Taking Flight With Creativity: Worship Design Teams That Work

INTRODUCTION

Flight is an enduring human desire. For most of history, to soar above the earth like the birds of the air has been confined to the stuff of imagination. The disappointing chasm between dreams and the reality of human flight had eluded scientists, engineers, and dreamers for millennia, from Ezekiel’s wheel to Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches to Octave Chanute’s failed tests of 1894.

Two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, also had the dream of manned flight. It began as a boyhood fascination with a toy helicopter and ended up becoming one of the most inspiring stories of innovation and triumph ever told. Orville and Wilbur Wright changed the world on December 17, 1903, on a fittingly named area of grassy sand dunes in North Carolina called Kill Devil Hills.

A great sense of personal accomplishment in solving the mysteries of flight must have fueled their passion for finishing their mission. Later, they may have marveled at the impact their ragtag operation would have on culture in the early 1900s. Yet, they never really got to see how much they changed the world. In fact, it is almost impossible now to grasp the magnitude of what these men, working as a team of two, accomplished. The passage of time, along with descriptions and dramatic recreations of these events, have colored their story in ways that make it impossible to fully capture what happened. But this much is clear: it is impossible that the Wright brothers had any idea of the global impact their discovery would have. Human flight, as much as any invention or discovery before or since, ushered in an age of globalization. Their influence can be seen from the dirt runways in third-world countries to the most state-of-theart airports in the biggest cities in the world.

Why were the Wright brothers able to take flight, while others had failed? We believe the key lies in their relationship. Whereas many of their predecessors had more resources, education, and support, nearly all of them worked on the pursuit of flight alone. It would seem no coincidence that Orville and Wilbur succeeded where so many others had failed and that they were co-collaborators working as a team. For more than one hundred years now, we’ve been in the air because two kindred spirits led the way in the discovery of something neither could have accomplished alone. The sum total of their feat equaled more than their two parts could have achieved individually.

We got our start in ministry in Dayton, Ohio—the same town where the Wright brothers began their journey toward the sky. It is hard to miss their influence when literally walking down the same streets and looking up at the same sky that they dreamed of soaring through. Their father was a bishop in the United Brethren in Christ denomination, an ancestor denomination to the congregation we initially served, Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church. We have long been inspired by the Wright brothers’ story, and have found some great insights for ministry in the iconic tale of their vision and innovation. As we take a look at teams, and the challenges associated with creating successful ones, we’ll continually look to the Wright brothers’ partnership and the metaphor of flight as a way to understand and help create worship teams that work.

PART ONE

ARE WE MEANT

TO FLY?

Discovering a Strategic Approach to Worship

Whether humankind was meant to fly was a topic of some debate at the time of the Wright brothers’ accomplishment. Similarly, the extent to which a strategic team should plan and design worship is a matter of some debate today. If worship teams are to get off the ground, they require a sense of purpose and calling. There cannot be questions about their existence. This section looks at strategic approaches to designing worship in collaboration with others.

CHAPTER ONE

WHY DESIGN WORSHIP

IN A TEAM?

Let’s just be honest here and admit it: our worship stinks." Those were the words of a denominational official, addressing a group of pastors and other church leaders at a meeting on congregational growth and development. We were pleasantly surprised at his candidness. He was being brutally honest, but he spoke the truth. Good worship is a compelling, powerful, life-changing experience; yet so often what we create on Sunday morning falls far short of this potential. Instead of taking flight in worship, we stay on the ground.

For some, the inability to fly is tied to the denial that such flight exists. There’s an old saw that states, If man were meant to fly, he would have been born with wings. In all likelihood that pithy zinger fell out of the mouth of a naysayer at the turn of the twentieth century—someone who had never seen or experienced flight and assumed it didn’t exist. Maybe it was someone watching the Wright brothers or others of their ilk crash a crazy flying machine with four sets of wings into a house or barn, like in an old Buster Keaton film clip. That person looks the fool now, assuredly. To mix a transportation metaphor and quote Francis Bacon: They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Similarly, there are Christians who—in a lifetime of church attendance—have rarely if ever known a powerful, transformative experience of the Holy Spirit in a corporate body of fellow believers. These people are often victims and sometimes perpetrators of a variety of dysfunctions that keep them grounded.

We believe it is possible to take flight weekly—to design and experience transformative worship on a regular basis. And the way to consistently achieve flight with creativity is through the work of a team of collaborative worship designers. But first, it is important to look at what worship is, theologically and methodologically, and why teams should be a part of its design and creation.

Defining Worship

Do you ever feel effective worship is something other people do and have? Do you feel like you’re grounded in the same old holding patterns while those around you are soaring to new heights in creativity and power? Sometimes our best efforts seem to go nowhere, or even worse, end up crashing in a big heap. While others fly ahead we find ourselves covered in dust and beaten up by our humble attempts at effective worship.

This book is for people who remember why they got into ministry in the first place—people who do the work of creating corporate worship because they want to see other people encounter a holy and living God, and through that encounter experience healing and transformation. This book is for people who believe and hope that worship can be a truly transformational experience. It is not about creating worship that is doctrinally or historically correct, personally edifying, nice (like Milquetoast), entertaining, or even aesthetically pleasing. It’s about worship that works.

What does that phrase mean, you ask? We believe worship works when it is the basis for personal and social transformation. Worship works when we—believer or nonbeliever, saint or sinner—meet God through the Holy Spirit, and in that encounter confess our brokenness, discover God’s grace, and are made new.

Further, the experience of worship, or maybe we should say the noun of worship (as opposed to the verb of worship), is the primary vehicle through which, on an everyday, local level, we demonstrate on a corporate level what it means to be a Christian. When people worship (verb) together in corporate worship (noun), transformational things happen.

We don’t believe that worship is limited to acts of glorification or adoration, although they are certainly a part of the worship experience. Good and true worship forms the basis for discipleship and social transformation. It is out of worship and the Christian community within which it occurs that personal and social change happens. Worship is the core of the church. It is the single most important, recurring reflection of the body of believers. It is the big gathering. It is prime-time Christianity, if you will.

Bells may be going off in your head with that last statement. Whoa! Worship is not a production! you say. This is true. Worship supersedes any understanding of an experience rooted in words like program or event. Such a shallow interpretation misses the point of planning a corporate gathering in the name of Christ. Choreographed cultural spectacles are a dime a dozen, and certainly the Holy Spirit appears in even the least organized of gatherings. Effective worship of any sort is separate and distinct from what we may call the wow experience. It points people in powerful ways to the risen Lord.

Yet at the same time that worship is not a production, or more than the summary of its technical components, it is indeed a production, worthy of our best planning and effort. The presence of the Holy Spirit is not an excuse for the absence of creative vision or any sense of forethought. On the contrary, the Holy Spirit is often found moving in places with the highest creativity and best organization. For if we don’t use our creativity to plan worship that engages and moves us, then how can we expect it to move others? Fumbling through a mediocre service can impede the work of the Spirit, whereas creatively planning a smoothly flowing worship experience allows us to get out of the Spirit’s way as it moves in people’s lives. That doesn’t just happen by creating a song list and a standard three-point sermon. It takes hard work. This book is about designing worship that works.

Designing Worship

How do we, as twenty-first–century proclaimers of the gospel, enable our worship to take flight?

We suggest one key way is by establishing effective worship design teams. Emphasizing teamwork and teams-based organization has been trendy in corporate culture for a while now, to the point where Saturday Night Live has parodied the irony of ragtag corporate groups of coffee drinkers in crumpled shirts sitting around a featureless conference room table, with a big, supposedly inspirational banner proclaiming Together Everyone Achieves More behind them on the wall.

As followers of Christ, however, there may be more to teams than meets the corporate eye. True teams of people, operating as two or three gathered together in the name of Jesus, doing ministry together, know something that mere money-makers cannot: the power of the Holy Spirit. This kind of community is known as koinonia, a Greek term found often in the New Testament. To coin a simple definition, based on the different ways it is often translated into English, koinonia is the intimate fellowship of sharing, participation, and contribution that followers of the risen Christ experience.

Although it is incredible to experience, koinonia is more than a feel-good moment. To quote a song by the band R.E.M., it is more than shiny happy people holding hands. Koinonia has power. It does something. It is the dynamic of a community of believers out of which amazing things happen.

Case Studies

We know this at more than a theological level. We know it because we have witnessed it firsthand at churches we have served over the years. When a group of Christians set aside themselves and set about the work of the Kingdom, truly amazing things happen. We believe in the power of worship design teams because we have lived it, first in an amazing period of growth at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church.

Ginghamsburg is a large, influential congregation in rural Ohio whose rapid growth and pioneering style of worship began to draw national and international attention in the mid 1990s. Len served as the first media minister there, from 1995–2000, and Jason served as the church’s first full-time artist from 1997–2000. During this period, worship attendance tripled to more than three thousand attendees weekly. Much has been documented about Ginghamsburg’s innovative model for designing worship (see Kim Miller’s Redesigning Worship, Abingdon Press, 2009), and we could spend a book dissecting and understanding the innovations that occurred during that late-1990s period alone. But since that time, a myriad of additional experiences in churches of a variety of sizes has broadened our scope significantly.

After this seminal period, we worked together for two years on a para-church team designing and sometimes implementing worship that had to work for churches spanning a large spectrum of sizes and styles. For another period of about two years, Len worked with a traditional high steeple church forming a worship design team to serve a new contemporary service. Jason served for two years with a team designing contemporary-style worship