leading a 1.8 million dollar entity that didn’t have some business experience. Seems like an illogical hire all the way around. But we do it all the time. Yes, committee systems are there for a checks and balances, but time and again our congregations give so much of the daily business power to the pastors, who rarely have formal business training.

Sorry, getting off that soap box.

Back to original box..

Back in the day one got away with giving a good sermon through the oratory methods shown to us in academia. John Wesley had his book of sermons and had specific instructions of, “if you can’t give a decent sermon just read this and it will work” (or something to that account). So the bar for ‘presenting’ a sermon that would engage and stimulate was not much different than a university lecture. It would teach and give the listener something to think about & learn. Today though we have a culture that is so conditioned to learning through entertainment. We also call new learning methods ‘active learning’ or ‘discovery based learning’ the list can go on. Our seminaries teach preaching and I know they give classes on teaching styles and preparations. However, do we need to encourage our seminaries to require theater work so that our preachers can shift where they can preach with a little flare? Maybe a semester of improv would do nicely..

Anyways, just a thought to help those ‘boring’ preachers.

Wild Goose Festival a final gander

By

Wild Goose Festival**This originally posted at Youthworker Circuit Blog. Kevin headed up the Wild Goose Festival Youth Community tent where he was able to get folks like Shane Claiborne and Brian McLaren came to share with the teenagers at the event.

When you get right down to it, there are more goose jokes than you might think.

I came into Wild Goose in a kind of hodge-podge, last-second decision kind of way and managed to experience it in a similar fashion. At the outset, I was alerted to its existence by a Twitter mention from Gavin: “@elvisfreakshow really wants to go to this, he just doesn’t know it yet.” It was the end of February, I think. So I headed over to the Wild Goose site, which at the time was less cool and more borrowed looking. I poked around a bit, but apart from a sense that Derek Webb was involved, there wasn’t much information. “Maybe he was kidding,” I concluded.

A few months months and a circus of communication later, I was asked (two weeks ahead of the festival) to lead the youth team. Which, as it turned out, was a bit of a blank page considering how close we were to the festival. My experience of the festival, then, was from the perspective of both insider and outsider. The most common sentiment I picked up throughout the festival from everyone I encountered was that we were all so glad it was happening. I don’t know if any two people came away with the same story; everyone seemed to be moving through in their own way. Two truths: I missed about half of the bands and speakers that I would like to have seen. And I would do it again the same way.

Because I approached the festival as an attendee, I came with my family. Because at the very last I became staff, my family and I had very different experiences of the festival and we were careful to evaluate our time together and apart as we went along, to avoid the former intention being ruined by the latter obligation. Late one evening we arrived at this conclusion that I think pretty fairly sums up the Wild Goose experience: in no other set of circumstances over any other 4 days would we ever have encountered such a powerful collection of moments. And all those moments added up to a sense of worthwhile that is difficult to express.

Ordinarily the event is about, well, the event. The right speakers, bands, whatever. At Wild Goose, it felt like the event was about those in attendance. Conversations you’d have nowhere else. People you’d meet nowhere else. Presenters and performers that were present for the duration of the event. When does that ever happen?

Sure, it wasn’t perfect. There’s probably a mighty check-list being nailed to the wall somewhere as you read this (“#16. Don’t attempt to transition from soul-warming Americana to intimate worship by putting a comic in the middle. #17. Especially if you’ve just passed out 1,000 marshmallows to the masses). But the spirit of the festival was picked up by the crowd entirely; walking the grounds the last day of the festival felt like the last day of a mission trip. Something special had happened. People weren’t streaming for the exits; they were lingering, savoring.

I’m all in for next year; I suspect I’m not the only one who has already Googled, “Wild Goose 2012″ with unreasonable optimism. I’ll be making my case to head next year’s youth team later this week; people seemed to resonate with this year’s efforts–imagine what I could do with more than a week and a half of preparation!

Hope to see you there next time.

Peace,
K