Throughout my blogs, I have been exploring how current developments in psychology and psychotherapy can bring helpful new perspectives and correctives to our religion and spirituality. No longer a pastor, I am one of five worship leaders within my current church at Shantz Mennonite Church near Baden, Ontario. Here I get the opportunity to shape the language that my congregation uses when I am worship leading. In this blog, I want to share with you how my training and experience as a psychospiritual therapist is changing the language I use in worship so that these prayers now reflect a theology and spirituality that nurtures better the faith of the people in my church. Back in March, when my church was recognizing the six-week season of Lent, I was struggling with the prayer resources that my church was using in worship. I remember one Sunday where I found myself unable to repeat the prayers found on the screen at the front of my church. I found the language so condemning of me, as a human being, and instead of these prayers lifting my spirit, I found they burdened me with unnecessary guilt and shame. Knowing that I was worship leader in a couple weeks, I shared with my pastor my struggle and ask him if I could rewrite all my worship resources for my Sunday when I was worship leading. I promised to still use the resources but rework them so that they spoke to and nurture my spirit more, and hopefully the faith of the people in my church. In this blog, I want to share with you the “before” readings and the “after” readings to help you see and experience what I was struggling with during Lent this year in my church. The “before” readings are the worship resources that I was given to work with. The “after” readings are the final readings and prayers I used that Sunday in worship. a. Reworking the Call to Worship Within my church, after a time of welcoming, worship begins with a call to worship. Here is the original call to worship that I was given. Leader: Out of the depths we cry to you. People: O Lord, hear our cry. Leader: If you kept a record of sin, who would stand a chance? People: O Lord, hear our cry, Leader: But with you there is forgiveness. All: We wait for you, O Lord. We hope in your word. Blessed be your name. This Call to Worship is based closely on Psalm 130. Because it is based on a literal text of the Bible, there is often a reluctance to adjust the language found in this Psalm. However, I struggled with the language in this Psalm for the several reasons. First, there are not many Sundays where I am in this sad place, where all of me is crying out to God. So, it feels inauthentic for me say these words. I suspect this would be true for many people on a Sunday morning, not just me. Second, as a spiritual care provider, I know that when "all of me" is in this place where we identify with the experience of crying out to God from our depths, a merge has often happened. My sense of me, my centre, has merged with the painful sad part within my soul, and when this happens, we do feel that all of us is in pain and thus is crying out to God. However, when we are in a merged state with our pain, it is not possible for us to sense the presence of God in our lives. When we are in a merged state, we do feel totally abandoned by God…just as Jesus felt abandoned on the cross just before he died. This is what naturally happens when we are merged with the pain of any negative emotion: we feel disconnected from Presence or the Sacred. However, the purpose of prayer is to help people break this merge state, to help them realize that only a part of them is in intense pain, not all of them, and that God is actually there with them in their pain. How could this call to worship be changed so that it helps people break their merge state rather than support this merge, and open the possibility for them to experience the presence of God again during this time of worship? Third, I found the phrase “But with you (God), there is forgiveness” way too weak. When we are in this place of pain around sin and hurt, we want more assurance than that in God there is forgiveness. We want to know that all painful experiences of life are forgiven and healed by God. Fourth, I found it problematic for people to utter the words “we wait for you, O God.” It suggests that for some reason God is withholding God’s presence and healing from us, and so we are waiting until this reason is addressed. But is it true that we are waiting on God to respond to our pain? When Christian theology claims that God’s love is unconditional, does that not suggest that there is no reason, from God’s end, for us not to experience God’s loving presence. If this is true, then the psalmist is wrong when they frame their sense of aloneness as “we wait for you, O Lord.” I have found in my spiritual care ministry that many people hold this “waiting on God” form of theology, which causes them to feel powerless for due to this belief, they are powerless to do anything (God is in control) or angry at God for not responding to their prayers, and many other complex feelings. Instead of interpreting this “waiting on God” in this way, is not this “waiting on God” described better as our longing for God’s presence to come into our painful place? Finally, this call to worship focuses on hope, hoping that our theology is true, that God’s love is unconditional and thus God’s spirit is already present and actively engaging with our painful life experience. I find the word “hope” a weak word of faith compared to the word “trust” which captures the truth that God’s spirit is already here and interacting in helpful ways with our life. With these thoughts in mind, I rewrote the call to the worship that I was given to the following: Leader: Out of the depths, the painful part within us cries out to you. People: O Lord, we know you hear this cry. Leader: If you kept a record of sins, who would stand a chance, but you don't. People: O Lord, we know you hear this cry. Leader: But with you, all can be forgiven. All: We long for your soothing compassionate spirit. We trust in your word. Blessed be your name. I invite you to read these two calls to worship together, one after the other. Our experience of them is very different. One is heavy, the other is more life-giving. b. Reworking the Prayer of Confession Here again, the worship resources I was given contained a prayer of confession that was quite condemning. Leader: Lord, our lives are dry bones. We are cruel in our words and indifferent in our actions. We confess to the Lord …. (silent prayer) Leader: Breathe on us, Lord. Put your Spirit within us and make us alive. All: We place our hope in you. This prayer of confession is based on the Old Testament text from Ezekiel 37 which works with the image of dry bones. How do you feel after saying this prayer of confession? Do you feel uplifted and forgiven or do you feel like you are waiting for the forgiving presence of God to come? As I did with the Call to Worship, I reworked this confessional prayer so that it became a prayer that helped people experience more the healing presence of God. The original confessional prayer nurtured the negative merge with the dry part of our soul by claiming “our lives are dry bones.” This is not totally true. There are some days when this negative merge is true but there are other times when our lives don’t feel like dry bones but are alive. This truth is the essence of narrative therapy where we help clients look beyond the dominant negative narrative in their life of dry bones and discover the less common but more essential counter narrative where they find ourselves alive with energy and optimism. Should not a confessional prayer carry a similar hopeful focus that is based on more truth? This means that it would be more truthful to pray that “there are days when our lives feel like dry bones”. This negative merge continues in this prayer when the congregation is invited to say, “We are cruel in our words and indifferent in our actions.” How is reciting those condemning words helpful to anyone? How are they even authentic for people who rarely are cruel in their words or indifferent in their action? Seeing these issues, I rewrote this confession with language that highlighted that these potential aspects of our fallen human nature are only a part of us, and only a part of us when we unfortunately express them in our lives, and this does happen sometimes. I was also troubled by the phrase, “put your Spirit within us and make us alive.” I have come to realize that God’s spirit is always within us, that we born with God’s spirit already present within our soul. The issue is not God’s spirit is missing in us and thus needs to be put in us. Rather, there are structures in our soul that have developed during our lifetime like unhelpful beliefs, painful memories, unhealed sins and hurts, coping patterns, addictions, compulsions, etc. that block us from noticing and sensing God’s spirit moving within our soul. This is why many people feel that God’s spirit is not present in their soul, and thus abandoned. These structures that restrict the flow of God's spirit in our soul is what causes this feeling of "waiting on God" and longing that we discussed earlier in this blog. I suspect that this was what Ezekiel, the Jewish prophet whose words are the basis of this confessional prayer, believed. He believed, due to his experience of dry bones, that God’s spirit no longer resided within his soul. For those who practice spiritual direction and psychospiritual therapy, we know that this belief is not actually experientially or scientifically true. Below is my final confessional prayer that I invited my congregation to participate in. Leader: Lord, there are days when our lives feel like dry bones. We can be cruel in our words and indifferent in our actions. We confess to the Lord . . . (silent prayer) Leader: Breathe on us, Lord. Allow us to become aware of your compassionate Spirit within us so that we can become more alive. All: We place our trust in you. Amen. Again, I invite you to read these two versions of the confession prayer and notice how they impact you differently. c. Composing an Offertory Prayer Each Sunday during worship, there is a time when our congregation has an offertory prayer. Since many people provide offerings to the church through electric funds transfers, we no longer pass the offering plate. Instead, the offering plate is by the back doors by the sanctuary and people, who wish to give a physical offering, can do so upon entering or leaving the sanctuary. Even though the offering plate is not passed, our congregation still believes it is important to have an offertory prayer. I have given a lot of thought around the goal of the offering prayer. Many times, I have found offertory prayers often stress our responsibility as Christians to be generous with our time, money, and sharing of ourselves with others. There is truth is this, but I have come to realize that offering is not something we “should” do as Christians. Rather, offering is an expression of God's spirit moving within us causing us to be generous and wanting to respond to the needs within our church community and the many needs beyond the church in the world. I have come to realize that “shoulding” is not an expression of God’s spirit but rather a fallen structure within our soul that Christians and churches often appeal to so that we are generous in our offering to the church. With this in mind, in my offering prayers, I seek to connect with the deeper motivations and longings of our soul that have their roots in God’s spirit whether it be our longings to be generous, or our feelings of care toward those who are suffering in our community or world, or our desire to share offering as an expression of gratitude toward how God has blessed our lives. Below is the offertory prayer I shared on this Lenten Sunday when I was seeking to nurture a theological culture in church that would help people connect with their essential nature of their soul…where God’s spirit emerges from within us. I said the following words of introduction and then shared a prayer. Words of Introduction: During our offering time, I want to you to consider how all of us are part of God’s community. When one part of humanity suffers from dryness and lack of life, we are all impacted by that dryness. When one part of humanity is blessed, all of humanity is meant to experience these blessings for these gifts are meant to be shared. Let us pray: Wonderful God, we are so grateful for the many ways your spirit revitalizes our world and us so that we can experience life more fully. In response, we willingly share of these blessings …whether it be ourselves, our time, or our possessions so that others can be blessed…and thus experience the fullness of life that God wants all people to experience. In the name of compassionate Christ, the giver of life. Amen. d. Composing a Congregational Prayer Every Sunday, following the sermon/teaching time and singing, we enter a time of congregational prayer. This prayer can take on many forms. This congregational prayer is done often by our pastor, but we, as worship leaders, have the option to create a congregational prayer and lead our congregation through it. This is what I did on this Sunday. I wanted to create a congregational prayer that reflected a theology and used images that help people connect with their divine selves but also help people experience God’s spirit interacting with their painful parts if that was what was needed on this Sunday. Below are the 5 slides I created and used with my congregation to help them experience God's spirit ministering to them during this time in the worship service. As you read through them, you will see how I integrated many insights of spiritual care into this prayer as well as images from the scriptures, especially Ezekiel 37, that were read on this day. e. Reworking the Closing Blessing
Here is the final blessing I was given from the worship resources provided for this day. Leader: Put your hope in the Lord. People: The Lord is unfailing love. Leader: And with God is full redemption. People: God will bring us up from our graves. All: God will redeem us from our sins. Below is the final blessing I created using the above blessing as a starting point. Leader: Put your trust in God’s compassion. People: God’s love never fails. Leader: And God fully restores us. People: God will revitalize those parts of us that feel dead. All: God will heal us from our mistakes and brokenness. Conclusion: This whole experience of worship leading for this Lenten Sunday made me far more conscious of the language we use in our prayers, readings, and songs in the church, and how some theological language is very deadening to most people’s faith while other theological language is very life giving. My hope in sharing these reflections is that they may inspire us to become more conscious and reflective of the language we used in our religious and spiritual communities. It is important to realize that not all religious or biblical language is life-giving to people. Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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