For “The Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Green Online Course, with Dan Wilt“.
This week’s work in Essentials looked at the ideas of Accessibility and Cultural Relevance. The accessibility piece was one that I thought I had a pretty good grasp on, the idea that we want to make all aspects of our worship experiences easy to become connected to regardless of who might turn up. This means that our music is simple enough to engage with, we are conscious of our language in that we dont use jargon that may be unfamiliar, and we understand who our potential audience may be.
The culturally relevant piece is one that I often struggle with, particularly since one of my roles is doing worship with Middle and High School students. What much of our congregation deems “contemporary worship” is generally a sound that is 5-10 years old in many cases. Also, because much of my work is with technology I also see areas where the church is woefully behind the times in the ways that it interacts and leverages technology to spread the gospel. In this sense I see that the church is less than culturally relevant.
Something I was struck by this week was from Erwin McManus:
“Aren’t you tired of being relevant? I’m sick and tired of being relevant; relevant means someone else got there first and now I’m trying to connect. We need to stop being relevant and start leading the way”(1)
It seems that in much of what we try and accomplish as the church we’re only play catch up to someone who got there before us. As McManus says I’d appreciate the day where the church reclaims the historical role as the best creators of art, music, culture, and thinking.
(1) Dan Wilt, Essentials Green Book wk 2
Eric Barz 