Playing with God

It’s Monday lunchtime at work and I am still tired from Sunday evening’s service! Along with some really gifted and enthusiastic friends I was leading an experimental service in a Café Church. I don’t want to parade the details of what we did here – for that is not my point in this blog – only to say that to prepare and run this service needed about ten people to rehearse all afternoon, three or four others to meet to do some technical work and at least one to create a complex and scripted narrative which held the thing together. That’s a lot of work - a lot more than your typical liturgy or even family service takes.

My question is this – whose needs does alternative worship meet? It is often billed as the new culturally relevant spirituality which will re-engage a new generation with the church – but it is not. The people who plan it run it and attend it are mostly highly committed Christians who are just looking for something different, for a few spices and pickles to enliven palates dulled to insensitivity by the routine of church life and all too often uninspiring worship.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am generally a fan and certainly a practitioner of alternative forms of worship, guilty of inflicting all kinds of imaginings on congregations at different times. BUT this is mainly because in common with many other Christians I need times to be playful with God in my worship. Play is that activity in which we imagine what it would be like to do, try or be something, in which we make and follow all kinds of rules and procedures together just because it is good to be together and do these things.

So let’s have worship godly play for adults too.