"Gimme that ole metric index, gimme that ole metric index, gimme that ole metric index, it's good enough for me..."

Don't you love some of the tunes of the old hymn standards but sometimes feel the words are a tad out of date or not quite the meaning you want to impart? Allow me to introduce to you a dear old friend of ours, the Metrical Index, found in the back of every hymnal I have ever known.

Found on page 664 of the UU hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition, but hiding in the back of every Protestant hymnal I have ever met, the Metrical Index lists songs that share the same line meter and therefore can have their words and tunes interchanged easily.

For instance, the Doxology, "Old Hundredth," dates back to 1551. You may know it as "All People That on Earth Do Dwell." This song is in Long Meter, 8.8.8.8 syllables per line. There are literally 45 other hymns in the UU hymnal that share that meter and therefore can be interchange - tunes and words as poignant as "When Jesus Wept,"  as yearning as "When all the Peoples of this Earth," as mysterious as the words of Hildegard of Bingen, "I am that Great and Fiery Force,"...... the possibilites are endless!

I love the Welsh tune of the hymn,"Come Thou Long Expected Jesus," written in 1844 by Rowland Pritchard (Metric name: Hyfrodol, syllabic numbers: 8.7.8.7.D). Many of us know it as the Earth Day hymn, "Blue Boat Home," arranged by Peter Meyer. It has a very adaptable meter that can handle scores of other lyrics - 14 listed in the UU hymnal.

The beautiful tune called Sursum Corda has a meter of 10.10.10.10 and can handle the gorgeous words of RabindranathTagore (UU #191) or the words of Robert Frost (UU#64) or W.H. Auden's poem, "What Shall we Learn." The fact is, "Abide with Me," which most people associate with funerals, is a beautiful 10.10.10.10 melody that can carry many, many different lyrics on its back.

When crafting a lay service, this means you can be very discriminating. You may want to chose a great tune, then see if there are words that fit both the tune and your theme, or you may choose words you love but that may be matched in the hymnal with a difficult or unfamiliar tune. Check to see if you can change up that tune to one either more familiar or easier to sing.

I'm all for learning new tunes - I'm a huge fan of the UU Teal hymnal when used properly (that's worth it's own posting...) and I feel that stretching musically bring richness and spiritual intensity to our singing repertoire, but let's face it: lay-led services can be short on expert musical resources and it's nice to know you may have options other than the particular tune currently matched with a particular lyric. Plus the old tunes are great!

Use those little color-coded post-its and mark hymns with the same meter in your hymnal!
You will be delighted by what you find!

How did I find out about this valuable gem? Years ago from my elementary and high school youth choir director at Riverside Church in New York, Rose Marie Wildman, a gifted church school teacher who believed children should be taken seriously musically. I'll never forget her leading us in the chorale of J.S.Bach's St. Matthew's Passion with an adult cast of hundreds and full orchestra. Oh, we had to sing it in German, of course. Amazing!

Exploring the dynamics of change in a worship setting

People are suspicious of change - with good reason. Change can end up ruining a good thing.

How do we effect positive change in worship without freaking out the congregation?

Many minister see lay worship as a useful way to try a change without having to take ownership of it, thereby allowing an experiment to take place once, but not have to invest reputation or ego in it.  The trouble with this is that a change needs to be experienced over a course of time for people to get used to it before passing judgment on it. Also, as lay people, given an opening, we over-eagerly tend to lay on too many changes all at once, thereby muddying the waters, so-to-speak, in an effort to present ALL our best ideas and hope that something will stick.

Take for example, a paperless service.
Images and the words to hymns, songs, and responsive readings are projected on a screen in the front, allowing people to lift up their heads, have their voices mingle in greater unity, and elderly and young folks people can follow along more easily. Less paper is used, visuals (artwork for example) add another element to understanding a message, the mind is engaged by more than one sense.

That's all well and good, but it takes time for people to get accustomed to this radical change in worship. People may associate the method with a different faith tradition, college lectures, commercial advertising - the visceral reaction can be negative.

The best advice we got on this was from Terry Steeden, a church friend and retired minister, who has in his professional career successfully shepherded two congregations into the use of multimedia in worship.  He advises initially using BOTH print and projection in worship, doing multimedia in a particular seasonal experience such as Advent or Lent, with a fixed time period and returning to the old way of doing things so people can first, get used to a change, but also trust that leadership is not going to make permanent change without necessary discernment.

He also strongly advises not messing with any other aspect of worship while you are trying this radically new and different style. Wise words from someone who has been a cheerful and courageous proponent of the use of new technology in modern worship.

No official church in the summer? Wow. Cue the death knell.

Does worship really matter in people's private lives? We know from experience that it does - it can be transformational - but you would never know that from watching the typical UU church calendar.

One of the most damning aspects of the UU common culture is that while worship and the support of community are held up as foundational during the academic year (September through early June), it becomes acceptable to take the summer off. Oh, sorry, we do alternative events such as "walks in Nature." We meet for coffee at 8 a.m. We walk the dogs. We watch videos of GA. We visit other faith traditions. We let lay people fumble around trying to compensate for professional worship and music leaders. We have an "open pulpit." If you want to take on planning summer worship, go for it. We won't come 'cause we're busy or sleeping late. We have extended vacations with complicated schedules with family, foreign travel and extended trips into pristine wilderness. We're on vacation, but go for it anyway. You have our absent blessing.

What is up with that? Do you realize the elitist message you are sending?
Does worship really matter to you?

If worship and community support of people struggling with their lives matter, why is it okay to disappear for the summer? Burned out? There are ways to provide funding, training and leadership to compensate. Worship is a core value in most faiths and weekly practice is part of the most dynamic traditions.

Light bulb moment: 

Life doesn't take a vacation. 

If worship matters in helping cope with life, it should happen year 'round. Some churches lift this value up. In working class communities especially, those of us who only get a two week vacation, know that year-round church matters. We're coping with the messiness of Life 24/7, 52 weeks a year. Life is hard. That's why we thought church might help. Are you gonna be there for me? No? Only when it's convenient? Okay, sayanara.

If UU churches really want to matter to the people who need them most, they would prioritize year-round church. Church should meet an urgent need: the need for community and the need for spiritual practice.

Evangelicals don't take the summer off, believe me, there's too much work to do. You can dismiss them for their theology, but they know why people come to worship - they come because they need it.

An Alternative to Joys & Concerns...

Sometimes it feels like we hear from the same people every week during Joys & Concerns. What about the people sitting quietly in the pews who don't feel comfortable standing up and speaking into a mic about their trials and tribulations, their successes and gratitudes? Do we honor their journeys, giving the hurting and vulnerable in our midst an opportunity during worship to process their concerns and gratitudes? A strong pastoral prayer can do this but a participatory prayer can be even more effective.

This Hand Meditation is an alternative, maybe not every week, but on some sort of regular basis...

Open your right hand. Look into the cracks, lines and crevaces. Here we place our personal concerns and those of people for whom we care deeply. . . We are tired and weary. We have overextended ourselves and need to say “no, not at this time” more often. We worry for people facing chronic illness or other medical challenges…people, maybe ourselves, who are in transition…who feel despair and loneliness…who are in conflict with others or with themselves…people for whom hope feels far away…We hold their needs and our own with reverence and care.  

(pause)

Now open your left hand. See the interplay of the lines of life. Here we place our joys, our delights, our celebrations, the unexpected blessings that reassure us.

We raise up the joy of new life, new beginnings in relationships, in work, in life choices. Many things have worked out well. We and those we care about have faced and met challenges, overcoming them. We wake up to revel in the beauty of Nature, the rewards of living in community, times when we’ve opened our hearts to small and large moments of grace in our lives…

(pause)

Place your hands together.

Life is a balance of these things and through the strength of community, we know that we and our loved ones will receive help through prayer and good works.

Written by Ellen Snoeyenbos

Bless these, our circumstances,

Bless the hardship and the pain as well as the delight.

Bless the hunger and the thirst as well as the abundance.

Bless those things that do not turn out right as well as those that do.

Bless those who take all and give not and also those who love.

In these circumstances, find growth.

In growth, discover clarity.

            In clarity, an inner vision.                                    

(Nancy Wood, adapt. by Victoria Safford, White Beak Lake UU, Minnesota)

Multimedia is the new stained glass window...

Lots of people see a screen and projector and think, "Oh, oh. That's not our style. We're not a mega-church."


What we have found is that there are a lot of good reasons to incorporate visuals and dispense with paper in a service:

Telling a story visually can be transformational

• Adding an image can allow people to bring their imagination to bear on what is being said or experienced musically. Obviously, it's possible to hit people over the head with a message, but, if done tastefully and with respect to the intelligence of the congregation, visuals can involve people on a more visceral level and bring art and symbolism to the discussion.

• Putting the words to hymns and responses on the screen is a powerful way to include elderly people and the young in participation. Bold words spoken together with heads up and facing forward is SO much different from words spoken into a bulletin or hymnal, heads down and elderly eyes searching for the appropriate reading. (We had a 100 year old church lady tell us this week that, "usually I come into church and fall asleep, but with your service, I can follow along more easily, singing and reading with everyone else!")

• Having the announcements run before and after the service on the screen means you don't have to intrude into the service time to let people know things. It can have a bigger impact than a printed announcement and teachers who may be leaving in the middle of the service, will see the announcements at the beginning.
• An opening loop of visuals and information can set the stage for the main body of the service. Setting the tone and introducing a theme can have a powerful effect on people's ability to absorb a message.

Worship can challenge us to reach deeper

Every report I read lately is pessimistic about the dismal state of worship in the U.S. today:

http://faithcommunitiestoday.org/sites/faithcommunitiestoday.org/files/Decade%20of%20Change%20Final_0.pdf
But if we are fortunate enough to discover worship that challenges us to reach deeper to plumb our innermost spiritual yearnings, to establish spiritual practice, and to embrace sharing the journey, then I believe that pews would fill up. We are all struggling with complicated lives and overflowing to-do lists. Taking time to re-center through worship can give me the emotional charge I need to carry me through the week. It also reminds me to open myself up to belonging to the world...and the responsibilities that go along with that. To be completely honest, I am afraid to dig deep, to go there, but the surface I've scratched at over the past few years encourages me to go on.

That worship has to be based on intention and reality, though.


In my opinion, some of the problems I see in worship today happen when we lose our focus. We cling to old ways. We feed our minds but not our souls. We mingle our candles of Joys and Sorrows and the person with a struggle is left feeling unheard because we're all cooing over a child's first lost tooth. Although I've never met her, I find myself inspired time and again by the words of the Rev. Victoria Safford, minister of White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in Mahtomedi, Minnesota:

Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of hope--not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of "Everything Is Gonna Be All Right." But a different, sometimes lonely place, of truth-telling about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we're seeing, asking them what they see.

As a Unitarian Universalist, words like this give me hope for the future of worship that can truly "nurture the spirit and heal the world."

Creating Sacred Time

Sometimes when we are creating worship, we get caught up in the important details of the elements, the flow, whether or not everyone knows what is coming next. These things are important in building  a worshipful space and they bring meaning and value to those participating, but the most important element seems to me to be to create sacred time. Pacing that allows for a shifting of our inner clocks to a contemplative time frame is crucial in developing life-affirming worship. How do we do that?

• Rehearsing is important. Knowing that everyone is on the same page means we can focus our worship energy on building that sacred time for ourselves and others. 
• Taking a moment before worship to pray together as worship-givers can give us the perspective we need.
• Allowing empty space to co-exist with filled space can heighten the value of what is said and felt. It gives us the room we need to connect with our inner spirit, hear our soul's voice, and makes the possibility of change more real.