mark shivers sent me a paper he has written putting liturgical scholars in conversation with alternative worship. he has now uploaded it as a pdf you can download if you’re interested.
liturgy and alternative worship in conversation
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this is a great piece of work – how is mark engaging with liturgical scholars ?
Photo credit to boot! Must’ve made your day.
Roger
Nice to see you credited for writing the Vaux stuff too 😉
It’s a good document. Look forward to chatting about it in NI.
it’s bad enough when i get credited for grace stuff… see you in NI
indeed, please do call for me out for misquotes!
the main article I used from the Vaux site was:
http://www.vaux.net/greyspace/PolAWE.htm
in the parentheses under the title, it reads “[Jonny Baker April 2000]”…I assume that was credit to author?
Any other places I have attributed authorship incorrectly, please do let me know..
And of course, more than anything, come back at me at my understanding and appropriation of alt worship.
thanks again jonny for helping me get some critique from those most knowledgeable on this..
Mark
mark i did write that piece so that’s cool… kester may have been talking about something else?…
Sorry. My memory is going. Apologies!
Mark – I was interested in the part of the essay about ‘giving it away’ and how that related to the stuff on the gift economy that Jonny has posted about here and I’ve written about in The Complex Christ… I think the idea of worship as gift is really very important.
One of the ways I’ve been thinking about enacting that is creating something called ‘The Open Office’. I’d wanted to talk to Jonny about it this weekend… Basically, an open source liturgical resource that groups could up and down load to/from. So much good liturgy is written by groups, and never seen again… In this way it could be preserved. I’d foresee it be catagorized under ‘standard’ office tags – so people could look up stuff for daily use, for special festivals etc…
A very much initial version is currently being put together by the post-Vaux crowd at http://303.typepad.com/openoffice
though this is by no means where it may stay…
Kester,
I think you are right on there. Gift. Indeed. John Claypool, an influential homiletician in some circles here in States spoke about preaching as gift-giving. He argued that we received from the over-abundance of God’s grace and then gave that away during a sermon. Once a gift is given, it must be let go of by the preacher and it must either be received or rejected by the listeners..(obviously a sermon-centric approach but I think parallels are there with worship)..
I also think the idea of giving it away works to resist the trend by some cultural-linguistic based thought towards closure by consistent use of grammar that forms the church. Not only does this thrust generally move towards counter-cultural positions, but it also is a very hierarchical model..both trends that I know alt worship wants to move past…Even more so, the idea of open liturgy and gift allows us to freely cross so-called cultural lines (such as denominational, conservative/liberal, etc). It is in crossing these lines that any chance for creative and more importantly NOVEL truth can emerge..
I wrote briefly about the internet as a whole being an “open source liturgy” a little while back:
http://www.theshiverian.com/weblog/2006/08/blogosphere-as-open-source-liturgy.html
But I think your thoughts towards a somewhat central location (or portal) is a needed..a searchable database would allow exposure..in some ways, we cannot create what cannot imagine. One of the true blessings of sites like jonny’s and smallfire, etc., is that it has allowed many of our imaginations to be so expanded that we can at least begin to imagine “outside the box.”
much grace and peace..
mark
this is a fascinating piece of work. well done mark. one quibble, page 8 cites Steve Taylor as “pastor-scholar in Austalia.” Steve Taylor lives in New Zealand! keeps the IQ on both sides of the ocean up 🙂
ahh..thanks steve..please forgive my error (and my fulfilling of the sterotypical American who knows jack about geography)..Ill correct and get an updated version up..
and thanks for the kind words..
mark
hi kester – re: open office, a group of us developed an alt.worship online media archive several years ago, alas it got busted and has never quite worked properly since. but if you wanna take a look: http://www.the-scriptorium.org