Exploring Contemporary and Alternative Worship
2005 Louisville, Kentucky
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Convener 2005
Convener: Eileen D. Crowley, Ph.D. (assistant professor of word and worship, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago)
Seminar Participants 2005
Seminar participants: Kevin Anderson, Chip Andrus, Eileen Crowley, Helen Gierke, Marlea Gilbert, Todd Johnson, Ruth Meyers, Sylvia Sweeney
Visitors: Carl Stam, Crawford Murphy, Melanie Ross
Seminar Report 2005
The primary focus for this year’s discussions was the phenomenon of alternative worship, also known as alt worship. This postmodern approach to worship, as practiced by diverse groups in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the U.S., and elsewhere, has its origins in efforts in the 1990s to contextualize worship for young people. It typically combines elements of worship from various moments in Christian liturgical tradition and incorporates a variety of arts (including new media arts), a diversity of worship settings (including flexible, borrowed, or multi-space situations), collaborative leadership, and integration of media technology.
Kevin Anderson reported on the four-day summer Greenbelt Festival of Arts which has occurred annually outside of London for more than thirty years. The festival brings together diverse groups of people (some 20,000 in 2004) who represent a variety of faith traditions and who worship in multi-sensory, multi-arts ways not typical of Sunday worship in denominational churches. Each group offers its form of worship—typically including diverse uses of the visual and musical arts, media technology, dance and other movement, and symbols from popular culture. Anderson reported on two books by one of the leaders of the Emerging Worship movement, a form of alternative worship, Pete Ward, The Rite Stuff and Mass Culture: Eucharist and Mission in a Postmodern World.
Marlea Gilbert led the seminar group’s discussion of the book Alternative Worship, its postmodern approach to ritual, its liturgical theology, its aesthetics, and its concept of liturgical leader as “curator.”
Ron Rienstra submitted a report and analysis of multiple alt worship experiences he had while living for a short time in the U.K. He included comments from alt worship leaders whom he interviewed.
Members discussed future research into churches which have identified themselves with the emerging worship movement, as well as those still developing the mega-church and satellite-church models of Sunday seeker and praise-and-worship services.
The seminar members also discussed with Melanie Ross her article, “Dunking Doughnuts? Rethinking Free Church Baptismal Theology.”
Members offered to explore local contemporary, alternative, and seeker churches about which they could report in the 2006 seminar, with the joint hope that this investigation might eventually lead to collaborative field research and analysis.