The pattern of worship, modified a bit from descriptions in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, and the like, is this: gathering together, offering, transformation, sending. I want to focus on the gathering together and the offering because, at least in terms of worship, those are our work. The transformation and the sending are all God’s work.
For me, it is significant when the title of a ministry position is Director of Worship and Music in contradistinction to Director of Music and Worship. The ministry of a Director of Worship and Music is fundamentally about gathering together and offering. Because in the gathering together, we are not just getting a group of people together to perform something, as though we just need to gather together a sufficent number of warm bodies to complete the task. No, we are, as the all-too-rarely-sung offertory says, gathering “the hopes and dreams of all.” The Director of Worship and Music’s task is to discern the body as St. Paul says, to attend to the hopes and dream, joys and sorrows, ministry and mission of the Body of Christ and to make sure that all of that is gathered together in the Sunday Assembly. This is so that, even if every member of the body is not physically present, the body is re-membered- really and truly gathered together as one in the Sunday assembly. Anything less than this is, I believe, simply a perfunctory performance of a ritual arising from a sense of duty or a sense that, “well, this is what we always do.” An authentic gathering together doesn’t just happen on its own – it must be cultivated week in and week out.
The music part of the Director of Worship and Music’s ministry is, perhaps more obviously, a ministry of gathering and offering. For to be sure, choirs/ensembles must be rehearsed and prepared to lead worship- to offer music in worship. Indeed it is the role of the Director of Worship and Music to do all in their power, with God’s help, to make sure that music offered in worship is an offering of our best to God. And not just an offering of the ensemble’s best to God or the organist’s best to God, but an offering of the entire assembly’s best to God. This most certainly means that the Director of Worship and Music is called to cultivate the participation of all in worship and music- through assembly song, proclamation of the word, drama, preparation of the worship space, art, scheduling of volunteers, cleaning up, and a myriad of other ways – to make sure that all of who we are is gathered together, offered to God for transformation, transformed by God, and sent out for the sake of the world God so loves. It also means that the Director of Worship and Music is called to continually listen and look for those whose musical gifts are not being gathered together and offered to God. And to find ways for those gifts to be offered God in worship. And to help cultivate those gifts so that they can grow and flourish and bring ever more glory to God.
This gathering together and offering that is so much a part of the ministry of the Director of Worship and Music is also fundamentally a ministry of inclusion. It is a ministry of always, always, always discerning what barriers need to be broken down that hamper the gathering together and offering of all of God’s people in the act of worship. Because without offering to God all of who everyone of us is for transformation, our life and the life of the world is diminished.
The Director of Worship and Music’s cultivation of gathering together and offering leads, at least for me, to the perpetual asking of a question: “Who are we leaving behind?,” or, put another way, “Who are we excluding?” This is not only a matter of asking what members of the church aren’t coming to worship and then simply calling to check in on them. This is a matter of deep discernmnent of what barriers we are intentinally or unintentionally erecting to the gathering together and offering of ALL God’s people that is absolutely fundamental to the Christian identity. But not only this. The Director of Worship and Music must also have a heart to continually ask, if indeed all of our gathering together and offering is so that God can transform us and send us out for the life of the WORLD, “Who out there, beyond the boundaries of the congregation are we excluding or not inviting who God may be calling to be a part of our gathering together and offering in this place?” A Director of Worship and Music is, I believe, called to be a person sweeping every single corner to find the lost coin – to locate all of those many treasures, many of whom may have been cast aside of neglected – and to gather them in to God’s tender love and care so that they too can be “freely loved and fully known,”*and brought into the holy work of gathering together, offering, transformation, and sending, for the life of the world.
Finally, a favorite hymn text of the recently departed Thomas Troeger that, in many ways, sums all of this up for me:
Look who gathers at Christ's table!
Hear the stories that they bring.
Some are weeping; some are laughing;
some have songs they want to sing.
Others ask why they're invited,
burdened by the wrong the've done.
Christ insists they all are welcome.
there is room for ev'ryone.
Clouds of light surround the table;
Ancient followers appear,
saints confessing how they wrestled
with their guilt, their doubt and fear.
Peter tells of his denying
Christ was ever in his sight;
Paul relates his fruitless effort
to obliterate the light.
Their sad stories are repeated
in the thousand diff'rent ways,
but they share one thing in common:
they are end in thanks and praise
for the host who has invited
north and south and east and west
to converge around this table,
where all life is fed and blest.
Bring your joy and bring your sadness,
and prepare to be surprised
by the host whose hands are wounded,
who will open wide your eyes
when he blesses bread and breaks it–
truth and manna from above!–
and then passes wine that wakens
in your hear the taste of love.
* A nod to Brian Wren’s hymn “When Christ was lifted from the earth”