Letting Go of Too Much Control

A key requirement for good worship, according to Trey Hall, is honesty about our lives. When worship planners and leaders are too focused on “getting it right,” we easily overlook what needs to be said and shown––in language and ritual––for the sake of honesty in worship. The rubrics and orchestration of movement help to eliminate distractions from prayer, but willingness to fail leads to worship that has life.

Although the congregation Hall founded and serves has Methodist roots, he seems to be saying, with Martin Luther, that a Christian––and, by extension, Christian worship––ought to “sin boldly.”

If Jesus’ “let go of your life” guidance is true, then one mark of good worship, at least for an American context, is the capacity of the Christian community to be deliberately honest about our individual and collective failure: in a sustained and integrated fashion, to tell the truth, both liturgically and homiletically, about what has gone down, and to continue to risk failure for the sake of the Gospel.

 Good worship displays narratively and ritually the difficult truth that part of Jesus’ persistent medicine in all stages of the salvation journey is to push us again and again toward the edges of both minor pitfalls and epic failures into a subterranean grace that is finally beyond what we can predict or manage. Good worship stops resisting (or at least confesses our tendency to resist) the good news that, according to Jesus and Paul, failure is part of living a true story and therefore can be a sacrament of freedom.

Pastors, worship planners, and worship leaders working hard to avoid mistakes and ritual failure, tend to make the mistake of employing three failure avoidance strategies. They seek to:

1) Create worship that is always “excellent” because God always desires our best offering. This sounds theologically right on, but often results in hyperpolished and overproduced liturgies that leave no space for mess. . . [with] flawlessly blocked processions; perfectly timed light cues; always seamless transitions; band or organ or soloist-focused music whose preciousness or precision actually diminishes congregational singing. . .

 2) Use the denominationally sanctioned rubrics for Confession and Assurance, Prayers of the People, Great Thanksgiving, and so forth, but do not dive too deeply into the subjects they refer to. For example, it was reported that on Sunday, July 14, 2013, only twelve hours after the announcement of the Zimmerman not-guilty verdict pointed painfully to the personal and structural racism that still plagues America, 85 percent of churches failed to mention the verdict in any way in worship.

 3) Evaluate others’ failures instead of mining your own. This classic strategy appears in innumerable guises, but one small contemporary example is how fashionable it has become of late, in some mainline and evangelical Christian circles, to critique “spiritual but not religious” people.

 What makes worship good is the consistent and creatively reframed invitation—ritualized and extemporaneous, scripted and improvised—for the gathered community to intentionally trip over the stumbling block, to experience the scandal of the cross that gathers in and interprets, crucible-like, all of our mess, and to fall into the foolishness of grace.

- Trey Hall is one of the lead pastors of Urban Village Church, Chicago, Illinois. 

Trey Hall, “Failure Makes Worship Good,” Liturgy 29, no. 2 (31 Jan 2014): 20-26.

The Gospel and Improv

Striving always for excellence in worship, Trey Hall holds up the importance of being willing to fail.

A couple of years ago, seeking to stretch myself spiritually, I signed up for an improvisational comedy class. I knew it was going to be a challenge because I am one of the least funny people you will ever meet. I was the kid at the school lunch table who would try to proffer something witty in the middle of an already-laughing group, only to bring the conversation to a standstill. Awkward silence would abound.

 The first night of class at Chicago's ImprovOlympic arrived and it turned out that the other seventeen “novices” had already graduated from all five levels at the other improv school in Chicago (ever heard of Second City, feeder pool for Saturday Night Live?) and they had all registered for this course simply to fine-tune. Going around the circle, the Tina Feys and Mike Meyerses of tomorrow introduced themselves—hilariously, of course. My cheeks flushed and my forehead started to sweat as the potential for my own humiliation increased exponentially. Improv is built around games of self- and other-discovery.

 A teacher might say, “Okay, Trey and Ellen, get up on stage.” And then, with no preparation at all, you start the scene and see what unfolds. A basic improv principle to facilitate the unfolding is “Yes, and … ” The goal of this practice is to accept whatever idea your partner gives you and to go with it, no matter what. So if Ellen says to me, “Do you want to go to a movie?” I should not respond with, “No. I hate movies.” (That would be “No, but … ”). If I am “Yes-and-ing,” I might respond, “Yes—let's go off our diets and eat a lot of greasy popcorn,” or, “Yes—is anybody picketing anything? I feel like counter-protesting.”

 Improv formation teaches us to expect the unexpected and to live more freely in the moment.

 After a particularly humiliating night, I whined to my teacher, “I'm so locked down on stage, I'm stuck in my head, I can't let go, and I feel like I'm really bombing.” She said, “Trey, you feel like you're really bombing because you are really bombing. . .  Stop the control-freakery and don't be afraid to get lost in the game. What's the worst thing that could happen?” “I could fail really, really bad.” “You're already doing that,” she said, “and besides, failure is good for the soul.”

 . . .  I sensed that whether she knew it or not, my teacher was riffing on Jesus. His main theme may feel less like a punch in the stomach than my teacher's remark, but only because the church has often framed, “If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you let go of your life for me, you will find it” as a palliative bromide rather than actually
receiving it as an unsettling metarubric for worship and therefore for life.

 - Trey Hall is one of the lead pastors of Urban Village Church, Chicago, Illinois.

 Can we let go of worry that every moment in worship will be perfectly timed? Can we make room for the child who runs away from the pew in search of what is behind the altar table? Can we let an off-key musical offering stand as a testimony of love rather than an embarrassment?

Failure may be a means by which the light gets through to us.

Trey Hall, “Failure Makes Worship Good,” Liturgy 29, no. 2 (31 Jan 2014): 20-26.