In the fall of 2000, I put together the first of what were to become many unstructured, un-church-sponsored, "worship" events in my home or in local venues in my community. This first event was a concert. I had a set of material I had been working on with the intention of playing it within a "worship" context…I simply got a band together to play the material, made the arrangements to play the set at our house, and invited my community to come and participate. What wasn't simple was the fact that this show was a culmination of many month's thinking about worship's proper place in our lives, and music's proper place within worship.

The final piece of information I needed to step forward and "do" my worship event came at a Sting concert I attended in late summer of that year. I had invited the leader of our community to go with me. During the show, I kept commenting to him all the things I was intrigued by: the goose-bump effect of music and the simultaneous unmediated or led group sing-along to "Roxanne." Could this humanistic, egomaniacal genius really lead us in "worship?" Sure Bono could--he was a Christian after all, quoting scripture in his songs and at his concerts. That's not a big stretch. But Sting?

I had been struggling for years--hear me, years--about the tension between performance and participation in worship. All of a sudden, standing in the mud at the Sting concert, it was clear to me: it doesn't matter. Worship as performance. Performance as worship. Who cares? Maybe if all the good "worship" experiences I had were at "regular" concerts, we needed to put a little more performance in our worship. Go for the moments. Don't be shy about how they are created. Showmanship? Sure! Why not, as long as those people being drug along in this moment realize that that is all it is--a moment. A moment with God? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it's the closest we're going to get while we're still here on planet dirt.

So I started my little private house concert with plenty of beer and vodka. I did all my talking up front--with a beer in my hand. I told them about my recent revelation, and I don't think a single person understood what I was trying to say. Nonetheless, we went into our set, about an hour and a half of music. Towards the end we reprised my "worship" song, We Sing. I ended up on the floor, on my back, strumming my guitar like crazy. Turned out I had hit the deck so hard that I had broken the head of the guitar on the floor when I went down. Everyone loved it. Was I performing? Yes. Was I worshiping? You bet.

My friend Scott Gravatt wrote a review of the show afterward. At first I was a little turned off by his description, but by the time I got to the end of his review I loved it. He was doing with his review what I wanted to do with my event--ruffle feathers. Get people to think about what they were doing. Give them a moment, good or bad. I sent the review out to my out-of-town Christian friends and posted it on my website. They didn't like it. They thought I had been a tad sacrilege. They were right. On the other hand, I was free. Free in the Spirit and free to express my faith in new ways other than the standard fare offered up Sunday mornings and Saturday nights nationwide. Not only that, but I knew why and how I was so able.

Worship had finally become integrated with my everyday life. No longer was I searching for some ambiguous moment every Sunday morning, at the mercy of the congregants at my local "place of worship." My place of worship was right here, right now, every day, every minute of the day. I may only feel it every so often--and the less often I feel it the more I may desire it--but I can also feel it at the strangest of times. This is true worship. It can be staged on Sunday mornings or at the concert I see Friday night, or it can be at a random and unexpected time as well.

Most importantly, it does not have to be within the whitewashed walls of the church--whichever way we define that term. I can experience God--and frequently do--within the confines of the often lewd and f-bombed context of my local poetry slam. I can see the Spirit move at a concert most "self respecting" Christians were protesting against.

…because that is real life. Without God being in my everyday life, He might as well not exist. The term "worship with your life" was no longer cliché (although neither before or since have I heard that phrase used in a context where it wasn't cliché).

The other result of all this was that church fell into a huge black hole of irrelevance. There were some interesting, creative worship events going on in other parts of the world, but where I was, there was nothing. This precipitated two things: 1. I would have to create some venues myself if I was going to express my spiritual side explicitly and 2. I was going to have to locate and infiltrate the local arts scene in order to communicate and be with others with the same zeal for both creativity and true, thinking spirituality.

DIY (DO IT YOURSELF) WORSHIP

My web site documents some of the things I have tried in my quest for satisfying worship. Honestly, some of them have worked, others have not, but the point is we are seeking and we are free to make mistakes and say and do things that might not make perfect "spiritual" sense at the time. Many times, much later on, we realize what was "really" going on, and that the Spirit was in fact at work with us in our endeavors.

It matters little if you continue to work within the structure of the institutional church or, like us, find yourself outside of the church and unwilling to enter it again. What is important in creating authentic worship is the desire to see it happen, and the freedom to try and make it happen. Often times churches are not places of freedom at all--this has been our experience and the reason why we have pursued the arts community as our place of spiritual exploration. However, here are a couple of things to keep in mind if you do choose to traverse the peculiar landscape of the institutional church:

Sin abounds in the church--which is a great thing. That's where it belongs. Unfortunately, certain sins are often overlooked, and these are the very ones which might prohibit creativity: divisiveness, power-struggles, close-mindedness, false attribution of things "holy" or "sacred" (like elements of the worship). Even worse is when elements of your creative nature--for example tattoos, piercing, abstract art, unusual installations, tasteful work with nudes, just to name a few--are seen as sin by the church and you are chastised for them. If this is your environment, leave immediately. Otherwise, there is still hope for your church, however you may need to prepare yourself for countless frustrations and a generally slow pace of progression relative to your desire to see creative and authentic worship. You may find yourself doing things outside of the church anyway in order to accomplish some of your goals. If this happens, don't be surprised if many people in the church that you think would appreciate your worship event/installation do not attend or participate simply because it is not within the auspices of the church. This is very common and has been a great area of frustration for us specifically, since all our events are outside of the institutional church, but many are still geared towards our Christian friends. When they do not come it's invariably for one of two reasons: they are not comfortable with things outside of some church structure, or they simply lack the initiative to participate in more abstract worship without a hierarchical structure to instruct them to do so.

An important element of DIY worship is the idea of a "spiritual food chain." If you participate in the creative element of any church at the moment, you will quickly understand what I mean by this phrase. It is said that in any church, any group for that matter, the 80/20 rule applies. That is, 20 percent of the people do the work for the entire institution to exist. More true is that anywhere from 5-10 percent sustain the life of any organization, group or church. This ten percent is at the bottom of the spiritual food chain. They are constantly giving of their spiritual resources so that the other 90 percent can eat. You hear this in the language of the church all the time: worship leaders are told to "worship on their own" in order to "fill their tanks," people talk about going somewhere where they can be "fed." The root is the same as I mentioned before: lack of creative initiative on the part of the individuals. I recently heard an analogy of the church as a hospital, and it is apt, although not in the context I was hearing it in (the sick come to get healed), but rather in the sense that there are millions of Christians out there on life support. Just because you provide something different and potentially more engaging for them doesn't mean that they are going to engage with it. You might as well just be changing the IV. They will simply continue to lie there in their coma.

The important thing is that you avoid being, once again, on the bottom of the food chain. It matters little if the worship is relevant or not if you are completely drained week in week out. The worship has to be for everyone. It cannot be only two sided--the feeder faces the eater and shoves food down their throat. It has to be non-hierarchical and non-linear. Energy flows must be considered so that there can be an empowering relationship, not a co-dependent, dominant/submissive one.

This is an area where I find myself struggling again and again. I am repeatedly finding myself at the bottom of the food chain, all eaten up and never eating. And so I have to find my worship in the non-traditional forms I mentioned before. I have to find it in my real life or not at all, which is actually great. It keeps me living and looking for God. But it is very difficult at times. The same thing often occurs in the art world…a band on tour plays for five people in some small dirty club in the middle of nowhere…why do you think artists have such a hard time of it, and that there are so few working artists and so many "amateur" ones? Not only the church, but our culture as a whole, has put away the creative seeker. However, somewhere there still resides a ghost of a chance…