‘Diversity is God’s doing’

The Rev Roddy Hamilton highlights the importance of the inclusion of different learning styles in worship.

IMAGINE worship that engages all our learning styles. Unfortunately it is still a work of imagination, as our tradition has created a liturgy with heavy emphasis almost solely on the ability to listen.

There are some great examples of congregations which have engaged with the breadth of experiences of different learning styles, but they are the minority.

To emphasise this consider what happens in worship: spoken liturgy and prayers, hymn singing, reading scripture, spoken sermon. All these are examples of an auditory learning style. What else is part of our liturgy? Not much.

What if you are a visual learner? Screens with words on them? Contemplate the stained glass instead of listening to the sermon? Or what is on offer if you are a kinaesthetic (movement) learner?

I have synesthesia. I see patterns in everything. I have a number line in my head and any number you mention I can see it three dimensionally on this line. Depending on the number, sometimes I am looking down on it or underneath the line looking up. If the number is in the teens, I’m on a level with it, if it is in the 50s and the numbers are on the right of me. It is the same for days of the week and months of the year. Some even have different colours associated to them. Don’t ask me if I’ve visited someone by giving me their name, give me their address, however, and I can tell you immediately.

That’s just one version of synesthesia. And there is are multiple versions of that and a plethora of other examples of how each people’s make-up is different from each other and how our learning style or style of intelligence enables us to engage with the world, learn about it, and experience it. Clearly we all take these multiple intelligences into worship, yet most of our worship training is shaped round an auditory learning style. Not completely, given our invitation into intergenerational communities which offers some response to multiple intelligences, but it is mainly so.

If we are inviting God’s people to encounter a God who created us in the variety in which we find ourselves, and we are more aware of that variety today than ever before, then how might we shape worship that enables such a variety to fully engage?

Personally, I find a greater encounter with the holy in art than I do in prose. And if I have to listen, then I find a pattern of words easier or a story. I can imagine a story.

But there are others who need movement which our hymn choice can allow: different voices in different places, or worship that is set up in stations, passing bread and wine, the peace etc or dramatic retelling of the bible.

“ Personally, I find a greater encounter with the holy in art than I do in prose.

Reflective, silence moments are necessary for others helped by a blank space in the order of service for people to write or draw during worship.

Visuals are not for a wee TV screen high on a pillar, but appropriately sized for the space, a space decorated or lit in a particular way, and tactile, to name a few suggestions.

Worship leaders, download a list of multiple intelligences and play with them as you create worship. This diversity is God’s own doing. Worship ought to celebrate that. ¤

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick.