Worship Leaders: Build Half a House

I’ve always been fascinated by motivates people. As worship leaders, it’s part of our job to study the inner workings of our fellow humans. What do we love and hate? What kind of words or environments inspire or repel us? What’s the subtle difference between creating comfort vs. complacency?

A few weeks ago, I ran across a podcast episode that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. Here’s the story from the accompanying article:

On the night of February 27th, 2010, Luis Enriquez had just gotten home from his job at a lumber factory in Constitución, Chile. At around three o’clock in the morning, Luis started to feel the earth shake. It was an earthquake—a bad one.

With a magnitude of 8.8, the quake that hit Constitución was the second biggest that the world had seen in half a century. The quake and the tsunami it produced completely crushed the town. By the time it was over, more than 500 people were dead, and about 80% of the Constitución’s buildings were ruined.

As part of the relief effort, an architecture firm called Elemental was hired to create a master plan for the city, which included new housing for people displaced in the disaster. But the structures that Elemental delivered were a radical and controversial approach toward housing.

They gave people half of a house.

Villa Verde in Constitución, Chile by Elemental

The houses are simple, two-story homes, each with a wall that runs down the middle, splitting the house in two. One side of the house is ready to be moved into. The other side is just a frame around empty space, waiting to be built out by the occupant…

[The architect] made the case that housing ought not be a static unit that is packaged and handed over to people. Rather, housing should be conceived of as an ongoing project wherein residents are co-creators…

[The builders would] build the parts of housing that residents have the hardest time building on their own—things like concrete foundations, plumbing, and electrical wiring. Governments would also provide services—such as roads, drainage sewers, garbage collection, and schools—to the site.

Over time, residents would turn the component parts of their basic sites into suitable housing, on their own terms. They donate their labor and pay the cost of materials to finish the house. In the end, they own what they build.

Here’s the thought that got stuck in my head: as worship leaders, maybe we should be thinking of ways that we can build half a house in our services. Let me try to capture this idea by replacing some words from the article.

• Gathered worship ought not be a static unit that is packaged and handed over to people. Rather, gathered worship should be conceived of as an ongoing project wherein the congregation are co-creators.
• Worship leaders should only build the parts of the service and the worship environment that the congregation has the hardest time building on their own.

What Happened When We Got a (Physical) House

Two years after we planted, our church moved our Sunday gatherings from an elementary school to a permanent building. There were so many good things that came with this change. But I also noticed a shift in the culture of our people.

When we were in the school, it was necessary to load in and load out each Sunday. Chairs, curtains, mixers, speaker, instruments, projector… All of it had to be set up beforehand and torn down afterward. There was a sort of good-natured chaos to it all, even if we didn’t realize it at the time. Our people arrived on Sunday mornings with a shared expectation that most of them would need to join in do something in order for us to be able to meet together.

Chances were, there would be something that needed doing. Chances were, we would need their help. Visit This Website.

As soon as we purchased a permanent building, though, the expectation and interaction shifted. This was now a place to come and watch the professionals do their thing. Everything was expected to be done, done well, and probably done by someone else. What a fascinating shift! Somewhere along the way, many of us had gone from being being part of a body to being patrons of a business.

Bringing it Home in Gathered Worship

So here’s what I’m wondering about modern Western churches: As leaders, in our pursuit of “excellence” in our services, should we be more careful that we are not working our congregations out of a job? If gathered worship truly is a partnership and not just a one-way production, how can we craft services that are more of a job opportunity than a handout?

If our “worship experiences” too complex and complete in and of themselves, there might not be much of a felt need for church members to join in to serve and sing. How can we, as leaders, try to do what the congregation can’t do, but let them do what they can? (Could there have been an unintended benefit of the sparse instrumentation and arrangements of smaller churches and bygone eras?)

If the goal of our gatherings is not just a one-off experience, but an ongoing attempt to help build strong worshippers, we may be doing them an unintentional disservice by creating a cultural dependency on professionalism and musical excellence. Does your flock have a list of prerequisites in order to worship? (Energy, volume, lighting, seats, A/C?) Can they— can we?— worship when things are not excellent?

I’m more interested in seeing what ideas this concept sparks in your head than in trying to tell you exactly what this means for you. Right now this is just a concept and the beginning of a conversation, not a fleshed out strategy. But the idea of finding intentional ways to “build half a house”— of intentionally leaving space, or even leaving some things purposefully undone—is a thought provoking one for me. Do we still know how to dive in when all we have is a partial house— or barely any house at all? Can we learn as a family to build a healthy liturgy in the simplest and sparsest of places?