Sept. 17 session eyes new worship trends

Southwest Texas United Methodists can explore new worship trends next month in San Antonio.
The Worship and Music Committee of the Board of Discipleship is sponsoring its biennial worship workshop Sept. 17 at Alamo Heights UMC.
Theme for the 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. event is "Creative and Meaningful Worship in Your Church."
A key topic will be "the emerging church," said the Rev. Linda Elford, chair of the Worship and Music Committee and associate pastor of St. John's UMC, Corpus Christi.
Don Vanderslice, pastor of an "emerging congregation" in Austin called Mosaic, is to lead the opening worship service as well as a one-hour workshop. That's one of 15 sessions on the schedule.
Elford said the committee invited the pastor from a nondenominational church to lead worship for two reasons:
> Emerging worship is reaching 18 to 30 year olds, a group often absent from United Methodist congregations, and is providing an alternative to the traditional versus contemporary worship argument.
"People who care about worship need to know about this development if they want to 'offer Christ to all,'" she said.
> Texas has very few emerging congregations. None are United Methodist.
Mosaic is the only emerging congregation within the Southwest Texas Conference.
The congregation meets Sunday nights in a rented worship space in downtown
Austin.
Vanderslice is quick to point out that emerging worship (also called post-modern, emergent or alternative worship) is "not a franchise." Each congregation develops its own style.
In fact, he said, the emergent approach strongly values indigenous, homegrown worship over a slick mass-produced format.
For example, he said, some emergent congregations use music from the Taize community. Others lean toward Christian alternative rock. Many sing hymns.
Mosaic's band leader, Seth Green, often composes original settings for psalms.
Emergent congregations do have several things in common, Vanderslice said, such as an interest in recovering the ancient traditions of the church. For example, his congregation celebrates weekly communion and observes the liturgical seasons of the church year.
Worship is interactive and informal, using the arts, eclectic music and digital technology to draw worshipers into the mystery of God's presence.
An evangelical emphasis on personal faith and discipleship is combined with an openness to questions and a concern for social justice, he said. In fact, emergent leaders see the old evangelical/liberal and traditional/contemporary polarities as relics of the past. They are out of place in a post-modern church.
Registration information is available at www.umcswtx.org.