Seminary Shade
Ashley Sutherland is one of those candidates for ordained ministry who makes me a better pastor and reminds me to follow Jesus closer. She’s super intentional about discipleship. She’s instagram savvy and at-home on-line. She couples fierce intelligence with brave vulnerability. Sometimes it’s a bit annoying when you support someone’s call to ministry and then realize they’re going to be better at leading the church than you.
Ashley’s devotion to Jesus is real, yet she hasn’t attended worship since the first weeks of Covid 19. After trying several worship gatherings, she closed her computer and went outside. I don’t blame her. I lead a church that embraces creative practices of worship as well as change and yet I think our online worship experiences have only risen above the level of mediocre entertainment once or twice in this long pandemic.
A Theatrical Parable
I’m not a techno-phobe, nor am I one of those worship purists who corrects pastors who break the bread too early in the communion liturgy. I’m a pastor, but I’m also a theater director who likes to think of myself as an actor even though I can’t memorize lines for shit. My friends and congregants in the performing arts world are struggling from financial poverty as well as creative and community poverty. Despite their desperation, almost none of them are trying to translate their craft to video.
There are exceptions. Very underwhelming exceptions. Some theatre companies have begun releasing online performances. They blow the digital dust off of arecording of One Man, Two Guvnors, American Mariachi or Hamlet and post it online with the pomp and circumstance of a grandparent who just figured out iMovie and wants to show their grandchildren.
Rather than losing myself in the story while watching these recordings, I check my phone and am aghast at myself for doing so. Such behavior is definitely not okay, even for theatre streamed to my room. I watch another ten minutes and then check facebook, leaving buried the browser streaming Hamlet. Neither the acting nor the audience laughter in James Corden’s objectively funny One Man, Two Guv’nors has inspired me to laugh in 35 minutes. “We were way funnier,” I text my friend who starred in a local production with which I was involved.
Slapping live theatre to a digital format is translation without fidelity. It’s a placeholder for those of us who consume and create stage theatre. Live, the subtle interactions between audience and stage are so powerful that a University College of London study reveals the heartbeats of actor and audience sync. Live theatre isn’t even rehearsed without an audience. The director’s primary rehearsal role is to be a voice for the audience until the cast is ready for a house full of people. For thousands of years, theatre has been a way of embodying story with a live audience...not for an audience. Take that live interaction out of the equation and you’re left with a thin echo of what could be.
A hundred years ago, the film industry started to figure out how to take embodied storytelling and put it into a video format. Ghost lights and memories are all that can effectively place-hold theater in our hearts and the theatre world seems to be far more accepting of this reality than the church ever could be.
Placeholder Worship
I have yet to find a church that really nails an online experience of worship—including my own. Following shelter-in-place, all sorts of very well-intentioned church leaders flocked to facebook live, zoom, switcher and a long list of other platforms designed to connect with people at a distance. We bought iPad stands, tinkered with lights and rallied our bands or A/V volunteers to make funny videos (I should show you ours). Many pastors were initially wowed by how many people showed up. Six weeks later, the numbers show a slow decline--just when we’re finally getting the hang of facebook live.
Worship is meant to be an encounter with the presence of God, sacred stories and deep community. For thousands of years, religious communities have developed liturgical cathedrals with powerful patterns of worship. What we forget is that the mighty walls of our liturgical houses are buttressed by a support structure so obvious we forgot it was there--the physically gathered community. Lacking that support structure, our liturgical cathedrals are weak and ineffective, easily swayed by the wind. The media of collective gathering— smelling the same smells, taking the same breaths while singing, giving subtle cues to the pastor that she needs to adjust the timber of her voice while preaching—the media contributes as much to the experience of worship as the acts themselves. Divorcing the media from the act itself casts a helpful, but incomplete reflection of what was intended. As a result, our congregants check their phones, look at other tabs on their browser and send text messages to their friends.
I’m increasingly feeling like our online covid-19 worship is a placeholder in people’s calendar—a moment of routine so that my people won’t forget what they do in “normal life” on Sunday morning. We are deeply afraid that they might find something else to do that they will want to continue to do after shelter-in-place ends. Ashley Sutherland, again, offered a poignant reminder to me when I was discussing the inadequacy of my church’s worship experience. “The church *has* to offer something categorically different than what people receive in online entertainment or real life “third spaces.” That something different is God and authentic community among a people who share a story.
We are losing more than dollars and cents in offering plates. We are losing ourselves.
So what do we do?
I think there are two ways forward to consider that I hear precious few people advocating..
Ghost Light
A superstition developed that the ghosts of theatre performed to the light left on stage over night. (Photo Credit: Derrick Collins)
Holy Ghost Lights. Most theaters are continuing an old tradition of leaving what’s called a “ghost light” on their stage. Ghost lights started as a safety measure. With changing sets and stages you can literally fall from, darkness transforms theaters into dangerous places. Before turning off the house lights, someone leaves a light on the stage so that whoever comes into the theater next won’t hurt themselves. Recently, Ghost Lights have become an audacious symbol of hope because their very idea is predicated on the assumption that some one will return to the theatre and upon the hope they will once again prepare the stage for show. They are lights in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome them.
What if churches paused online worship and literally illuminated our sanctuaries with ghost lights until we one day return to tell sacred stories and encounter the presence of God? In the meantime, we can embody those stories with our day-to-day lives by serving our neighbors and protecting our most vulnerable. Our people may long all the more for the chance to worship together and rally to our churches when they open.
2. Reinvent Worship. What if we gathered teams to craft intense experiences of the presence of God, sacred stories and beloved community, but through an online media? They could be facilitated by experts in human-centered design, incorporate you tubers, tik Tok aficionados, theologians, high church sacramentalists, film directors, screen writers, preachers who deliver the word interactively, seminarians, pentecostals and film school students. At least half of them should not be church-attenders.
Do not think for a second I am saying that worship online is meaningless or ought not be pursued. This is the era of the Holy Spirit who dwells with us regardless of how socially distant we are—a point of which I became all too painfully aware when sick with covid 19 and struggling for breath. Holy Spirit is Holy Ruach is Holy Breath. God is in the very air we breathe whether I’m in a sanctuary or not. We can draw people’s awareness to the Holy Ghost light—but we need to train ourselves to do so in a new way.
A Cry for Help
Here’s the big problem: nobody’s got time to reinvent worship. Pastors are trying to find old money in couch cushions to keep paying church staff, while struggling to figure out how the damn breakout rooms work on zoom. Congregants are organizing drive-by wedding receptions and making phone call hospital visits to their grandparents. Everyone is baking our own bread for communion and church staff members are printing out cardboard congregations for funerals where less than ten people can attend. Local churches neither have the time nor the resources to hire a brilliant team to re-imagine worship. We are stuck in the lower rings of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Help must come from the broader church.
Seminaries. Cancel the classes you were planning for the fall. Seriously. Cancel 25% of them and replace them with one course to be repeated by many groups. The course would start with students walking into a room to find a one-page syllabus in front of them: Break into small groups. Use this stipend to give honorariums to some people who do not go to church, but are experts in relevant fields. Design online worship experiences that are true to the medium. Repeatedly test and improve. I think it’s obvious what your final exam will be. At the end, a researcher will ask what you’ve learned and publish findings as well as links to your worship experiences. Have fun and don’t you dare water anything down or act like this doesn’t matter. The future of the church is in your very capable hands.
Aunt Lily. How about you put together teams, cover some innovative pastors’ salaries for a bit and hire the right, brilliant people to crack this case? There may be no project more important to the long-term health of the church in the internet age of the Holy Spirit.
Conference, Diocesan and Judicatory staffs. How about a pause button on zoom calls designed to resource congregations and put together the best-and-brightest to dream out loud about what worship could be? Pry your most creative pastors from their virtual pulpits and get them to do some of this work collaboratively with the right experts at their disposal and without the distractions of day-to-day ministry. Put the young who prophesy and have visions along-side a dash of seasoned leaders who dream dreams. Send retired pastors to cover their churches temporarily. If my twice retired father-in-law can master facebook live, so can the retirees in your area.
Large Church Pastors. Do whatever you are going to do anyway and, I say this with love, please keep it to yourselves. Your financial resources are so out of touch from the experience of 90% of US churches that what you come up with won’t likely be attainable by anybody else. You are on a financial pedestal and that means you can do *incredible* things for your congregation and community. For you to offer “best practices” will set unattainably high bars for most churches in ways that cause unintentional harm. To borrow from the theatre analogy: regional theater can create amazing experiences, but they will never have Beyonce’s budget to create Beyonce experiences. Y’all are Beyonce. Love it. Don’t accidentally set the expectation for others to be.
The Age of the Spirit
Equity Dallas Actress, Lauren LeBlanc, summarized theatre after closing her last show before the pandemic. (Don’t be afraid to substitute the word “worship” for “theatre” as you read).
"The nature of theatre is that it is ephemeral: beautiful, fleeting, finite. The world can only exist in the room, as it is happening, a contract between the players and spectators. And even when you’re in the room, each performance differs wildly from the one preceding it, following it. It’s not like a rerun of your favorite episode of The Office, even though the lines are the same as the ones said the night before.”
Would that we, equity actors of the church, were so self-aware of our craft and calling as pastors and worship leaders. Her words of theatre summarize embodied worship at its best. Let’s not soil it with translation. Let’s be fruitful and multiply, craft new forms of worship and behold God making all things new—not just for Covid-19 but for a new era of connections across time and space. The film industry started this work over a hundred years ago. We can do it too and the blessings will be abundant.
Those who take up this task will be the apostles of a new era of Holy Ruach for a world struggling to breathe.