{"id":161,"date":"2021-09-07T05:32:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-07T05:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/?p=161"},"modified":"2025-04-13T05:33:16","modified_gmt":"2025-04-13T05:33:16","slug":"makerspace-worship-the-first-attempt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/2021\/09\/07\/makerspace-worship-the-first-attempt\/","title":{"rendered":"Makerspace Worship: The First Attempt"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This past Sunday the small group of intrepid experimenters at A Jesus Community<\/a> in Edmonton tested out an alternative practice for worship for the first time. This practice, which we have been tentatively calling \u201cmakerspace worship<\/a>,\u201d was conceived of a couple of years ago but had yet to be tried out in an actual worship setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by Louis Smith<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Worship involves orienting our hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits to God in community with one another for a period of time. This broad definition of worship gets expressed differently in different contexts. In many evangelical churches, this definition gets expressed specifically through congregational singing, with varying degrees of production. In liturgical churches, the worship involves congregational prayer and proclamation. In other settings, it may include chanting or other practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The aim with makerspace<\/em> worship is to give permission to those in the room who find that a time of singing together elicits feelings that are far from worshipful to worship in their own way. Specifically, it affirms that anyone in the room who is seeking to orient their hearts and minds to God during that time together is part of the worship time. The time is structured using music and facilitation, so that the \u201cworship set\u201d forms a kind of backbone for organizing the response of those in the community; the non-musical expressions of worship that happen during that time form harmonic and spirit-led layers beyond the thematic melody of the song list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This past Sunday, we continued on a theme that was introduced in August at our \u201cWord!\u201d Sunday: Grace. The worship set included songs about grace, which Bono reminds us \u201cmakes beauty out of ugly things.\u201d Meanwhile, in addition to those who sang along with the songs, there were people who drew, some people who read, and at least one seven-year old who spent the time writing songs of her own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the one leading the music from the piano (along with a wonderful guitarist and another person who generously had brought a cajon drum), I admit that I had been nervous that either it would be too chaotic or that those who were singing would feel awkward about the fact that there were others who weren\u2019t singing. But this doesn\u2019t seem to have been the case. In fact, the mix seems to have worked!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also seems like this approach could take other formats, since the core idea of \u201cmakerspace\u201d worship is not the coffeehouse feel itself or the kinds of non-singing activities that people might do, but rather that worship is about reflecting God\u2019s goodness and glory back to him \u2013 and that that can be done in all kinds of ways if we just remain open to the ways people express the image of the God in them. A hymn sing could be done in a \u201cmakerspace\u201d style. Or you could find a different backbone than worship music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are looking forward to trying this out again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past Sunday the small group of intrepid experimenters at A Jesus Community in Edmonton tested out an alternative practice for worship for the first time. This practice, which we have been tentatively calling \u201cmakerspace worship,\u201d was conceived of a couple of years ago but had yet to be tried out in an actual worship setting. Worship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,16],"class_list":["post-161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-a-jesus-community","tag-experiment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162,"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions\/162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacecommunity.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}