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Sunday night, Fional and I went along to an experimental worship event at Citygate church here in Brighton. Not knowing quite what to expect, we did know that Terl Bryant and some of his musical friends would be there. The Pastor of Citygate, Andy, had told me during the week that they didn’t quite know what they were going to do on the evening but had some resources ready.
We arrived on time, 7pm, but all that happened for perhaps 15 minutes was the band began drumming out rhythms, at first gently then with increasing volume until by the time Andy and Kirsty, his p.a. made the opening announcements and welcome things were buzzing. There were perhaps 150 20/30 somethings there seated around cafe style tables with drinks and nibbles and a large video screen overhead showed an arty selection of photographs. These changed throughout the night, flicking through in a postmodern stylee.
Citygate is a charismatic church and as such the evening of experimental worship was different in feel from a lot of the alt.worship and emerging church scene in the UK, at least. In fact the blend created across the evening was very relaxed and as the band moved with the rhythm, and as people came forward to read poems or scripture etc themes did emerge albeit in a pencil sketched, rather than hard delineated obviously deliberate kind of way. At times things got a little confusing in the mix, such as when a poet stood up and performed one of his pieces which though clearly poetic was not easy to follow and seemed just to throw more questions into the pot. At another point someone else shouted into a microphone for 2 minutes in tongues, and it wasn’t very clear if any interpretation was given or whether this was just the person’s deep sense of God coming out.
A moment which I felt didn’t click was when the band (top class musicians all of them), first slipped via the bassist into riffs from Buffalo Soldier, and not long after into a full blown (literally!) rendition of a Miles Davis number from A Kind of Blue. Whilst I enjoy Miles Davis, it felt clearly to me like we’d moved from worship into performance. I’ve talked before about this crossover point, having thought about it for example in relation to the Cambridge / Oxford university college choir tradition where art may or may not meet worship (IMHO). Still we soon came back to very fly blues/jazz version of the Ishmael song ‘Father God’. Some parts such as quietly moving into ‘Here is love, vast as the ocean’ were deeply moving.
Andy has an international dance ministry and the influence of that became clear as through the course of the evening a number of young women danced freely and interpretively in the space created for this near the front of worship area. Andy used a huge trailing flag on a 10ft pole to interpret the music for a few minutes, which was powerful as an image and a great demonstration of physicality meeting spirituality (I find some interpretive dance can seem quite formulaic, but this was a long way from that).
All in all I want to say ‘Hallelujah!’ and give thanks to God for Andy and Citygate because what they with Terl Bryant and friends tried to do was risky, but a very well worthwhile attempt to go “Stepping Beyond” (loose theme for the night) the ‘boyband’ or personality driven form of worship leading that is quite prevalent at the moment in many evangelical churches. The sense of freedom and experimentation was a hard thing to bring together successfully, but I felt that it was a taste of the kind of thing I’ve longed to be into for years.
