Worship in Rural Contexts

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Worship in Rural Contexts

• Our Starting Points
• Live Issues
• Challenges Opportunities
• Clues for Worship Planning

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Weekly services Congregation of 18-25
3 services/month Congregation of 7-9
2 Sunday 1 weekday services each
week Congregations of 10 and 35-45 Junior
Church of 8-15
2 services/month Congregation of 3-6
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Family Year

• Start of school year (September)
• All Saints (an antidote to Halloween)
• All Souls
• Remembrance
• Christmas
• New Year
• Valentines Day

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Family Year

• Mothering Sunday
• Lent, Holy Week and Easter
• St. Georges Day?
• Exam time
• Fathers Day
• End of school year (Y6 service)
• Holiday time

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Agricultural Year

• Creation - 2nd Sunday before Lent
• Plough Sunday - 1st Sunday of Epiphany
• Rogationtide - 6th Sunday of Easter
• Lammastide - 1 August
• Harvest Thanksgiving - Start of October
• Prayers in times of Agricultural Crisis

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Are You Regular?

• Many services became no longer
• weekly but monthly, creating
• a context which demanded esoteric knowledge to
  find them, discouraged that the favoured Anglican
  bird of passage, the casual attender, and created
  patterns of irregular attendance as an unwelcome
  norm in spirituality.
• George Lings

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11.00 am
8.00 am
9.30 am
BCP HC HAM
CW HC FEN
FAMILY STOKE
1st
BCP HC STOW
BCP HC LEA
CW HC CROFT
2nd
BCP HC HAM
FAMILY FEN
CW HC STOKE
3rd
BCP HC STOW
MATINS LEA
FAMILY CROFT
4th
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Joining Together?

• The Methodist Church policy became to close
  small local chapels and ask people to come
  together to form critical mass or joinable
  churches.
• Conversations I had with Methodist leaders tell
  me one third of the people simply stopped going
  anywhere, one third stayed local but transferred
  (usually to the Anglicans) and only one third
  complied.
• George Lings

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Audience or Participators?

• Lay members sit where they always sat in
  patterns that continue to relegate them to the
  role of spectator an audience sat before the
  stage of the altar.
• We need to get away from the Boeing 747
  configuration in which we all look towards the
  cockpit and hope that someone up there knows what
  theyre doing.
• Richard Giles
• Dean of Philadelphia

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Flying Machine?

• It is better to provide simple but sustainable
  weekly lay-led services of the word, with
  Eucharist less frequently, than to operate with
  the priest as a whirling dervish Eucharistic
  machine, flying around the benefice, parachuting
  in for the magic words, splitting the integrity
  of word and sacrament and unable to build
  pastoral contacts.
• George Lings

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Lay Ordained

• it was when we saw a combination of leadership
  by a parish priest and a growing understanding of
  personal ministry on the part of the laity that
  we found the most inspired churches
• the emphasis which has been placed on the
  full-time stipendiary clergy has overshadowed
  every Christians vocation to discover their own
  ministry at work, in the community and in the
  church.
• the key role of the priest is to bring into
  focus and enable the total mission and ministry
  of the Church.
• Faith in the Countryside, 1990

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Lay Ordained

• The decline in clergy numbers in rural areas is
  opening the way to a new and more cohesive vision
  of the Churchs ministry. We believe this to be
  the work of the Holy Spirit. (p155)
• A number of clergy spoke of a lay group in the
  benefice as their major source of spiritual
  support. Learning to share even this very
  personal part of ministry with lay people is
  perhaps the key to an effective spirituality for
  todays multi-parish incumbent. (p186)
• Faith in the Countryside, 1990

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Making Worship

• Leading people in worship is leading people into
  mystery, into the unknown and yet the familiar.
  This spiritual activity is much more than getting
  the words or the sections in the right order. The
  primary object in the careful planning and
  leading of the service is the spiritual direction
  which enables the whole congregation to come into
  the presence of God to give him glory.
• New Patterns for Worship

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Clues for Worship
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Musical Options

• The Organist
• A music group (which may include children)
• The Digital Hymnal
• Midi files on the existing organ
• No Organist - No Problem
• Unaccompanied singing

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Handling Gods Word

• Bible Study or Study Course
• A Play or Meditation
• Pre-written homily
• Conversation/discussion
• Dialogue
• Podcast (or DVD?)

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Intercession

• Contributions from congregation?
• Actions/movement
• Newspapers?
• Local and wide
• Silence

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For All Ages

• All-age worship?
• Printed resources
• Crèche Area?
• Junior Church/Sunday School
• Workshops
• Holiday Clubs

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Local Christian Communities centrally supported

• Each church has a small worship planning team
• Trained and supervised by central staff, with
  resources centrally available
• The team meets regularly to review, plan, assign
  tasks, agree themes, etc
• Each member of the team will have particular
  gifts and callings (eg eucharistic ministry,
  preaching, ideas, IT/DTP)
• Every service is co-planned and co-led by at
  least 2 of the team, involving where possible
  others not in the team

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What they really, really want

• A de-churched enquirer was talking recently
  about his journey back to faith after 20 years.
  After a while, the question of where to worship
  came up. The key criterion for this person was
  not the style of service nor the distance to
  travel. Instead he said, I want something that
  is going to connect me with the living God. I
  dont care what that looks like - I dont mind
  being challenged or even uncomfortable.
• Mission-shaped Parish

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What is possible?

• The rural church is not going to grow regionally
  noteworthy ministries in preaching, musical
  excellence or provision for varied ages of
  childrens groups. What it does is offer
  something simple and sustainable, where all who
  go count they know and are known.
• George Lings