Worship Grant

You may have heard! The Road Church is a recipient of the 2020 Calvin Institute of Worship Worshipping Communites Grant. This grant was in turn made possible through generous grants from Lilly Endowment Inc.  

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The Goal:

At The Road Church, this project aims to articulate common values around communal worship and explore how our Worship values might embody our church’s stated values of Wonder, Openness and Welcome, Genuineness and Justness.  Through this process we hope to develop and articulate a sense of worship at TRC that could form worship habits, for both Sunday gatherings and our everyday lives, shaping how we engage with God's work of bringing Shalom to all Creation.

 

The Process:

 The worship design small group will meet regularly to engage with various writings, and experience both prayer, creative and communal practices together. The practices and creative exploration of this group will then be offered to the congregation throughout this year and beyond.  

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The Hope:

We hope people come to understand worship as not only the songs (although songs are GREAT) but as the mind, body and heart habits that form us into the likeness of Christ.  We hope the re-formation of our imaginations that occurs in TRC's worship gatherings then translates into all our habits in everyday life.  

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For more information on the grant and some of the details, feel free to contact Jacqui at jacqui@theroadchurch.ca

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Here's a thought we've been pondering:

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“Christian worship is the heart of discipleship just to the extent that it is a repertoire of practices shaped by the biblical story.  Only worship that is oriented by the biblical story and suffused with the Spirit will be a counter-formative practice that can undo the habits of rival, “secular” liturgies.**  Not everything that calls itself “Worship” today will have this counter-formative power, since so many of our worship services are little more than Jesusified versions of secular liturgies.  They claim the name (and emotion) of worship but deny the (humility unto death)  power thereof.  So while we may be singing songs about Jesus, the very shape or form of the worship “experience” in fact reinforces the gospel of consumerism and the unwitting encounter with Jesus as one more commodity.  The story carried in such contemporary forms of worship is one whose telos (vision and goal) is not God’s vision of shalom but consumerism’s vision of fulfilment via consumption and disposal.”  

J.K. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, p. 79

 

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**Anything we regularly do is a “ liturgy."  A liturgy is a habit that inevitably shapes what we see as the goal of life, what we ultimately trust and love.