A Vision for Worship Symposium 2018

Once again, more than 1,300 people from across North America and from dozens of countries around the world will be coming to Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., to participate in the annual Calvin Symposium on Worship, which runs this year from Jan. 25-27.

Featuring plenary speakers, seminars, panel discussions and plenty of time for worship, the event always touches on a range of topics, from liturgy in the early days of the church to the latest in worship styles, and from issues of social justice to the use of the Psalms as poems and prayers of lament and praise.

While the symposium is certainly about worship, it is about so much more. Just ask John Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship.

“As we gather, it is important to realize how diverse we are. This is not a conference just for ‘worship people’ — a term we increasingly hear which marks worship off as merely one specialized interest in the church,” writes Witvliet in a vision statement for this year’s symposium.

“There are events that gather people in particular roles — the worship types, the justice types, the evangelism types, the faith formation types,” he said.

“Our prayer is that it is hard to tell whether this is a conference on preaching, worship, justice, faith formation, evangelism, the arts, disability/ability, anti-racism, music, theology, history, cross-cultural learning, or ‘glocal’ Christianity,” said Witvliet.

He tries to summarize it in a phrase — describing the vision as one of “symphonic discipleship” or “whole-body-of-Christ sanctification.”

There will be sessions this year on mental health, racial trauma, contemplative prayer, singing and praying bilingually, universal design, and the role of the church in a consumer’s world in which God can sometimes be viewed as being one of many flavors on the shelf.

At the symposium, writes Witvliet, he and other organizers hope “you find songs you love to sing and a song that you may not yet like to sing, that you will be graced by encouraging conversations in the hallway, and confronted again with the power and beauty of God’s Word, conveyed through preaching, drama, visual art, and more.”

Joining Witvliet in casting this vision are Scott Hoezee, director of the Calvin Center for Excellence in Preaching, and Kristin Verhulst, program manager for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.

While people from many churches will attend the symposium, this conference is a key connecting time for CRC congregational leaders, both within and beyond the denomination. In addition, CRC Worship Ministries is hosting a networking dinner, and Faith Formation Ministries is holding a seminar on designing your congregation’s faith formation framework.

In another document about the Symposium on Worship, the word “jazz” comes up as the symposium organizers consider what they do, day in and day out at the institute.

“In our work . . . we are eager to draw deeply from the Bible-shaped wisdom of classic Christian liturgies throughout the centuries, and to express that wisdom through a sampling of the wide variety of cultural, musical, and artistic forms used in congregations around the world,” this reflection states.

This is a pastoral task that involves “a challenging interplay of freedom and form, of bringing to expression a deep unity-in-diversity, diversity-in-unity.”

This is about blending and separating, about digging deep into history and staying tuned to the latest in worship expressions.

Participants this year can learn to ring handbells; discover ways in which small churches can create visual liturgy; learn to teach like Jesus; explore how digital technology can enhance prayer and reflection; or attend a workshop that looks at worship from the perspective of Augustine and other early church leaders.

Using the metaphor of jazz, worship planners at the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship have said they have thought about how many communities around the world wrestle with this interplay of freedom and form.

“Jazz music features remarkable bursts of freedom, creativity, and soulful expression,” they write, “but those bursts of freedom depend entirely on the common use of a well-crafted chord pattern, which each musician accepts as a kind of musical discipline.”

With this in mind, the symposium will again weave together a mixture of approaches and programs that reflect how God’s people can and do come together for worship, praising in loud voices, singing sweetly, praying softly, speaking boldly, praying fervently, and gathering at the Lord’s table with warm and yet hungry hearts.

Especially in taking the bread and drinking the wine, they write, we can all participate “deeply as God’s children gathered at Jesus’ table, where we celebrate a meal of memory, communion, and hope, a celebration of hospitality, justice, and covenant renewal.”

All the plenary worship services and vespers (taking place in the College Chapel and Covenant Fine Arts Center Auditorium) will be free and open to the public. They will also be live-streamed from the website, along with the plenary addresses. For more information, visit https://worship.calvin.edu/symposium/schedule-overview.html.