A Challenge to "Big Productions"

As part of the Worship Team at our church, I'm constantly planning and working on the services for Sundays. The funny thing is how big of a "production" it's all become ("contemporary" worship, anyway). Today I got my "Technologies for Worship" magazine with page after page of articles on lighting and sound with complimentary glossy ads showing "Worship Leaders" proudly singing with their new Sure In-Ear Monitor system.

While glancing through the magazine, I was reminded of a chapter in a book called "Sabbath" by Wayne Muller (one of my favorite books). Here are a few excerpts:

• Liturgical ritual is meant to be repeated. We are not supposed to do it right the first time, and then be done with it. This year's Easter does not have to be new and improved, more dramatic and moving than last year's. The perfection is in the repetition, the sheer ordinariness, the intimate familiarity of a place known because we have visited it again and again, in so many different moments...
• This is not about progress, it is about circles, cycles, and seasons, and the way time moves, and things we must remember, because with ever-faster turnings of the wheel it can become easier to forget...
• When liturgy is ensnared by progress, all these quiet, mystical qualities are replaced by responsibility and obligation. I have been part of so many little churches paralyzed by the assumption that we must make this year's Christmas pageant better, more dramatic, more impressive, more spectacular than the last. I have seen parents, children, and youth ministers frantic, desperate, frusterated, and overwhelmed as they try to make the "perfect" representation of an event that was, at its origins, quiet, unassuming, unpredictable, sloppy, and invisible.