As the passing of the peace winds down at Maryland Presbyterian Church in Towson, I start to sing the prayer for illumination from the pulpit. The congregation joins in within the first two notes as they find their seats.
Depending on who is in worship that morning, we can break into spontaneous harmonies so delicious it makes me want to sing it twice. All together, we proclaim:
I love to tell the story;
’twill be my theme in glory
to tell the old, old story
of Jesus and his love.
These days, more often than not, the congregation really is telling the story with me out of a collision of laments.
The church was grieving the loss of a choir and special music in worship. They had done good work to incorporate new music styles and traditions in worship over the years. Even when the membership numbers had declined, and the full choir they had boasted years ago had gone away, they still had worshipful music. But by the time I arrived, stresses in the budget had reduced the special music Sundays to Christmas and Easter. People started voicing their sadness that there was no choir, no folk band, no organ played. There was no big communal sound.
Meanwhile, I was sinking under the expectations of preaching a meaningful weekly sermon. I had been spoiled in my first call at the presbytery office, and had spent most of my time teaching, not preaching. After six weeks of standing in front of this room of people I hardly knew, I threw up my hands and decided there had to be another way — one where I wasn’t the only voice in the room, and that involved much more collaboration.
We tried a hymn sing, but people missed the sermon. We tried inviting people to join a pop-up choir, but after a few attempts, participation fizzled out.
Then one morning, during the annual creation care service, folks were invited to bring readings about faith and ecology. Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver were well-represented. Then a church member named Joe stood up and started to sing an a cappella solo rendition of “Big Yellow Taxi.” I was surprised — first by his courage and then by the congregation, who joined his song. A child came up from the back pew to dance in the aisle. It was unprompted, easy and gorgeous.
That was when I suspected that our laments might have a joint solution: What if we sang during the sermon?
First, we had to reset the space to be more intimate. We rearranged the pews into a U shape so that no matter where you were sitting, you could see others. We moved the pulpit to the middle of the pews. We made everyone worshipping on Zoom visible to those in the sanctuary. Our space now primed us to be transformed from an audience to a community and opened the door to corporate proclamation of all kinds.
Half the Sundays each month, I preach, and the other half feature a sermon with welcomed interaction, overflowing with questions, songs, seriousness and silliness. We have Bible studies that end with congregants sharing the story’s call or good news. We put on reader’s theater-style plays. We share show-and-tell Sundays with an invitation to bring stories, readings or art on a theme. And of course, we sprinkle in musical sermons, weaving a retelling of the day’s scripture with hymns, protest and movement anthems, chanting, and secular music. The songs are simple and memorable, the kind you can take out of your pocket when you need them.
A few weeks ago, we told stories of women walking together as they faced impossible challenges. We remembered the story of Ruth and Naomi, their grief and disorientation, and the deaths and choices that bonded them. We sang together in the spirit of Ruth’s proclamation in Ruth 1, but in the words that first echoed through South African prisons during apartheid:
Courage, my friend;
you do not walk alone.
We will walk with you
and sing your spirit home.
Then we remembered Mary’s walk to the hill country to stay with Elizabeth in Luke 1. From her trek over limestone to the moment she greets her cousin, we felt the difficulty of the journey and the relief of falling into the arms of an older and wiser cousin. We sang together:
Walk together, the journey is long …
The journey, the journey, the journey is long.
We turned to our congregation’s journey and the call to grow relationships that may save us in the coming years. We sang:
From this house to the world,
we will go hand in hand.
Stories and songs tangled together in the room, and then we took them with us. In a moment of grief or challenge, Ruth 1 or Luke 1 might not come back to us word for word, but the harmonies we created around those stories might drift back to us and sustain us.
From my perspective, sitting in a room with a crowd all facing the same direction, receiving a sermon and then listening to music is a strange recipe for building community. It is a form of worship that seems not to trust the congregation, yet that’s how many of us gather.
We at Maryland Presbyterian are a couple of years into our experiment. The pews have stayed in their U shape. The pulpit has drifted farther into the middle of the sanctuary. More congregants brave the microphone to read a poem or proclaim good news. We love to tell these old, old stories — now together, and with a song.
