had a good three days with mark pierson in oxford. the three days were basically mark sharing his insights from the last twelve years at cityside church in new zealand. what mark has managed to do there is to take the ideas/insights from alt worship and transition a whole church into doing that as opposed to doing creative stuff on a monthly service. he is one of the authors of the prodigal project.
one of the key values that mark and cityside hold dear is participation. so they have a basic structure for a morning service – call to worship, confession, text, prayers etc… and the way worship works is that someone is designated as a worship curator and then different people are allocated the different segments of the service. the curator overseas the space and the flow of the service. in an overall ethos of creativity the stuff produced is wonderful. what i like about this approach is that anyone could do it – it simply requires a mindset shift about worship – that rather than it being led by one or two experts it is the work of the people (which of course is what liturgy means). curation as a model for worship leading is what mark is suggesting as a new model/way forward. i think this is very helpful.
parallel with this kind of approach they have also started a new weds evening thing called ‘sonar’ which is also curated but is a very different kind of event/experience – ambient musicians creating an hour soundscape with small rituals/stations to interact with, sometimes silence, sometimes compline. it’s interesting that having started with alt worship, then taken it into a regular morning service, developed art installations such as stations of the cross, and now journeyed to developing a new kind of alt worship experience. i guess it shows the importance of communities growing, responding, changing, moving on – and that some things may die, new things will emerge. what is important is the community of people and that that community is fueling their following of christ. the things that fuel that will change and have their seasons…
mark is a great collector of things that he and others do and is committed to sharing resources, sparking peoples imagination and so on… he has distilled lots of his thoughts, theoretical reflections, ways of structuring worship and lots of prayers and liturgies that have been used at cityside over the years and compiled them on a CD ROM that he has self published called FRACTALS. it really is packed with stuff. i have ordered some copies for proost so when they arrive i’ll blog about it if you are interested in getting one.
the three days were under the title ‘church for the arts’. what was interesting about that was that the people attending were a wide age range and there were about 4 times as many women as men. if it had been advertised as emerging church or alternative worship i suspect it might have been the other way round which is kind of weird/interesting….
as ever at these things it was great meeting new people and old friends. good to catch up with lilly, karen, pete and tess, mark and others…
I didn’t notice the guy/girl thing! – but you are totally right. I wonder why this is. There were more women. Was it because Tess organised it? If it was something Pete had organised would more blokes have turned up – the old butch competitive thing? Was it because of the title – the emphasis was on the arts and not on the structure of church? Are there more women who consider themselves artists? I don’t know the ratio split. In art the famous artists are mostly men but it seems more a female past time -/spare time activity – well painting is anyway. What Mark was talking about – participation – would certainly seem v attractive to most women I think cos it is more equal and non competitive as opposed to top down structures that either we can’t be bothered to tackle cos we don’t get our sense of self worth out of them or we can’t be bothered to fight with the men for the positions – we are not interested in the fight – we are only interested in getting the work done. Maybe the participation model is attractive to women because it is to do with togetherness and working together much more – but blokes like that too (but perhaps not as murch? – I don’t know – I’m not a bloke) so – I don’t know. MAGGI DAWN YOU MUST HAVE SOME IDEAS ABOUT THIS??? Help me out girlfriend!…and what happened to our conference idea? – women, emerging church, roundtable…
pete did organise it so it’s not that. i think it’s two things –
1. things with arts and spirituality in the title somehow attract more women than men – that is just a hunch, no hard evidence.
2. ark T is an arts and spirituality centre – maybe the networks of people linked with it reflected who came? and maybe there are more women in the network?
i don’t think it’s the participation thing because no one knew in advance that mark would emphasise that so much….
i don’t think the gender mix was a problem – it was just interesting that it attracted quite a different crowd….