Visual Worship In China

Check out this interview that friend of the tour, Stephen Proctor, did with an American guy working over in China. He has some great perspective on the Chinese church and visual worship. (watch the full version here and read Stephen's blog post here)

Visual Worship in China (highlights) from stephen proctor on Vimeo.

I can totally relate to being cynical about western worship/church culture after coming back from mission trips to Africa.

I've been to Burundi, Africa twice and each time I go, I am amazed by the spirit with which Burundians worship. Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world but you couldn't tell it from the looks on their faces as they are worshipping God. One of the churches we visited only had green tarp walls, a corrugated metal roof and old oil barrel drums but that didn't stop them from worshipping with great joy.

Even though they have so little, they are so passionate...so why when we come back to America is it so hard to get people excited about worship?

I know part of the reason is because people think churches are out of touch and irrelevant (and there are a lot of churches that still are in that category) but in an effort to combat that lack of relevance churches have grabbed hold of visual media and technology and gone overboard.

They tried to woo people by matching Hollywood and spent millions on their new technology - state of the art intelligent lighting, HD projection, video equipment, etc. Of course in doing this, churches made themselves open targets to be labeled the other common stereotype - hypocritical. "How can churches spend millions on tech equipment for a space they use only on the weekends when so many are dying, hungry, homeless around the world?" Some would ask.

From January to April of this year I had the great opportunity to work with Mike Slaughter, the lead pastor at Ginghamsburg Church in Ohio. Mike is a brilliant leader, great storyteller and a joker too. One of my favorite Slaughter sayings was this:

"Minimize brick, maximize mission."

Although Ginghamsburg is a mega church with over 4000 people attending a weekend and they are well known as a pioneer in media ministry when you climb the steps up into their tech booth, you would really think you've walked into the tech booth of a church half their size and prominence. Yes they do IMAG but some of their cameras are 10 years old. Yes they have intelligent lights but they don't have the latest and greatest lighting board. They understand the power visual media has to communicates to people in a whole different way than music or spoken word alone, but their set-up is simple and low-key because they want to minimize brick - minimize the money they're putting into the church and maximize mission - maximize the money they are putting into the world.

In the coming weeks I want to talk more about the purpose of media. How we can embrace it and use it effectively without going overboard, so we're not irrelevant or hypocritical, so we can use media in worship to maximize mission. I'm also working on finding examples to back up all this talk.

Other Coming Attractions:
Get ready for some new video interviews, starting with Richard Webb talking more about Worship As Spiritual Formation. Look for them starting next week.

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