The Work of the People: Telling the Story of the Congregation Through Worship – Transcript
Jim Latimer
Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministry, best practices and quick help – wisdom from the field. This is our collaborative Wisdom from the Field project featuring short interviews with transitional interim ministers and others with practical help and wisdom to offer those engaged in transitional ministry. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Wisdom from the Field.
Jim Latimer
I’m your host, Reverend Jim Latimer. Today we have with us again for another episode, Reverend Anna Tew. Ann is a millennial and an ELCA minister, and I’ve known Anna for a number of years. And just overall, she’s a delight to be around and has real, innovative, creative thoughts around worship, and how, you know, often you’ll hear pastors wishing that others would help more perhaps in leading worship or things, and we all know that when more people are involved in leading worship, there’s more spiritual crackle and energy. And Anna has helped her congregation make that shift from worshiping as just clergy-led to really being the work of the people as the word liturgy means. Alright, I won’t say any more Anna. Please help us see what’s the shift that you hope your congregation makes?
Anna Tew
Yes, sure. I’ve served two congregations in my career, one in Alabama, and one in Massachusetts. So, I would say two very different cultures. So, I’ve really become passionate about this particular thing. Worship is often seen as a show with an audience performed by the pastor, or maybe the music director. And so, what I was taught to sort of think about beginning in seminary, I’m gonna plug my seminary, the Candler School of Theology at Emory. If you’ve ever been in that chapel, or if you ever have a chance to go to that chapel, it’s set up like a train station where you can enter in one place and leave in another because Atlanta is located where it is because of the intersection of first trading routes, and then train tracks. So that very space reflects the community that worships there.
Anna Tew
And so that led me to thinking as a young seminary student of 23-24 years old, What if all worship in our congregations reflected the particular identity of the people doing the worship their particular place, their occupations, their life experiences? And how might they better connect to the Divine if they saw the worship as coming from them and from their community? So, what we start with in the Lutheran tradition, and many traditions, I would argue that worship in every church has some sort of structure, some sort of liturgy. And liturgy, of course, literally means the work of the people.
Anna Tew
And so, I think in terms of the structure of individual services, and then the structure of the seasons that you go through as a church. Our resource in the ELCA is called Sundays and Seasons. So that’s kind of how I’ve broken this topic up. So, Sundays meaning individual Sundays, Seasons, meaning the seasons of the year. So, if we’re thinking about Sundays, we’re thinking small. We’re thinking in terms of the individual elements of each particular service. So, some small practical ways that you might help worship reflect the community is for example in prayer – praying for your particular locality. For ours, it’s the town of South Hadley. South Hadley has a town meeting is our lead. We don’t have a mayor. But if you have a mayor, maybe you pray for your mayor. We pray for Mara, our governor. We pray for Joe, our president. And I might add that if you’re going to pray for political leaders, do be careful to always pray for whoever is in office.
Anna Tew
And then the other thing is, is little places to put in these local tidbits. So, for baptismal reaffirmations, I always try to name the local bodies of water. We give thanks to the Connecticut River that runs through our home for the Manahan River, for the Westfield river. And these are rivers that my church folks go out and fish on the weekends. And so, they’re gonna leave worship and go fishing and see that water and think of their baptisms and the fact that God loves them. So, it’s these little ways of connecting that.
Anna Tew
So that’s one way to think about Sundays and the individual elements of the worship service. And the other way is to think about seasons – the themes of special days and seasons. One of my very favorite examples that I talked to you about, Jim, when we’re first sort of floating this episode, is when I was in Montgomery, Alabama, they had a bluegrass jam something like you know, every fourth Saturday of the month. And I would go to these and I would listen to the songs that they would play. And they were all about people who they loved that they had lost, who had gone on to glory, which is exactly what All Saints Day is. It is remembering those people that we’ve loved and lost. And so, I invited the Bluegrass bands to come and do the intro to worship, do a couple of hymns and do the Offertory. And they sang the most beautiful songs about people who passed on. And it really helps the congregation to connect like, Oh, this is about my loved ones that I’ve lost. I’m gonna love bluegrass! But they had never made that connection before.
Anna Tew
And then at my current congregation, Our Saviors, they love nothing more than a good skit and a good campfire. They are camp people. They are Western Mass people. And they’re just like goofy, fun loving, smart, folks. So, when we do the Easter Vigil every year, we do the new fire, which is frankly, just a campfire. And that’s not just a campfire, but it’s campfire. And the kids love that. We do stop sort of roasting marshmallows. And then we go inside. And rather than read the assigned readings for Easter Vigil, of which there are many, we pick five from the Creation, Noah’s Ark, the stories of the Old Testament, and we have people perform skits. The kids always do a skit. The kids are welcome to be involved in other skits. We involve the congregation. That wouldn’t fly in every congregation. But this is who they are. They love that stuff. And they love writing and performing skits. And that’s how they tell the story of Easter and new hope. So that’s a couple of kind of practical examples of both Sunday and season reflection.
Jim Latimer
Thank you, Anna. That’s great. I love how practical it is. And to be able to do what you just said, you have to know your congregation. You’ve got to observe them. You’ve got to listen to them.
Anna Tew
Exactly.
Jim Latimer
So, the question is, how do you get to know what people’s passions and interests are? Well, that’s probably in other podcasts. It’s not that difficult. But it requires us as pastors to maybe step out of the self-image of – I’m the expert around liturgy and leading worship – to step out of that and think, No, I’m collaborating with these folks. And not only am I collaborating, but it’s about them. It’s about God in them through them and all that. And how do you find out? You gotta talk to them.
Anna Tew
Exactly.
Jim Latimer
Observe them. Do stuff. You don’t have to go fishing with them if you don’t want to, but you ask them how it went? Where did you go? What was it like? What did you catch? What kind of lure did you use?
Anna Tew
You get the bonus benefit of you know, if you’re like me and you Jim – you’re outdoorsy – you learn where to go kayaking. It’s great!
Jim Latimer
It is. Anna, that’s beautiful. I love it. And one of the reasons people join churches and hang around churches is because they feel seen, and in what you’re describing in liturgy is people are going to feel seen.
Anna Tew
Yes, absolutely.
Jim Latimer
Seen by their pastor and by God. That’s beautiful. Anna, that’s fabulous. A lot of folks will be inspired by this. Thank you so much for your time and your energy and your wisdom and look forward to what’s next!
Anna Tew
Can’t wait. Thanks Jim. Bye