Interesting Services

I've attended or lead at four worship services this weekend... two more than the average for me. In addition to the two Sunday morning worship services here at Lord of Life, I attended a Lutheran Revival Saturday night and a U2charist tonight. I did in fact say a Lutheran Revival... and no, there wasn't an altar call. =)

I attended both services with a group of people from Lord of Life. I had thought about attending them out of curiosity. But I started to talk with a couple of people in the office about them and since we are considering starting a satellite church which would most likely offer worship in a style different from the traditional Lutheran setting, we decided to offer these worship services as 'field trips' to explore the possibility for alternative services. So some of us went Saturday night to the Revival and then some more of us went to the U2charist tonight. Both were at other Lutheran Churches here in Cleveland.

The Revival was interesting... long, but interesting. We left when the service was basically over, but not completely and that was after two hours had already passed. There were places where I did not realize we'd been there for so long (a good thing), but there were others when I thought, we really should move on. They brought in an Evangelist from West Virginia and a good portion of his congregation came with him including their praise band. Apparently the ELCA also got word of this and is interested in pursuing the Revival movement so they sent one of the Evangelism people from the Churchwide office and a camera crew to make a documentary. It was nuts... all for something that I thought was just ok. I thought there were some things that were done well and there were others that were done not so well. So by and large the service was just ok and not something I'd like to pursue in my congregation... at least the way they did it.

As for the U2charist, it was something I thought was very well done and really enjoyed it. For those of you not familiar with the concept, a U2charist is a Eucharist service set around the music of the Irish band U2. The band's music is clearly Christian and the lead singer, Bono, is a big proponent of the ONE campaign (if you want more information about that, click the rotating ribbon in the top right corner of this blog or visit www.one.org). I thought the music was better than the revival which is not terribly surprising because I think U2's music has more depth than the praise songs played at the revival. The bonus was that the band who played the music was very gifted musically and the music sounded very much like the actual band was playing it. Additionally, the prayers and other insertions in the service were well done and very meaningful. Ironically, I believe I was more revived spiritually (what the revival was supposed to do) from this service than from the revival.

So two very different services - two different experiences. The U2charist is something I would consider doing, but only if I could find musicians talented enough to pull it off musically. But the concept seems viable to me... music with depth, music that engages, combined with prayers and a message with meaning. Now that I think about it, I think the depth is what was missing from the revival for me. I've never really been one for cheap faith - faith that is all praise all the time. Maybe I am just painfully Lutheran and looking for the Theology of the Cross - the suffering at the foot of the cross that makes me long for God's grace. But then again, maybe I long for that because that's how we get to a faith with meaning. Just maybe.

Kate