Preach Magazine Issue 4 - Preaching in the digital age | Page 43

FEATURE

43

When CODEC was asked to prepare the weekly
college communion service, the biggest issue for us
was how not to make the service so different that
it completely alienated the congregation. Worship
after all is the worship of the people – the offering
of ourselves as living sacrifices, our reasonable or
spiritual act of worship (Romans 12).

T

hat act is a corporate act, borne
out of the authenticity of our
community together (John
4:21–24, 1 Corinthians 12–14), the
gathering together of a congregation
which offers its very best to God in
a act of spiritual worship. Indeed,
that passage in John could be
interpreted to mean that our worship
has to be authentic to our specific
congregation – owned by us. Jesus
criticises the Samaritans for not
understanding worship properly (they
had rejected the concept of Jerusalem
as the central place of worship and
established an alternative cult centre
on Mount Gerizim) and argues that
since salvation comes from the Jews,
they know what they are talking
about. But he then goes on to argue
that God is seeking out worshippers
who will worship in the Spirit and in
truth (or in the Spirit of Truth) for they
are the kind of worshippers God seeks.
So authenticity and worship go hand
in hand.
How then were we to fulfil a mandate
to lead worship, to plan the whole
service, but at the same time to be
authentic both to our own identity as
a research centre exploring digital
culture and the congregation’s
authenticity as an ongoing, multitradition, multi-age congregation
within the broad context of the
Church of England?
The first thing we decided was
that we were not going to create
an alien, gimmick-laden form of
worship which took people out of the
context of worship that they were

already engaged in. We ruled out a
whole list of possibilities: the use of
gadgets and devices to engage in the
service; social media engagement
as obligatory at any point; technojargon; virtual communion. Instead,
we began to explore how the worship
of the ongoing community could be
made richer by the incorporation of
digital culture. Incorporation is an
important word – the embodiment
of digital culture within an already
embodied community and context.
What we were not being asked to do
was to create an online experience
but rather to lead an act of worship
that was already embodied although
with some occ