Sally Morgenthaler @ TN Annual Conference, Session 2

Live blogging from the stage of Sally Morgenthaler’s presentation to the Tennessee Annual Conference. Sally is the founder of Sacramentis, and a reknowned leader in the area of worship.

I’m not sure the outline form really works for this, but bullet points don’t work in this template, so bear with me…

  1. Are you ready to get passionate?
  2. Church signs are the talk back to the bumper stickers
    1. Should say, we are such a dysfunctional family that you will be right at home.
  3. Passionate worship connects the dots between what is in here and what is outside.
    1. Psalms – more laments than victories
    2. Clip from Bruce Almighty as an example of lament
    3. We need to tell the truth about our lives – the whole truth.
    4. Where is your life and ministry? It doesn’t have to do with bands, equipment, etc.
    5. We tell folks to come as they are, but we leave them as they are, not giving them a chance to express their hurts.
    6. Why do our pictures always show folks being happy and nice. What if we showed people where they are.
    7. In passionate worship, we connect the dots both outward and downward.
    8. What have you longed to do in the presence of God for a long time?
    9. The early church brought the psalms with them into the tradition. We need to ensure that we are using the psalms in our worship.
  4. How can you give them something more?
    1. Psalm 23 – but not in a way that’s nice.   (Video clip)
      1. How do we make worship more real? What in your congregation do with Psalm 23?
        1. Congregational responses
          1. Painting is a good way to embellish the scripture, as is dance.
          2. Personal stories of those who have been through the valleys.
            1. Jesus was familiar with grief.
          3. What does it take to teach kids today?
            1. Visual/multi sensory methods
            2. How can we break out of words?
            3. Storytelling as a resource.
          4. Drama and dance
        2. Why don’t we do these things?
          1. It’s not what we’ve always done
          2. It takes planning
          3. We lose control
      2. Rosemary Brown – example of the person “Painting herself well…”
  5. The video screen can be another “stained glass window.”
  6. One key image is enough.
    1. create a photo club, give them three blocks around the church, and use those pictures during the season of Lent portraying the ways we see Jesus crucified in our community.
  7. When she uses a screen, she always has something interactive either before or after the video.
  8. Part of our Wesleyan heritage is connecting the dots in worship
    1. It’s what the Wesley boys did.
    2. We understood how to put language in the words of the people.
    3. How can we expand the words of the people into the art of the people?
  9. Recommends Spaces for Spirit by Nancy Chinn   Amazon Link (Cokesbury link not available)
  10. We are so afraid to change, but we have to break open our forms. Folks can’t receive Jesus in the same forms. You have to change to stay the same. You have to break open and reframe the elements so that folks can take them in.
  11. What is the language of your folks that makes the old images new.
  12. We worship with all of our lives. All the time.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s
