(pic credit: hot topics ©2017-2018 by crisbaj. Used with permission)
“I would rather look around and see the smiling faces of brothers and sisters in worship… then looking at the back of heads I can’t interact with…”
Goin’ round… changing the layout of our worship gatherings from the pervasive stage-audience set-up to an interactive, in-the-round, circular design has been something we’ve been talking about here.
It looks like ‘the Spirit is saying something to the Church’ after all. A significant number of blog posts, church news articles and leadership journals are all talking about making the ‘into the round’ change, with fantastic results.
Being a member of numerous Facebook worship leader groups, and regular follower of worship blogs, some really cool things are emerging in the area:
<>people are actually calling this a ‘movement’… ‘in the round’ is the most commonly-used tag… ‘worship circles’, ‘community worship’, sometimes under ‘organic worship’…
<>apparently, some worship bands are doing ‘under the radar’ touring where they camp out at a church for a week or two, do a number of ‘in the round’ nights and gatherings in the church and in homes, train worship leaders on sustaining and implementing the overall movement of ‘intimate worship’… and move on. ‘Housefires’ and ‘Iron Bell Ministries’ have been mentioned…
(caveat: I recently flew to the mid-west to guitar at a large special gathering. Iron Bell had been at that church a month before, and not only were the people quite jazzed about what happened, but the prayer room was super-alive with the ‘residual’ of some awesome God-moments!)
<>a number of leaders have posted things like,
*we were ‘in the round’ for Good Friday… amazing things happened…
*it was great, we ended up having to add a second service to accommodate all the guests…
*after doing a number of ‘special’ services in the round, and having such an overwhelmingly positive response, we’ve re-tooled our sanctuary to a permanent in-the-round layout…
<>to be fair, there were a few leaders who posted things like,
*people liked ‘in the round’ but I just don’t get it. We try to teach people to quit looking at themselves and look to the Lord, then we change the layout so they can face each other…
*… is it just a trendy thing? I like the usual way of doing our band worship…
<>Worship leaders doing outside-the-church public worship events have all chimed in that going ‘in the round’ has kept the vibe from becoming a rock-band show.
<>One house-church pastor told me, “of course, our worship is in-the-round! How else?? All our house churches gather monthly for a time of worship and a meal; the worship is totally in-the-round, just like in the houses… can’t even dream of going back to ‘everyone staring up front’ at me in a pulput…
TAKE-AWAY:
…hey, pastors and leaders, give this some consideration…
written by crisbaj
© 2017-18 by crisbaj/AdoreTheLord.blog All rights reserved.
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