Worship Innovation in Perspective

What kinds of new things should we try, and why?

After returning from sabbatical, while gearing up for the coming months of worship, I have been reflecting on worship experiments of the past several years. This graphic helps articulate why I have been investing my time and creativity into innovation in worship. 
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The image comes from a piece by congregational consultant Susan Beaumont, which in turn builds on a Harvard Business Review article about innovation in the for-profit sector. To congregations who want to thrive into the future, Beaumont directs attention to the process of “living into your next potential.”
 
Beaumont suggests that core innovation initiatives modify existing programs and ministries to better serve existing constituents and the needs you’ve been addressing. Adjacent innovation efforts build on existing strengths incrementally. Thus they serve additional needs, and reach new people – not dramatically different populations, but folks who are already within reach of the groups currently being served. The most headline-grabbing experiments, transformational initiatives, are meant to serve people who are in different orbits than current constituents. These “breakthrough offerings” go well beyond tinkering and constitute fundamentally new approaches.
 
Beaumont thinks we might learn from corporate innovators. The research indicates that the most successful organizations are those that “allocated about 70% of their innovation activity to core initiatives, 20% to adjacent ones, and 10% to transformational ones.”

How might that translate to a church? For a typical progressive congregation, programs in the core include religious education, small groups, and caring ministries, along with worship. Let’s zero in on worship.
 
Worship is how new people most often check out a church. It is the program many members participate in the most. And it is THE program that serves the church as a whole, gathered community.
 
Every aspect of a congregation’s mission plays out in worship:  building a community of care and connection, tending hearts and minds with inspiration, teaching from the roots of our Unitarian Universalist tradition, shaping commitments and courage that participants take back into their everyday lives. Worship doesn’t have to be everybody’s “thing,” individually. But it is the beating heart of religious community.
 
So it makes sense that, if we’re trying to meet the moment, and co-create the future of our living tradition to serve all comers, a significant amount of energy in a congregational setting will go toward innovation in the flagship program, worship.

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Connecting with colleagues, congregations and worship spaces on a sabbatical road trip this fall. (Above, with Rev. Sara LaWall at the Boise UU Fellowship after "serene sanctuary" renovations were completed as part of their capital initiatives.)

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On the chancel in the new building and sanctuary of UUs of Petaluma, CA, before guest preaching.

In the congregation I serve, First Unitarian Church of Omaha, I can group experimentation with worship in the past several years into five areas:  sensory-rich worship series à la Marcia McFee; a broader cultural shift toward participatory, multi-sensory worship; a music-centered worship format I’ve been calling Soulful Songs Sundays; a food-and-community rich format we call here Brunch Church; and a sermon co-op I piloted with a dozen UU colleagues.
 
The desire to engage in these experiments emerges partly from an entrepreneurial spirit and my sense of yearning for worship that feeds the spirit. I am someone who thrives on creativity and developing new systems; I don’t like to be bored, or to bore others. And I know how good worship touches and transforms me. I want everyone to have that.
 
My penchant for experimentation also emerges from other goals I have long held for worship. Here is one articulation of those goals, as shared with worship teams:

1. Support UU faith development for all who attend – newcomers and long-timers, young and old, with diverse theologies and learning styles
2. Support high quality worship regardless of whether minister is in or out of pulpit
3. Provide enough consistency from Sunday to Sunday to create a supportive container, and enough variety to engage people and prevent boredom
4. Create an integrated worship experience; elements form a meaningful whole
5. Bring in diverse voices, directly or indirectly, and broaden worship norms to welcome a wide range of people
6. Offer experiences of intergenerational community, including full services
7. Enhance the use of music and ritual, as well as rootedness in the earth
8. Help to integrate all our ministries (RE, pastoral care, social justice, etc.) and create a unified identify for our diverse and evolving congregation

 
If one is serious about serving the people who aren’t here yet, people of all ages and identities and walks of life – not to mention serving the people who *are* already in the church, but might not be in the pews, or might be under-served there – well, that calls for fresh approaches. Defaulting to “the way we’ve always done it” may not get us where we want to go.

​Rev. Kenneth Patton and the Charles St. Meeting House (Universalist) in Boston were at the forefront of innovation in an earlier era of liberal religion, in the middle of the last century. This photo from UUA archives shows Beltane at this hotbed of Universalist experimentation. For more on Patton and Charles St., see "A Religion for One World:  Kenneth L. Patton, the Charles Street Meeting House, and the New Universalism."

To be clear, I don't regard this as an either-or choice. Just because we sometimes do story-based, theatrical services for all ages, or ritual-centered services, or introduce other alternative formats, doesn’t mean we’ll never have “traditional,” sermon-centered worship. We still do more of the latter than the former where I am, and I don’t expect that to radically change. I also believe in the power of a good sermon; I put a lot of care into my sermons accordingly.
 
But more variety across worship services – and more ministering to the whole person in any service format – is all to the good. For newcomers and long-time congregants, alike.
 
Similar themes seem to be bubbling up throughout our UU movement. In sessions of the UUA Meet the Moment worship cohort I participated in last spring, the conversation touched on the intentionality required to create and hold sacred space, the power of embodied experiences that make more room for more people, worship that honors both the individuality and connection of participants, the ability of good worship to leave us more whole and integrated as individuals and in community, and the human alchemy that can take place because of what happens in the sanctuary on Sunday morning.

Image: Annemarie Schaepman / Unsplash

In the next two posts, I’ll describe four things we’ve tried at First Unitarian in recent years, and for each one, consider how it’s going:  How has the response been to this experiment? Is it serving the core well – existing people, and the needs previously met? Is it reaching the adjacent –new people or those who haven’t been in the center of congregational life, and needs not previously met (well)? On a practical level, have we – staff and lay leaders, everyone involved in creating worship – taken in stride the changes required behind the scenes to continue to offer this kind worship ministry? 
 
I’m also interested in whether the preparation for new modes takes the same, more, or less time and energy than for standard worship. I’ll have more to say on that in later post(s). There I’ll focus on questions of process and efficiency in the work of worship, reflecting also on the sermon co-op model. Why does efficiency matter? It is not the paramount value when it comes to worship. But effort saved in worship preparation would mean capacity freed up for other ministry beyond worship – and perhaps even for more audacious, transformational experimentation.
 
Meanwhile, I’m curious to hear from you. Does Beaumont’s graphic, and the concepts of core vs. adjacent vs. transformational types of innovation, illuminate what’s happening in your congregation’s worship life?  If so, how?  How do you think UU communities might effectively “meet the moment” in worship?

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