Summer Spirit 2021
Worship in our 21st century context
Notes from Amelia Koh-Butler
Powerpoint slideshow Friday Evening Presentation
Video recording Vimeo (edited)
It must be over a decade since I was last at Summer Spirit. I recollect being with the gathering at Floreat. At the time, I laid out some of the challenges for UCA thinking around the sacraments. It was part of what prompted me into the research I would conduct to delve deeper into Mission, Worship and what might emerge into the future.
So, let me first say thanks to the visionaries who put together thinking and exploration spaces like Summer Spirit to encourage us all to work on challenging questions in mission and ministry.
Tonight, and tomorrow, I am not coming with answers, but I will try to lay out for you where my own thinking has been heading about how we approach Worship and Communities of Faith in our contexts.
2.
Three years ago, I moved back to Sydney after a three year stint as Executive Officer for Mission in SA.
As a Secular University’s Multifaith Chaplain, I led services following the bombings in Christchurch and Sri Lanka.
The Uni valued my Academic background and my connection with Parramatta Mission. It was a very different setting to Sydney’s old sandstone universities - Sydney and NSW – or Sydney’s more modernist universities of Macquarie and Uni of Technology Sydney.
Western Sydney has a different context… it is younger and much more multicultural. It has strong links with other younger international progressive universities.
It has a strong emphasis on cross-disciplinary work and edgy emerging areas of research, rather than focusing on the classics.
A key word here is EMERGING.
3.
An example would be the National Integrative and Complementary Medicine Research Centre [NICM], situated in the Westmead Health precinct, alongside the largest Public Hospital in NSW, a Private Hospital and the Children’s Hospital.
My late-husband, Terry, was one of the first patients at the Westmead campus research centre. In fact, the official public opening was held days after he died in December 2019.
We had a ‘soft opening’ in July 2019, with only contacts of the University and oncology patients from Westmead able to use the clinic for the first six months to iron out the kinks and get stuff ready for a full opening.
I used to drop Terry off for treatments and then do pastoral rounds.
Our relational links with the Oncology Department at Westmead hospital opened many doors
and we were able to integrate Chaplaincies between three hospitals and the university.
It helped that Terry had been both a nurse and a remedial massage therapist and he had trained with a couple of the therapists working at the centre.
In January, the staff from Westmead attended Terry’s funeral, held at the university campus.
About a week later, I was asked to Chaplain our staff members returning from Wuhan who were held in offshore quarantine for 2 weeks before they were allowed back into Sydney.
My uni had strong links with China and sister university relationships with both Beijing University and the University of Wuhan.
As I met with them on zoom on a daily basis, I was aware that this time the SARS epidemic fears would most likely impact us this time. Staff welcomed my provision of meditation and prayer sessions and the use of sacred song as part of their music therapy stream. Again, we were able to capitalize on links I had with various staff in Music Therapy who I had done my first degree with in the 1980’s.
A key word here is INTEGRATING.
4.
My sponsoring church, Parramatta Mission, had a number of congregations and when Terry and I had moved back to Sydney to the area where he grew up,
I asked him which congregation he wanted to join.
He decided on the Fijian congregation.
This surprised me a bit, as neither of us spoke Fijian… but, he said – he was beginning to lose his capacity with words anyway and when he listened to the Fijians sing, he had a sense of Heaven.
In our Fijian congregation each month, two of us would preach in English and two Fijian Lay Preachers would preach, so half the sermons were in English and half in Fijian. The rest of the services were a mixture of English and Fijian.
Terry also knew that this was a congregation who would take care of me. This photo shows how women in the Fijian community surround a widow with community to acknowledge grief and attend to the need for rites of passage.
A key word here is STRATEGY.
5.
By the end of February, I was Chaplaining the Western Sydney Uni researchers and staff working in the Westmead Hospital precinct of Sydney. They were using 3D printers to make copies of respirators and putting on upgrade courses for certifying medical and nursing staff on ICU equipment. I had attended weekly briefings on preparedness for COVID for about 4 weeks before the Pandemic was declared.
You can see the proximity of Parramatta Mission to the Parramatta City Campus of the University. In between those two buildings now is a large building that overshadows both the church and the uni that is not in this photo. It is the National headquarters of the National Australia Bank.
The Keyword here is – SITUATION
6.
March 2020
Our world had turned upside down and we “pivoted”. At my urging, our congregations at Parramatta Mission ceased face to face worship a week before lockdowns and restrictions for churches were announced.
In our congregations the first thing to go ‘online’ was the 100 nights service which was to mark the 100th night since my husband’s death.
For Fijian congregations, this is normally a huge event, where the community comes around the widow and surrounds her with love and presence, food and other gifts, to lift her spirits as she tries to move into life again. What we ended up doing was a simpler gathering online with some story-telling.
I was alone in my loungeroom!
We were joined online by people from other cities and other countries, including Fiji, Italy, England and Germany. This opened up my thinking about community online… the importance for me and the possibilities for others.
In coming weeks, as COVID started to impact other countries with sudden horrific consequences, I found myself conducting online funerals/memorial services for families in other countries.
e.g. uncle of Indonesian students
The Keyword here is ADAPTATING
7.
When lockdown started and cafes and restaurants closed, the uni asked me to coordinate a pastoral care program for international students impacted by the lockdown and loss of jobs.
The previous year, I had run a Soup Kitchen… this year, we took it online.
I carried a letter to say I was an essential worker and drove about Western Sydney delivering food packages to international students who could no longer work, who could not return home and who were running out of food.
We started an online Soup Kitchen, delivering 150 boxes of ingredients each week and then teaching young adults how to cook to survive on less than $5 per day.
The keyphrase here is making the most of OPPORTUNITY
8.
The program soon grew and started getting rolled out over 4 other campuses. Staff members were invited to tithe between 2% and 5% of their pay packets to support the 10,000 international students we were trying to provide for. I no longer had to package all the food out of my apartment… Student Services eventually took over the buying, packing and delivery. I simply had to run the online kitchen.
By July, other Chaplains realized we were not going to get back onto live campus activities for the remainder of the year and people started to volunteer to take over the kitchen and demo cooking.
My role as Chaplain was not to build a specific community but to seed the Kingdom of Heaven. Parramatta Mission treated me as a missionary, with the potential to influence future leaders of this city and, potentially, other parts of the world.
We had a mission value statement:
Parramatta Mission seeks to bless the university so the university can be a blessing to the wider community.
My goal was to help build capacity in the uni to live out Kingdom of Heaven. People knew I was a Christian Minister. What was new to them was that a Christian Minister was willing to minister to and with people of all faiths and no faith. The blessings of God were not reserved for the faithful, but were offered as a witness to the love of a gracious God, who seeks to bless the world.
This was a new experience of evangelism – it was good news.
In Sydney there are many Christian organizations with a ‘turn or burn’ approach to evangelism. Strategies include condemning or threatening people to convince them they need salvation. The idea of a loving God seeking to bless even the unfaithful and unworthy was, for most people, a new idea.
The Keyword here is COMMUNITY
9.
To be a missionary sent with good new, you need a spiritual home for support.
My home had (for nearly 30 years) been wherever Terry was. Now that I was on-my-own, it was more important than ever to have a home community.
I learnt more about Fijian culture on the next couple of months than I had in the previous couple of years…
And it was all online!
[Describe Palm Sunday experience and some of the cultural stuff behind the photos]
The Keyword here is TIMING and possibly SEASONS
Being a Worship Facilitator or Curator means attending to some key factors:
- Emerging (from Context)
- Integrating (experiences)
- Strategizing (oriented towards Heaven)
- Situating (geographically and in other ways)
- Adapting
- Taking Opportunity
- Making Community
- Attending to Timing / Seasons
10.
Music and Fijians…
SMULE
11.
Tell the Qata story…
It was last year, with all these experiences piling on top of each other, that I started to really make sense of some of my own academic research from the previous decade.
Without Intercultural engagement, we don’t get the richness of the Kingdom of Heaven.
We need a variety of cultures to begin to get the vision of God’s plan for us.
I had to face the challenge of doing online church for both English and Fijian speaking congregations…
What became quickly obvious was the difference between Individuals/Couples and communal households… did the screen image of zoom participants represent 1 or 2 people per screen or households of 8-8 people or more?
So – let us pause for a moment – think about your zoom or online experiences in the last year…
[Poll ?]
12.
We sometimes use the image for the experience of church – that it is a foretaste of heaven…
Well…
A taste of heaven
Needs to start with Heaven – it looks forward – toward heaven
Basis of Union Paragraph 8:
“…the people of God, through faith and the gift and power of the Holy Spirit, have communion with their Saviour, make their sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, proclaim the Lord's death, grow together into Christ, are strengthened for their participation in the mission of Christ in the world, and rejoice in the foretaste of the Kingdom which Christ will bring to consummation.”
Ephesians 1:14 that Spirit being a pledge and foretaste of our inheritance, in anticipation of its full redemption--the inheritance which God has purchased to be specially God’s won for the extolling of God’s glory.
Revelation 7:9-12 [The Message]
9-12 I looked again. I saw a huge crowd, too huge to count. Everyone was there—all nations and tribes, all races and languages. And they were standing, dressed in white robes and waving palm branches, standing before the Throne and the Lamb and heartily singing:
Salvation to our God on his Throne!
Salvation to the Lamb!
All who were standing around the Throne—Angels, Elders, Animals—fell on their faces before the Throne and worshiped God, singing:
Oh, Yes!
The blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving,
The honor and power and strength,
To our God forever and ever and ever!
Oh, Yes!
The MISSION is not just concerned with the broken past or the situations we have been saved from. The MISSION offers forward-oriented HOPE.
Soteriological necessity: Salvation is not just about what we have been saved from, but what we have been saved for…
Notice – the picture of heaven includes people of diverse identities….
So – I’d like to finish this evening with some thinking about identity…
13.
IDENTITY EXERCISE
How do you think of yourself?
How do you introduce yourself?
What is most important
to you about
your identity?
14.
[Circle the three aspects of identity that are high priority for you when talking about your identity]
Health
Age
Caring responsibilities
Sexual orientation
Number of siblings/children
Gender
Work role/position
Citizenship
Language
Job
Income
Environment
Qualifications
Ethnicity
Education
Kinship relationships
Culture/Heritage
Community status
Source: Gardenswartz & Rowe, 1994
15.
My upor – grandma – was the second of my grandfather's four wives. He also had 4 concubines.
When I first read about Jacob and his wives and servants, I was quite relieved… the God of Rachel and Leah and their maids, Bilhah and Zilpah, would understand about non-British family structures…
My father migrated to Australia in 1962 to study medicine, where he met my mother, a law student of Scottish-Aussie descent.
As a half and half 2nd gen-er, my family were subject to theterrors of the White Australia policy and I was referred to in official documents as a mongrel child.
16.
The Diversity Wheel is an attempt to understand –
what is core to identity?
How do we understand ourselves and how do we make sense of each other?
What are the factors at play and what emphasis do we place on different aspects of identity?
17.
18.
Hoftede – Culture indicators
Examples of Culture Difference
19.
Leader 1: "Talatala (tr. Minister)... when are we going to start?"
Me: "Whenever you are ready to sing.[pause...]
Leader 1: "oh”
Other members: "What happened? What’s she doing?”
Leader 1: "We are doing it Fijian-style."
The first time I led worship with the Parramatta Fijians was after several months of sitting in the pew, learning how to be in the community. I was surprised when I was welcomed every week, but came to learn it is part of being a Talatala. I will always be welcomed. I wonder if it is because for so long Talatalas were foreigners, missionaries, not really part of the community? The congregation were surprised I did not default to starting worship with words, as most English-speakers did. After they sang, I herded a young boy to the front to help light the Candle, sent him back and signaled for everyone to bow their heads in prayer... Bula! Let’s pray.
Waiting for the community, the sung call, the visual action, the greeting in ‘mother’ language... were all part of worship that acknowledged who we were before God. My congregation were initially concerned about what I might be doing. (I don’t look Fijian)
The moment of waiting and not knowing had transformed them and me into us. Once they realized I knew who we were, we were able to worship together.
AKB From “Becoming We: exploring liminality” in ‘When we pray: the future of common prayer’ Ed. Stephen Burns and Robert Gribben, 2020
Worami Mittigar
We finished last night thinking about the Foretaste of Heaven and the vision of all cultures worshipping together.
For me it posed the challenge to intentionally seek out the discomfort of being intentionally multicultural.
I find a good place to start with this is the scriptures.
Once congregations grapple with the challenges of Jewish, Syrian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Hybrid cultures in the Bible, they can become more culturally aware, learning to critique their own cultures in the light of others.
This is pretty essential if they are to intentionally break open their cultural ghettos and seek to participate in the heavenly banquet which draws them forth beyond themselves.
How many people speak more than one language?
When you get fluent you start to dream in the new language – that is when you know you are thinking in different patterns, not just translating English-constructed thoughts… People who become fluent in multiple languages develop multiple ways of thinking and problem-solving.
1. 8-way learning diagram
The '8 Ways' framework belong to a place, not a person or organisation. They came from Country in Western NSW. The Baakindji, Ngiyampaa, Yuwaalaraay, Gamilaraay, Wiradjuri, Wangkumarra peoples and other nations own the knowledges that this framework originated from.
Different languages and cultures have different protocols and etiquette… there are different values and systems. The 8-way system helps us understand which elements of learning and communication are operating in any situation.
If we think about liturgical language, we face the same questions… historically much liturgical language is not text-based… so what is happening?
Colours, body language, movement, liturgical seasons, ritual action, different musics – they are all part of a non-verbal liturgical language. How well they operate depends on how well we learn to use, think in and express ourselves in that language.
When I go to a congregation using different verbal languages, I need to pay attention to the common language – liturgy… and the common text they have for exploring conversation – the Bible.
[A hint here: in multicultural ministry, I have found that two keys for bringing people of difference together is around a hospitable combo of food, music and storytelling]
Where can we look to develop the biblical foundations for intercultural inclusion of diversity?
· Genesis 3 (Fall/Humanity) and Genesis 17 (Covenant with Abraham… concept of the Nations)
· Acts 1:8, 2…, 6:7, 7, 8:5, 11:20,24. 13:1, 16:14-15, 21:15-22
· Body of Christ
· Revelation (especially Chapters 2:2-6 and 7:9-10)
· Ruth, Naomi, Boaz
· The Genealogies
· Cornelius, the Gentile/Jewish reconciliation stories, baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch
· Ephesians – whole letter
· Great Commission (Apostello = sent) and Great Commandment
· John (especially 13:35, 17)
· Family/Household of God and relationship to the Concept of koinonia
· Lydia
· Matthew 5:1-12, 22:36-40, 28:19
· Philippians 2
· Proverbs 3:5-6
· Psalm 127:1
· Divided nations > conversation with the Samaritan woman (John 4)
· 2 Chronicles 7
· Timothy
2. Paying attention to Changing Environments
Think about:
- What is the process now when you arrive at a pharmacy or café?
- What is the expectation if you use shared transport – plane, bus, train?
- Do you think it would be different if you were in London or Rome or New York or Singapore?
How is COVID reshaping Australian society?
https://mccrindle.com.au/wp-content/uploads/reports/COVID19-Phase3-Report-2020.pdf
e.g.1 50% of Australians say they are likely to move house in the next 2-3 years.
When people move house, they are also likely to seek to move church or expect different things from their church connections.
e.g.2 3 in 5 Australians are intending working more flexibly than pre-COVID.
If people work more flexibly, how do we adapt worship, discipleship and other church connectivity to match changing lifestyles?
3. What sort of longterm impact has COVID had on the following areas of your life?
How are Australian universities responding?
University executives from areas of university life concluded that universities would:
· Have less people on campus (driven by work and learn from home options)
· Need to be more experiential and alive
· Have more porous boundaries to industry and community
· Be more automated and efficient
What are the likely impacts on churches?
- More creative
- Phone brigade
- Better pastoral care / more creative
- Greater presence on internet –
better prospect of supporting small faith communities
- Trekkies rock [Will Nicholas does Trek Church]
- Younger members connecting discipleship online
- Streaming, youtube and zoom [passive and,
potentially, active] – why we do what we do?
- Passing the peace – touch?
- Obstacles to getting online – age? Timing? Equipment?
Knowhow? Working on different platforms
There are complexities with blending physical and virtual…
- How do we make adoption of a digital-first mentality? – the question is no longer how do we use digital to augment the physical experience
- Acknowledge that churches need to reorganise ourselves to work as sub-teams of the same family, with shared goals and resources – much of our work [mission] no longer needs to be geographically limited to previous boundaries
Slide 4
So now it opens up:
Worship in the 21st Century – rethinking worship through a missional lens
Church organizations are often influenced by the world in how we talk…
When we work on a mission plan or talk about Mission, we tend to talk about Our Mission – the Mission of this group of people – this church – this congregation – this denomination.
When we talk about worship, we tend to talk about how WE worship, how WE experience God, about the limitations and heritage of OUR property.
For those of you who were with us last night, I talked a bit about how I was challenged by this thinking in the university setting and how I am trying to integrate those learnings into the new congregational setting.
Exercise in thinking about Worship using a missiological lens
QUOTES – Lesslie Newbigin “The Open Secret” (1995)
1. The business of the church is to tell and embody a story.
2. To be elect in Christ Jesus, and there is no other election, means to be incorporated into his mission to the world, to be the bearer of God’s saving purpose for his whole world, to be the sign and the agent and the firstfruit of his blessed kingdom which is for all.
3. It has never at any time been possible to fit the resurrection of Jesus into any world view except a world view of which it is the basis.
4. A society which believes in a worthwhile future saves in the present so as to invest in the future. Contemporary Western society spends in the present and piles up debts for the future, ravages the environment, and leaves its grandchildren to cope with the results as best they can.
5. The Church, wherever it is, is not only Christ’s witness to its own people and nation, but also the home-base for a mission to the ends of the earth.
6. The church is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as God’s agents of kingship.
7. The victory of the Church over the power which was embodied in the Roman imperial system was not won by seizing the levers of power: it was won when the victims knelt down in the Colosseum and prayed in the name of Jesus for the Emperor.
8. It is less important to ask a Christian what he or she believes about the Bible than it is to inquire what he or she does with it.
9. Do things that will get people asking questions, the answer to which is the Gospel.
10. Congregational life wherein each member has [their] opportunity to contribute to the life of the whole body, those gifts with which the Spirit endows him, is as much of the essence of the Church as are ministry and sacraments.
11. The Church must be seen as the company of pilgrims on the way to the ends of the world and the ends of the earth.
Quotes activity Instructions
1. By yourself
a. Pick a number to start at - Read three quotes, starting with that number and then the subsequent two quotes.
b. Choose one quote for yourself to reflect on.
c. Take a moment to reflect and ponder the following question: What difference might this thinking make to how we worship or how we critique worship?
2. In a trio
a. Each person takes a turn sharing their quote.
b. Each person shares their own thinking about their response to their own chosen quote.
c. Take a moment to reflect and ponder: what difference does it make when we think about worship from a missional perspective?
d. Discuss the experience with one another
3. Facilitator
We often consider worship to be about how we approach God, but what if we were to reimagine the activity of worship as God’s opportunity to form and reform us for God’s own purposes? The concept of “Mass” or “Missa est” is about us being sent by God for God’s purposes in the world. What if we look at the missional fruits of worship?
Let’s have a look at the quotes and collect up some of the ideas that have started to come up in our community of faith…
- World Methodist Council global research
- World Methodist Council gathering in Sweden, scheduled for 2022
- The UCA, National Conferences and links with sister churches (and also Partner Churches)
- Expanding our thinking about who we ‘reach’… what is the mission field?
AKB’s learnings since the Digital Church Planting Conference held in October 2020.
- Potential Newcomers check online first
- Blogs, social media and websites are part of contemporary life identity… when these are absent, the assumption is that the organisation is not planning for a future
- Discipleship strategies need to include:
o Flipped Classroom
o Just-in-time AND Just-in-case
o A variety of resources beyond preferred and scheduled programs
o Online community
o Digital hospitality
Note: The mission field has been redefined. We can now be ‘in mission’ globally online. It becomes more urgent to explore what is Glocal.
DIGITAL CHURCH PLANTING – Underparty
An example of GLocality
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