In my new work as mission developer for The Project F-M, a new faith community in Fargo-Moorhead, I think a lot about what a new worship gathering might look like. I also try to attend a wide variety of worship services in the community so I get a feel of what the worship scene is in these parts. If I’m honest, most of those visits leave me pretty wanting. But reading the book, The Hospitality of God: Emergent Worship for a Missional Church, got me really excited about alternative, creative, and faithful forms of missional and emerging worship.
The authors, Mary Gray-Reeves (serving in California) and Michael Perham (serving in England) are both Bishops in the Anglican tradition. The book is their take — simple reporting and thoughtful analysis — on 14 Anglican-related emerging worship communities in the US and England. The result is a readable comprehensive study that’s chockfull of smart reflections that critique carefully and judge with humility.
Organized according to topic rather than worship community, in each section the authors give a generous snapshot of a worship community or two, and then reflect how this community connects with traditional Anglican principles.
For example, “Authority is a Conversation” explores how the traditional notion of pastoral authority and institutional church authority is often supplanted in emergent/missional communities. Instead of giving authority because a priest wears a collar, emergent communities function with what the authors call, “indigenous authenticity.” The congregations they visited were connected to their ministry context, invested in their communities, and cared for their partners but from their own very intentional terms rather than those dictated from a church hierarchy. Along those lines, sermons in emergent churches the authors experiences “were preached by laity, sermons responded to in conversation during a feedback time, or individuals creating their own reflections by participating in Open Space.”
Though the variety of the faith communities the authors visits is vast — from house churches, to once-a-month worship experiences connected to traditional congregations, to a very traditional Compline service which attracts 500 folks in their 20s and 30s — the one thing the churches seem to have in common, the authors write, is an open communion table with much emphasis on all being welcome regardless of age, baptismal status, or belief.
I also appreciated their description of Open Space worship (which my buddy Adam Walker Cleaveland curates) from a few different settings. The authors conclude the chapter with their assertion: “What is evident here, despite a huge variety of approach, is a deep and reverent commitment to the Bible, serious study of it, and frequent use of it, most of the time in step with the rest of the church.”
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