Worship with ALL God's People

Recently, I was asked to develop anew service for Ash Wednesday that would work better for a "contemporary" worshiping community than the current service specified in The United Methodist Book of Worship. As this piece was released, I asked for feedback in the article and the United Methodist Worship Facebook Group about what works, what doesn't work, and what changes could make it better.

Among the suggestions offered so far, perhaps the most significant has been that this service, as designed, would be very frustrating for people with hearing and visual challenges. Here are some of the particulars:

• I suggested that instrumentalists continue to play "O-So-So" very quietly in the background during the Scripture readings. For people with even minor hearing impairments, this could make discriminating the spoken words from the background sounds very difficult.
• Related to that, I suggested not placing the words of these texts on the screen, so that the focus would be on hearing rather than reading. Again, for people with hearing challenges, unless there is also an ASL (American Sign Language) interpreter, this might mean that the message of the Scriptures does not come through at all.
• I also suggested that the transitions from reading the gospel, to singing the final verse, to coming forward to receive the ashes all happen by gestures rather than verbal explanation. How would people with visual impairments that limit their capacity to see what the worship leader is doing know what is going on in this moment if the instruction is not also voiced, or perhaps unless there were someone with them to guide them?

People Come with Differing Capacities
These are not trivial problems. In a denomination with a very large percentage of older adults and a denomination that says its doors are open to all people of all ages and abilities, we do well to remember that people come to worship with differing capacities to hear, to see, to move, to smell, to touch and to taste. While the awareness of these differing capacities does not mean that something like the new Ash Wednesday service I designed should not be offered more or less "as is" for the worshipers for whom it would work, it does mean that at least some accommodations should be offered for those for whom it would not.

This service, of course, is not unique in offering challenges to people with varying sensory or motor capacities. The Ash Wednesday Service in the Book of Worship (321-324) as I've usually seen it done in local United Methodist congregations could be no less problematic, if in different ways. There is a significant amount of "read prayers" and an extended "invitation" in this service, in addition to the four Scripture readings (including Psalm 51). That's a lot of reading for people with either visual or hearing impairments, not to mention those who may not be able to read for other reasons. There is one, or -- if Holy Communion is celebrated -- two different occasions where people are asked to move to a different part of the worship space (receiving ashes and receiving the blessed bread and cup). For persons with mobility challenges, you may need to plan to send individuals to them so they can participate fully.

People Come with Differing Cultural Ways of Processing the Senses
A lot of reading in worship creates also serious challenges for people whose senses are not impaired, but who are also not trained to focus on hearing. This may be especially the case for worshipers under the age of 45 who have grown up in a predominantly visually oriented culture in which "spoken word" lacks the power to retain attention unless it is accompanied by a sound track. While recent research at Stanford University has confirmed that "media multitasking" (managing several different media operations at once, such as watching TV, working on a document, answering email, and responding to Twitter messages) both does not work and impairs memory for up to several days, the same research found that an instrumental musical background, without all the other visual media inputs, seems to improve concentration in both listening and writing tasks.

There Is No "One Right Way" for All Worshipers
These sociological observations and psychometric research into how people pay attention to what they're hearing (or don't!) is a case in point. Many younger people in the U.S., at least, may not be able to pay attention to the spoken word as well without an instrumental sound track. They tend to become bored and tune out, and so, in effect, hear nothing. Older people and people with hearing challenges may not be able to hear well or become frustrated by trying to hear if there is a soundtrack. There is simply no "one-size-its-all" solution. Either way, some people, and perhaps a sizable number, will not get the message. And worse, their minds will wander away from the act of worship.

So What Is a Worship Planner/Leader to Do?
Here are a few guidelines to consider.

1. Discover the baseline capacities (and challenges) of your worshiping community. This is not something you or even your worship planning team may be aware of "automatically." Everyone tends to experience the world through his or her particular "sensory apparatus" and ways of using it; and most people tend to assume, automatically, that their own experience is "normal" for everyone else. That brings an immediate "confirmation bias" of your own experience to the fore as you plan worship. That is, unless you take intentional steps to find out what's really going on.

The best way to discover the basic capacities and challenges of your worshiping community is to ask and to listen. While you could design a survey instrument for this purpose, that is likely to be far less helpful than making an intentional effort to talk with people in a series of focus groups that include a variety of ages, faith stages, and physical and mental capacities. Each group meeting might include 10-12 people. Give each participant a copy of a recent worship bulletin from a service in which he or she was present or an outline of what happened if there was no formal bulletin, and ask him or her to mark each element "Tuned In," "Stayed Tuned," "Tuned Out," or "Tuned Back In." Then invite each person to jot down a note or two about what he/she thinks may have caused him/her to do what he/she indicated at each point. Particularly, ask people, if they tuned out, what might have helped them tune in or stay tuned in instead. For people who cannot read or write well, consider forming at least one focus group that also includes people who can read in which rather than asking for written answers, the leader talks through the process, step by step.

The goal of this process is for your planning team to get a clearer sense of where more of your worshiping community tunes in, stays tuned, or tunes back in, and to design worship experiences that reduce "tune-out," for whatever reasons, as much as possible. This process gives you and your planning team a more accurate "baseline" to work from.

2. Plan worship that primarily fits this baseline of your worshiping community's abilities. As you plan, keep in front of you basic questions such as:

• What sorts of things help our worshiping community tune in strongly at the beginning?
• Where are there "breaks" in action or flow or means of perceiving that cause many of us to "tune out"?
• How do we help keep most of our people "tuned in" for the reading of Scripture?
• What kind of "sermon" keeps more people tuned in?
• What preaching habits or practices cause many of our folks to tune out?
• How can we help the time of prayer tune most of us in more deeply, rather than tune many of us out?
• How can our practices of the sacraments help people tune in and deepen their focus on the presence of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit?
• How can the "sending forth" become a time for deeper tuning in rather than immediate tuning out?

Two caveats as you consider these questions for your worshiping community: First, this isn't about making every moment "creative" and "special" and "different" all the time. That can do more to make worship into one distraction after another than the sort of formational encounter worship at its best sense can be. Second, and related to that, that some elements may become "rote" (such as The Lord's Prayer, the Creeds, or even the Great Thanksgiving) does not mean they have lost their value in worship. Indeed, as these prayers and ways of worship become more incorporated into our minds and bodies, they begin to inform the ways we live without our having to think about it. These moments of "memorized" responses can actually "tune us in" even more deeply to the work of the Spirit precisely because we no longer have to strain to remember or read or think about the words or gestures. Good habits are good! Cultivate them!

3. Develop and implement plans to provide workable accommodations for those whose capacities differ substantially from the baseline you discover. While a majority of worshipers may be able to function optimally at the baseline, some will not. If we're serious about inviting all of God's people to worship with us, we must be just as serious about being ready to assist those whose capacities differ substantially from the baseline to worship well, too. Saying we welcome all people isn't enough. We need to plan to do it, and then actually do it.

Let's be honest. Most of our congregations offer no means for people who are deaf or blind to participate meaningfully at all. And while we may have built ramps to allow wheelchairs into at least parts of our facilities, the rest of our facilities, often including our worship spaces, essentially lock such people into a few limited positions once they get in. We have designed and maintained our worship spaces almost exclusively to fit the capacities of people with no serious sensory or motor impairments, and we have continued to design worship itself, partly as a result of how our spaces work, to accommodate the "baseline" we "thought" existed when those facilities were first built.

Taking this step seriously involves asking yourselves who is already present who needs accommodations beyond the baseline, how you will deliver those accommodations to those people in ways that respect their dignity, and who isn't attending that you can invite and welcome more fully when you have made those accommodations. All three steps matter. In most cases, making such accommodations means at the very least spending money for equipment and personnel (such as translators), installing and maintaining that equipment, and changing how furniture is arranged in the worship space. If your baseline studies reveal larger groupings with similar levels of abilities (two or more significant clusters rather than a bell-curve distribution), you may want to consider creating and staffing differing worship experiences around these differing baselines.

This planning, then, may need to include budgets, timelines, personnel, and fundraising plans. Your lay leader, trustees, staff-parish and finance committees are essential partners in this process. You may not be able to get everything you need all at once, but you can develop and take concrete steps to implement a plan so that over a specified period of time more of those whose abilities vary substantially from your current baseline will be able to worship with you more fully than they can now.

But no matter how well you plan and how great your implementation of providing physical and personnel accommodations may be, if you're not also continuing to build stronger relationships over time with people whose abilities differ substantially from your baseline, though you may "build it," don't expect them to come. This isn't about using equipment or personnel to attract people. It's about caring enough about people that you'll provide the equipment and personnel they need.

There is no "Final Fix": So Keep Learning and Adapting
Just as there is no "one right way" to help all God's people worship with you well where you are, there is also no "final fix" or set of fixes that you can start now and complete in three years that will work for all time. A commitment to worship with all of God's people where you are is a commitment that lasts for the lifetime of your congregation or worshiping community. Your baseline will change as the capacities of the people already present change over time, and as your surrounding community and social networks change. Plan to repeat the baseline focus group process at least every two years or sooner if there are substantial changes in the physical capacities, ages, lifestyles, languages or cultures of the people in your congregation or community.

Likewise, your plans for making accommodations may need to change, either gradually or dramatically, over time. You may discover, for example, that beginning to offer an American Sign Language interpreter in one of your services begins to bring a larger number of people in this community to worship, perhaps necessitating larger facilities or more interpreters. Or you may find that what you had thought was a sizable community of folks with visual impairments for whom you had purchased additional projectors and large print editions of the Bible and hymnals either isn't as large as you thought, or has moved elsewhere, or just isn't interested in worshiping with you for whatever reason. Whether you need to expand or reduce your plans, change is inevitable. So be flexible and build in regular times, perhaps yearly, to evaluate and adjust your purchase, installation, and personnel plans as needed over time.

One Last Thing . . .
Keep this in mind. The bottom line isn't money or even numbers of worshipers who attend. The bottom line is mission. And the mission here is to enable ALL God's people who might want to worship with you to do so as fully as they possibly can.