CHAPTER 10
DEEP WORSHIP: WHO ARE STUDENTS BECOMING WHEN WE LEAD THEM IN WORSHIP?
Kara Powell and Brad Griffin
DEEP DESIGN, STEP 1 (DISCERNMENT) : NOW?
“The question before us…is not whether our people will learn when they worship. The question is, What will they learn when we lead them in worship?”66
DEEP DESIGN PROMPT
We wish we could stamp this quote by theologian and author Will Willimon on every youth ministry’s order of service, every music leader’s guitar, and every church’s worship bulletin.
Let’s be honest: for most of us, worship means the right words, the right prayers, the right music, done the right way, by the right musicians, with the right multimedia trimmings. “Deeper” worship Now means having a student band that actually practices or even—gasp!—chooses songs that fit the theme of the service. What would it mean to take our worship—our music, our prayers, our rituals, and our interactions with Scripture—into New and more life-giving waters?
Creating space for God’s transformation: People learn in worship.
Brad will start with his own confession and crisis as a worship leader:
Hindering God’s transformation: Our worship tends to be focused on the “right” techniques.
A few years into ministry, I found myself wondering from time to time after a song or a prayer, Do I actually believe that? One song in particular, “At the Cross,” sticks out in my mind.67 A former youth pastor had taught our group the lines, “At the cross, he died for our sins. At the cross, he gave his life again.” Every time we sang those lyrics, the word again slapped me in the face. Again? I wrestled with this theology, BUT KEPT SINGING IT. Even worse, I was the guy with the guitar and the microphone, leading the “student band” as we, in turn, led the kids and adults in worship.
Finally (after a couple of years—I’m not kidding!) I tracked down the real words. To my great relief, I found that the original read, “He gave us life again”! Big difference. Looking back, I wonder…what did those students think about themselves and their sins, sending Jesus to the cross again and again? Was once not enough? Were students learning that the cross didn’t really make that much of an impact, or that it was just one of many ways God had to give his life for our sins?
Brad Griffin is project manager for the Center for Youth and Family Ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary. Brad has been involved in youth and worship ministry for the last 10 years in Kentucky, Illinois, and southern California, and is now an M.Div. student at Fuller. He lives in Pasadena with his wife and two daughters.
Creating space for God’s transformation: Causing us to rethink what students are learning during worship.
What about you? Have you ever edited a line like “Holiness is what you want from me”68 to read “Holiness is what you want for me”? There’s some theological distance between those pleas worth considering.
Hindering God’s transformation: Shallow worship can be contra-transformational.
The problem goes deeper than song lyrics. I’ve seen from my own leadership how shallow and puny our worship can be when we thoughtlessly “wing it” from week to week. At times it can even be contra-transformational.
Chew on that for a minute.
Contra-transformational.
In the end, our shallowness cheats God and kids.
If we’re not careful, communal worship Now can reinforce unhealthy leadership models, introduce destructive practices and processes into worshipers’ lives, or help maintain a denial of reality by feeding escapist mentalities.69 When all of our songs and prayers are based on transporting us to hyperindividual states of spiritual oneness with God, we are likely to miss out on the distinctly communal nature of worship. This individual focus might also cheat the biblical imperatives to care for the people and world around us as an extension of our worship (see Isaiah 58).
Hindering God’s transformation: Sometimes our worship teaches students the wrong messages.
Worship can also become a tool of oppression when leaders see it as an opportunity to control others or push their own agendas. This can happen in any number of ways: urging the manipulation of certain spiritual gifts to prove the presence of the Holy Spirit; submerging genuine expression of the same; or modeling a one-man/woman-show approach to leadership (haven’t we had enough of that?).
Hindering God’s transformation: Sometimes our “spontaneity” communicates that we—and God—don’t care.
Without thoughtful preparation, even our best attempts at “spontaneity” can come across as if we don’t really care about what we’re doing. Or worse, they can communicate that we think God doesn’t really care about what we’re doing. Perhaps we should think twice before tossing the keys to our student band and saying, “You plan it, you lead it.” When we do we’re saying, in effect, “It doesn’t matter all that much.” Not that student-led worship is always bad, but is it really transformative when we abandon 16-year-olds to create a worship plan based on what songs they like this week?
Maybe it’s time for us to get beyond how-to manuals for putting worship teams together or designing “engaging” worship services for students. Maybe it’s time for us to rethink the direction our worship is heading. If we’re not careful, we could be singing ourselves—and the students under our care—nowhere.
DEEP DESIGN, STEP 2 (REFLECTION): NEW?
Worship is more than a certain kind of music, more than what happens in the church sanctuary on Sunday mornings. For that matter, worship is more than a “worship service.” Paul reminds us that our “everyday, walking-around, going-to-school-and-work lives” are by their nature created as acts of worship and living sacrifices offered to God (Romans 12:1–2, adapted from The Message). In the midst of our lifestyle of worship, specific gatherings for worship lead us into a mysterious interaction with God—a holy dialogue—and we should expect to come out of it transformed in some way. When we lead adolescents into a worship encounter, what do we expect will happen to them? Anything?
I’d like to suggest that identity formation is one of the transformative processes that takes place through the mystery of worship. Identity formation is not the goal—worshiping God is—but nevertheless it’s something that happens to us and in us when we worship.
Scripture: Worship is more than music or just a “worship service” worship is a lifestyle.
At the heart of the human experience, we want to know who we are, why we exist, and how we relate to others. We yearn to live meaningfully; we long to discover what—and whose—story we are part of. These issues are especially present and powerful during adolescence. A multidisciplinary area of research and speculation, identity formation has recently reemerged as a significant focus of study in the social sciences. For those who work among adolescents within the context of the church, paying attention to what psychology, sociology, and anthropology say about identity development may result in a New understanding of the adolescent journey.
Experience: Our identity is formed as we worship God.
The process of identity formation in adolescents is closely linked to the task of individuation. Individuation involves developing into a distinct person, separate from the childhood roles in the family system. During individuation, a person develops the ability to interact healthily within and outside those relationships of origin, becoming part of a larger community. Using the metaphor of a tightrope walk, Chap frames the adolescent task of individuation through three critical questions: “Who am I?” (identity), “Do I matter?” (autonomy), and “How do I relate to others?” (belonging/reconnection).70 Each child walks the tightrope of adolescence from childhood toward adulthood, desperately needing mature adults to be both guides and safety nets.
Research: Individuation is an experience revolving around identity, autonomy, and belonging.
Historically, Erik Erikson was the first “guru” of identity development. He designated seven life stages of identity formation, labeling crisis and decision as the means through which individuals progress through the stages. In Erikson’s model, adolescence is marked by the resolution of the crisis of identity versus identity/role confusion.71 Erikson believed that navigating this transition leads to the adolescent’s developing a sense of individuality, a role in society, an experience of continuity across time, and a commitment to ideals.72 To add to the complexity of this task, adolescents often carry all kinds of unresolved crises from earlier stages of identity formation, including feelings of mistrust, shame, guilt, and inferiority.73
Research: Adolescence is marked by the resolution of the crisis of identity versus identity/role confusion.
The power of a person’s family, peers, broader community, and culture in helping to resolve these issues is undeniable. Teenagers often find that their identities are associated and strengthened by some sort of medium: “an object, an act, a music, an art, a language, a banner that serves as a label, insignia…These tag a human group and…in turn assume the identity of the group.”74
Research: Identity development involves personal discovery, interaction with others, and cultural symbols and rituals.
So human identity development seems to involve some level of personal discovery, interaction with others in the context of a larger narrative, and communication through cultural symbol or ritual.
As youth workers, we often try to help students understand their identities by turning to Scripture. Scripture and the Christian faith are unambiguous regarding the question of human identity: we were created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27) so that our very existence reveals God’s glory. Henri Nouwen proposes that true identity is discovered as we hear the voice of God calling us beloved. The words “You are my beloved” reveal “the most intimate truth about all human beings.”75
Scripture: Our identities as humans are rooted in the image of God.
Worship is a prime opportunity for us to realize our beloved-ness. The God we worship not only created us in his image, but also re-creates us by Christ’s work of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5) and names us as God’s children (1 John 3:1–2).76 Reflecting on God’s redemption means we’re doing theology when we worship. Even more than that, worship becomes a transformational acting-out of theology.
History: True identity is discovered as we realize we are the beloved.
For kids, this transformation through worship happens on the deepest levels of reality: identity, autonomy, and belonging. As adults who care about kids, we help guide students away from the cultural baggage they’ve accumulated and toward the heart of their God-created identity in Christ. We help foster worship environments that encourage students carefully across the bridge of adolescence into adulthood alongside their families. We’ll be better guides on this important journey of identity formation as we explore New ways that worship helps students navigate their experiences and relationships. Since no two communities share an identical landscape, your next step is to understand the hills and valleys of the unique contexts of your own kids.
Your Students’ Contexts
Experience: We all need to match our worship experiences against the needs and issues of our students.
The body of Christ is always located in a missional-contextual reality.77 In other words, while all Christian communities share much in common, each has its own distinct characteristics and nuances. Even savvy youth workers need to step back from time to time and take inventory of how their youth ministries are—or aren’t—matching the real needs and issues of their students. A key question for us becomes: how is God forming a new identity among this specific people, in this specific time and place?
The work of theologian Walter Brueggemann can help youth workers who want deeper worship to tap into the context of their students. The Psalms hold a full 65 laments, or “psalms of disorientation,” as Brueggemann terms them. Yet our corporate worship rarely, if ever, includes lament language. As Brueggemann suggests, “The problem with a hymnody [the collected songs, rituals, and prayers a church uses] that focuses on equilibrium, coherence, and symmetry…is that it may deceive and cover over. Life is not like that. Life is also savagely marked by disequilibrium, incoherence, and unrelieved asymmetry.”78
History: Our worship needs to acknowledge more of life’s disorientation.
Youth get this. The pains of loneliness, abandonment, and hopelessness mark their worlds. It could be argued that disorientation provides an appropriate label for the adolescent experience. The God who understands suffering appeals to a generation looking for something or someone worthy of suffering for, and who is willing to suffer in love for them.79
Experience: Adolescents connect with suffering during worship.
An identity-attentive worshiping community allows space both for authentic lament and for hope in the midst of suffering. When students deeply grieve the loss of a classmate to cancer, and we give them the chance to speak (or sing, draw, or write out) their pain in worship, we create a community that invites the hard questions. These questions take us to places of doubt before we can return again to places of faith and trust. In essence, the lament makes way for healing.
Lament for our students may involve personal or community sin, personal loss, grief on behalf of friends in difficult circumstances, or injustice and pain on a community or world level. How do we help Karl, who associates “parents” primarily with abuse and neglect, worship a God who we claim is the perfect Parent? What about the deep sense of shame and regret Lina feels about her sexual encounters with several boys over the last year? Will she be able to offer heartfelt praise to God without first lamenting the loss and disappointment she’s experienced? Lament, in part, enables Karl, Lina, and the rest of us to hope genuinely.
For more on lament and its place in Scripture and your youth worship, check out www.cyfm.net.
Dialogue
When it comes to lament and other issues, how will you know if you “get” the context of your students? One easy way to stimulate New dialogue is through a survey. Recently I designed a simple survey to collect reflections and observations from students in several churches. The survey invites students to discuss and evaluate the ways their youth ministries and churches worship together. The survey used simple questions, such as:
Experience: One great way to understand your context is through a survey.
For more on how to dialogue with (or survey) your students, see Chapter 12 on focus groups.
How important to you is being part of a group of people who regularly worship God together? What have you grown to understand about yourself, others, your church, and God through worshiping with others? Why do you worship with others?
After taking this survey, one student brought up the question of whether worship is primarily individual or corporate. She insisted that worshiping God is a solitary experience, and the people around us “just happen to be there” as we worship (an attitude reflected in several responses). So then the conversation shifted to other questions such as:
“What would be missing if you were not part of worship at your church?” “Who would care if you didn’t show up?”
Over the course of the conversation, several students realized worship may be about more than simply “me and God.” Students long to know the answer to that question—does it matter if I show up? In this scenario, a survey provided a launching point for deeper learning.
Along with your ministry team, you might want to study your communal worship life—its practices, rituals, and interactions with one another and with God—by asking:
Are there any fallacies communicated through the way we conduct worship or by the people we exclude from worship? Do our services emphasize fragmented families and community, whisking off youth and children to other parts of the church while adults experience “real” worship? Do we really believe what we are singing, praying, speaking, and displaying visually in our worship?
Regular dialogue with these kinds of questions allows the ministry team to affirm or adjust areas of ministry as needed, guarding against unhealthy patterns.
Ritual
Rituals are powerful ways of transmitting identity, especially rituals that involve rites of passage in the journey to adulthood.
Liturgy has generally come to mean the rites, practices, and common worship language of a church. Even the traditional liturgies of the church—which youth pastors tend to dismiss habitually—can help frame adolescent spiritual experiences within a broader and deeper collective identity. Maybe it’s time for the youth worker community to revisit the “stuff they do (or used to do) on Sunday morning in ‘big church.’”
Liturgy = the “service” of the people, through worship.
Practicing liturgy invokes acts of remembrance, a key theme of the biblical worship narrative. Rites of passage that recall God’s activity are important teaching tools in worship that speak a new identity into believers’ lives. As Will Willimon notes, “Rites of passage are ritualized journeys across life’s most difficult boundaries. They give new meaning to the changes in the status or role of persons, they reestablish equilibrium in persons and communities after the crisis of change, and they…[transmit] to future generations what the community believes to be the meaning of that change.”80
Experience: It’s time to revisit the rituals and acts of remembrance we’ve tended to cast aside.
Baptism is one of the most visual rituals that help us experience our identity as Christians.81 Baptism offers a response to the “Who am I?” question: “I am the one who is called, washed, named, promised, and commissioned.”82 And this, by necessity, happens in the context of a baptismal community. Those baptized into Christ become inheritors of God’s promises and living symbols of the new creation.83
History: Rites of passage give meaning and a sense of history to students today.
Another primary identity-forming ritual of the church is the Lord’s Supper. Eating together creates a sense of family, and Jesus’ practice of sharing meals with “saints and sinners” unveils the centrality and power of table fellowship for faith communities. Henri Nouwen teaches that our identities in Christ share the nature of the Eucharist: as the Spirit moves in our lives to form us as the beloved, we are “taken, blessed, broken, and given,” thus reflecting the actions of the Lord’s Supper.84
History: Both baptism and the Lord’s Supper are important rituals that help develop students’ identities.
Within your own ministry you might want to ask these questions:
What other rituals and tools of worship effectively communicate and transpose truths about God and humanity into the adolescent reality? How can we create further rituals of table fellowship, incorporating youth into the life of the community? How can baptism and/or confirmation rites include significant opportunities for others to confer on them new identities in Christ?
If the church leaves kids without any initiation rites—if they are left with only our culture’s cheap imitations and “graduations”—they will be forced to initiate one another, taking on roles abandoned by appropriate guides. Worship can be either a spawning pool or a cesspool for identity formation, depending in part upon its leadership. What kind of pool are our kids swimming in from week to week at our churches?
Experience: If we don’t give kids rituals and initiation rites, they’ll create their own cheap imitations.
Caveats
If you want an even deeper understanding of the role of rituals and rites of passage in your youth worship, check out www.cyfm.net.
A few warnings seem appropriate here.
First, the last thing we want is to make following Jesus more complicated or obscure. “Rites of passage” can sound and feel like fraternity rituals (think secret handshakes and group humiliation). Following Jesus should never require that. Sacred moments do not have to be complicated to be profound. Actions such as piling rocks together to create a simple altar or laying hands on a young person’s head while anointing her with oil create space for a deeply formative interaction with God.
Experience: Although glorifying God is the primary purpose of worship, along the way we can pick up valuable lessons about our identity.
Second, self-discovery is never the point of our worship. Glorifying God must remain our central focus. Yet as we glorify God, we will inevitably learn about ourselves. The questions then become what are we learning together as a community? and Is what we are learning accurate? As we ask and answer these questions, far from singing ourselves nowhere, we will see the kingdom of God breaking through in the lives of our churches.
DEEP DESIGN, STEP 3 (OBSERVATION): WHO?
Hal Hamilton, pastor to students at Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Marion, Illinois, has been wrestling with questions like these for years. The answers he’s discovered (and sometimes stumbled into) can help you and your team consider how your worship can offer deeper meaning and significance.
Hal, you are a professing non-musician. How has this influenced the nature and tone of worship in your student ministry?
Because I’m not a musician, I think it’s been easier for me and my students to grasp that worship is more than just singing a few songs. I’m a worship leader, yet I don’t play music. Clearly worship is more than music. But when it comes to music, I’ve had to learn to empower musicians and others in their gifts.
So how do you try to help other non-musicians learn to worship?
One year, as we were developing a new type of worship service, I looked at a specific student who was not a musician. His dad, who had helped lead worship music in another church, had recently walked out on the family. This kid was a computer whiz, so I asked myself, “How do I help him worship?” I approached him and asked if he could build a computer for us to use in worship as his act of worship. He was transformed. He uncovered an identity that benefited our community, partly because his skills shaped our worship in ways that mattered to him and to the community.
How else do you try to involve kids in your worship leading and planning?
One thing we do currently in our community is extend an invitation for all of the worshiping community to come together from 6:30 to 8 on Wednesday nights. This is a time when anybody can bring spiritual gifts. We spend the first 15 minutes talking about the previous service. This is not a negative critique, but a time to ask questions. Where did we encounter wonder? Where did we encounter transformation? Was the teaching biblical? Was the worship passionate? Then we start planning for future worship gatherings. As we look at next week’s text, we ask who has something to offer—a thought, a gift, whatever. Often the brainstorming with this group is about the look and feel of the worship space—the ambience. There’s a lot of ritual in how we decorate our worship space, yet it also shifts based on the text. In some churches the message is, “If you’re good enough to sing in the praise band, you’re a worshiper, and if you’re not, you’re not.” We’re trying to send the message that all of us are worshipers.
How do you think worship impacts students’ identity formation?
One of our college interns helped me put into words what happens in worship that shapes our identity. She referred to 1 John 4:18, which says, “Perfect love casts out all fear.” When we worship, we encounter the One who is perfect love. As he casts out fear, we’re able to become more open, more honest, and more authentic. We’re able to understand what it means to be the people God has called us to be.
What do you do to understand the particular fears and struggles of students in your context?
This comes not out of the worship service itself, but out of being a community where adults love Jesus passionately and walk alongside students with authenticity and appropriate vulnerability. As we share life together, these things emerge. The students have watched godly adults struggle—with cancer, the failure of a business, prodigal kids, unemployment, surgeries, death of parents, broken living room furniture, and a lot more—with grace and openness. That goes a long way toward opening the door to discovering the fears and struggles of the young people whose lives they have shared.
As someone who has been in youth ministry for 20 years, in what ways has your approach to student worship changed?
I used to be pretty directive in the way I led worship. In college I coordinated weekend worship teams that would visit churches and lead services. I mostly handpicked my teams and told them what to do. I felt there were formulas you could use, with the right people, to obtain the right results. But my philosophy and approach have changed. There’s something in me that rises up against technique as the central focus in worship. I don’t necessarily want students to have a great youth group experience. If they struggle through youth group but have fruit that lasts, it’s worth it. That makes our programming and worship messy—which goes against my personality. But I find myself strangely loving it.
What do you mean by “messy” worship experiences?
I don’t mean being thoughtless and just winging it. Instead, I mean valuing empowerment over excellence. I mean promoting process over performance. I mean the freedom to be real as kingdom people who live in the real world with real issues and pain, who are broken and sometimes a mess, but who also worship a real God.
In some youth ministries, worship has become equated with what we do together on Sundays. How do you view worship?
I’ve been teaching recently on “Eating with Jesus,” mostly from Luke. We’ve found that something powerful happens when we discuss the kingdom of God and interact with the kingdom around the table. We have been encouraging our community to build hospitality throughout the week and gather around tables and wrestle through issues of following Jesus. That helps students think about hospitality as an act of worship that makes us a worshiping community throughout the week, not only when we come together at a worship service.
How do you try to incorporate students into the worship life of the church?
The church is one of the few places in American culture where three, four, and maybe even five generations can still gather together. Yet we usually segregate ourselves in different rooms. At some point I started getting serious about the whole community worshiping together.
When we only let kids express their passion for God when they’re performing one Sunday a year on “Youth Sunday,” that’s not kingdom. If we really believe Jesus’ words and his teaching about worship and about community, then we’ve got to provide opportunities for people of every age to be worshiping. In our church, we integrate teenagers as liturgists, and we encourage students to join the choir because we think intergenerational worship is best for the whole Body.
What role does the ritual of communion play in your worship?
The way we worship together is fairly sacramental. Communion reminds us of our brokenness and allows us to celebrate in the midst of that brokenness. We take communion every week, framing it in the context of the good news. In our community, God’s Word always takes us to communion. We do it in different ways, but it’s a regular ritual.
What other significant worship rituals are students involved in?
We have a number of rite-of-passage rituals, but most of them are outside the context of corporate worship and more programmatic. One powerful worship ritual we have involves our worship space. We meet in a gym, and setting it up for worship has become a ritual act of worship. There is a buzz and a community happening for an hour before the service that is completely energizing.
Why do you think so many youth ministries don’t give time in-their worship for students to experience the type of lament that was experienced by the writers of the Psalms?
I think there are people who are afraid that if they begin to grieve, the black hole would be so huge that it would swallow them. If as the leader I’m not sure I won’t get lost in that pit, how in the world am I going to take someone else there?
For youth workers who want to lead their students into more experiences of Psalm-like lament, what would you recommend?
I have to admit, I haven’t explored this a great deal yet. It seems to me that studying the psalms of lament together and allowing the students to respond by writing and speaking their own experiences in the form of a psalm of lament might be a good opportunity. Or perhaps discussing movie clips that leave a lack of resolution or a sense of disequilibrium. Or maybe structuring an entire worship gathering around a psalm of lament and allowing students to express their uncertainties in prayer.
Any more suggestions for youth workers who might feel clueless or helpless when it comes to planning and leading worship meaningfully?
The students and adults in your community are exactly who God wants to help lead your worship times. If you don’t have the world’s best singer or guitar player in your community, you must not need them.
DEEP DESIGN, STEP 4 (APPLICATION) : HOW?
Application Questions:
What do you think your students are learning about God and themselves from your current worship experiences and services? What is good about what they’re learning? What do you wish they were learning? If you created a survey about worship for youth in your care, do you expect you might find that your youth have views similar to the youth in this chapter (e.g., that worship is individual, between me and God) ? What kinds of questions do you want to ask them now? What rituals do you have that are particularly meaningful in worship? What do you think students are learning about themselves through those rituals? What ideas do you have about other rituals that could help students go deeper in their worship and personal growth? How is your worship ministry similar to what Hal describes? How is it different? Which one of the ideas or practices in this chapter do you think you should reflect on in the next month? What other practical ideas do you have to spur identity transformation through deeper worship in your church or ministry?
How are we going to go deeper in our worship?
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