The Rev Roddy Hamilton makes a plea for mystery and beauty in worship.

I HAVE experienced a couple of services recently, which have made me realise I am very much in a shrinking compartment in the church now.

When I ventured out beyond my own walls, I noticed the jargon of the church has moved on. Nowadays everyone ‘has a heart’ for something (other than pumping blood), people are ‘intentional’ about things, and blessings are ‘prayed over’ us.

There is also preaching by meme, ‘meaching’ as a colleague of mine described it. For those who don’t know, and I did not until recently, memes are images, videos or text used like an old fashioned flash card but projected as visuals during the sermon.

And hymns: all the old ones remain, Be thou my vision, How great thou art, Amazing grace, but accompanied by cajon drum and guitar. Good musicians and buoyant to sing but they are on repeat with a small bundle of Getty/Townend favourites such as In Christ Alone etc.

Each to their own, but I felt like a fish in a sandpit, and I, theoretically, understood what was going on: a vivid example of how foreign our language, culture and rituals must feel to folk without a church tradition.

It was a sharp lesson which was as frightening as it was disenfranchising.

I am back reflecting on how to respond without losing any of the integrity and beauty and encounter in my local situation which is far more liberal and (used to be) ‘mainline’. I fear we are losing the mystery of encounter and leaving ourselves with only an experience of worship that can be quantified by responses like: ‘great hymns’, and ‘powerful preaching’, rather than: ‘I encountered the holy today. I found God’.

Each to their own, but I felt like a fish in a sandpit, and I, theoretically, understood what was going on: a vivid example of how foreign our language, culture and rituals must feel to folk without a church tradition.

The other reflection I will make time for is the need for mystery and beauty. This is not about the building, though that helps, but the words we use in worship, the way they are shaped and placed in the space; the music, the way it stirs and lifts us to something beyond ourselves, rather than makes us feel good. It means greater investment and training in these things, it means sermons with less teaching and more genuine preaching, which is an action that takes us into fresh encounters with the world and God together.

How can that be done in congregations of 40 or 50? Well, think about the shape of the worship space, the sense of community that is created with seats in rows or circles, the way our leadership conducts themselves in worship, knowing they are not making a speech, or taking a lesson, but inviting us into a place within the story, where we are inviting each other to meet God afresh, intriguing each other with the experience of grace and love in a holy dialogue, as contemporary as the moment in which we meet.

I do feel out on a limb with this. I am hoping there is still a place for poetry and mystery and beauty and depth: an encounter rather than an experience, but it feels that age, for me, is sadly passing.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick