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Coming Together
Leaders convene to rethink worship and music during advent season

From the first Heilig, heilig, heilig to Sunday’s closing benediction, the Music and Worship Leaders Training program at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center was filled with delight, enrichment, and—naturally—inspired worship. Facilitators Marlene Kropf, Ken Nafziger, and Randy Spaulding structured the event to equip individuals with resources in order to transform worship practices in their respective congregations.

Kropf is denominational minister of worship for Mennonite Church USA, a role in which she has served for more than twenty-five years. During that time, she has witnessed a notable shift in approaches to worship within churches.

“We’re discovering that worship can be more meaningful if we learn from other traditions and incorporate the arts,” commented Kropf during Friday evening’s opening session.

Her observation provided a framework for the weekend: the presenters and participants collaborated to explore a number of ways in which a faith community might experience the time leading up to Christ’s birth and the celebration thereafter in new and powerful ways.

“This can be very anxiety-producing,” explained Spaulding, pastor at Covenant Mennonite Fellowship in Sarasota, Florida. “It’s about honoring what has come before while continuing to move ahead.”

Nafziger, professor at Eastern Mennonite University and music editor of the Mennonite Hymnal: A Worship Book, led music throughout the weekend. He encouraged participants to view worship as emerging out of a community context. “It’s not about me or you,” he told the gathering, “it’s about us.”

The community that bonded over the weekend was characterized by a diversity of gifts and experiences. Many attended the conference to fortify their own worship leading practices and to gather resources to share with their respective churches.

One such resource—Leader, a quarterly periodical for Anabaptist congregations—was distributed to all in attendance, and participants enjoyed analyzing its model worship services while conceptualizing their own worship agendas for Advent.

Among the attendees were a number of students from Eastern Mennonite University—a new generation of worship leaders, curious to discover how they might bring their gifts to the worship setting.

Steve Rittenhouse, a Secondary Education/Math major in his junior year at EMU, returned to Mt. Pleasant this fall after attending the Laurelville-sponsored Music and Worship Leaders Retreat last January. “[The fall conference] is lot more hands-on—that’s what brought me here,” noted Rittenhouse.

Rittenhouse, under Nafziger’s direction, transformed a nearby portable storage unit into one of many makeshift percussion instruments for the weekend. Classmate Ben Bergey and EMU staffer Katie Derstine followed suit, picking up coat hangers to use as rhythm instruments and adding to the melodies filling Laurelville’s Meeting House.

Their improvisation exemplified the creative approach to worship Nafziger, Kropf, and Spaulding encouraged throughout the weekend.

“Worship should be about caring for people and caring for a community’s engagement with God,” said Kropf. “(Worship leaders) should provide something substantial enough to empower them all week long.”

This focus demands responsiveness to the many gifts and deep yearnings of a church body, the leaders stressed. Doing so entails incorporating visual aids to worship, tapping into what Nafziger described as an “infinite” array of music and song available, and carefully attending to reading of Scripture and other formative texts.

Kropf painted a metaphor of this complex task, likening worship leading to hosting a meal or social event. With that comes planning, attention to detail, creating a warm, welcoming space, and, above all else, showing sensitivity to the guests who are present.

Sound like a lot of work?

Grace Jones, of Bridgewater, Virginia, didn’t think so. “(The conference facilitators) did a lot of things anyone could do,” she said. She seemed very inspired, eager to implement many of the lessons learned in her future worship leading involvement.

And Kropf, Spaulding, and Nafziger were quick to refer back to the communal aspect of worship, lest leaders feel too heavy a burden in planning for worship.

Perhaps participant Emily Ralph summed it up best when she said, “It is ours to discover a congregation’s voice.”

The 2009 Music and Worship Leaders participants departed Sunday afternoon to find that voice, and, with grace, to tune it to sing God’s praise during this Advent season and beyond.