Show Notes
Why do Christians often gather in the sanctuary on Sunday morning and hear almost nothing about the work that consumes their entire week?
Dr. Matthew Kaemingk and Katie Roelofs join host Case Thorp to discuss bridging the gap between Sunday liturgy and Monday labor.
Matthew and Katie outline the practical steps of vocationally conversant worship found in their new book, Leading Worship for Workers: How to Design Liturgies for All of Life. They explain that genuine worship is not about leaving daily stress at the church door. Instead, it requires bringing the realities of your job directly to God, which includes the joys, the laments, and the hard questions.
This is a conversation for pastors, worship leaders, and every Christian who wants to navigate their daily vocation as an act of worship and let the sanctuary shape how they live their daily lives.
Episode Resources:
Leading Worship for Workers: How to Design Liturgies for All of Life by Matthew Kaemingk and Kathryn Roelofs – https://www.amazon.com/dp/1540969843
Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy by Matthew Kaemingk and Cory Willson – https://www.amazon.com/dp/1540961982
Worship for Workers Initiative – worshipforworkers.com
The Porter’s Gate – portersgateworship.com
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Does the worship of the church on a Sunday actually prepare people for the work of their lives? Well, today, friends, we are joined by Dr. Matthew Kaemingk and Reverend Katie Roelofs, co-authors of the new book, Leading Worship for Workers: How to Design Liturgies for All of Life. Matthew and Katie, thanks for joining me here on Nuance.
Katie Roelofs
Thanks for having us today. We’re glad to be here.
Case Thorp
Tell me, where are you coming to us from?
Katie Roelofs
I’m coming to you today from my home office, which is in Maryland, just north of Washington DC.
Case Thorp
Okay, and Matthew?
Matthew Kaemingk
I’m out in St. Louis.
Case Thorp
Now, you were in Houston when you were with Fuller…
Matthew Kaemingk
I was, yeah, I was serving as the Dean of the Fuller campus there in Houston and enjoyed some good barbecue out in Texas. And it was a good stay, but I’m enjoying the beer and brats in St. Louis now.
Case Thorp
Okay. Well, friends, and this is part of my introduction of Matthew, he’s a public theologian and ethicist who did serve at Fuller Theological Seminary as an associate professor of faith and public life and the director of the Mouw Institute, but recently appointed as Professor of Public Theology at Utrecht.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah, it’s in the Netherlands: Utrecht Theological University.
Case Thorp
Utrecht Theological University in the Netherlands. He’s written extensively on faith and public life, and is also the co-author with Cory Willson on a previous book, Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy.
Now, Katie Roelofs is a minister in the Reformed Church in America and has spent nearly two decades in worship and music ministry. She previously served a congregation in Washington, DC and now works as a worship consultant, and the managing director of the Worship for Workers Initiative, which produced the book we’re going to talk about. She helps to connect churches in their liturgy and daily vocation.
Well, let me welcome you, our listeners and viewers, to Nuance. We’re a podcast that explores what it means to be faithful in the public square for Jesus. Now, today’s conversation is primarily geared towards worship leaders, pastors, and music directors, due to the very resource we will discuss. Yet I’m going to make sure our conversation is for everyone. That you, if you’re not in one of those roles, can take something away from this. I mean, we all as Christ followers are in worship. Or, so I hope we are, right? Maybe a little more regularly than we should be. And so I know that what we’ll discuss will help you be a better worshiper. Or maybe even come up with some fresh ideas to share with the worship leadership at your church.
So, I don’t know who wants to go first. Y’all tell me about this project, Worship for Workers Initiative. I mean, how’d it come together and what does this book represent?
Katie Roelofs
Case, I think you remember some of the origins of this project. So after Matthew and his co-author Cory Willson wrote that first book that you just held up and showed, the Work and Worship book, I don’t know how this cohort came to be, Matt. Maybe you want to say more about that. But there was a cohort that was launched for pastors, worship leaders, a room full of people who wanted to sit and talk about this book, dive into some of the specifics of it theologically, but then shift more into a practical mode of what this looked like within the actual church. Go ahead. If you have more you want to say about the actual cohort that started.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah, I mean there’s a variety of different origin stories. I think one for me is, I walked into a worship service one time and there was a young guy with a guitar welcoming everybody into worship and he was strumming his guitar and he said, know, guys, welcome to worship. We’re so happy you’re here. I know you all have a lot on your minds. You’ve got jobs and projects and errands and all of these responsibilities from your whole week. But, you know, for the next hour, we’re just going to worship God. And I just want you to leave all that stuff, you know, from your week. I want you to leave that at the door, you know, because we’re just going to be focusing on God for the next hour. And it really crushed my heart that he said that because he was, you know, reinforcing this problem in worship that Katie and I care so deeply about, is worship is a place to actually bring your work to God, to bring your stress, your questions, your laments, your joys and your victories, all of it…to actually bring your work into worship and talk to God about it. And so I think, you know, and Katie, I mean, as a worship leader in Washington, DC, this was a big question for you as well, right?
Katie Roelofs
It certainly was, I served a church in Washington DC, really as my first major church job, and walked into a church that was 70% federal employees of the government.
Case Thorp
Wow, how many of that were military versus the blob?
Katie Roelofs
Almost no military. We’d get military chaplains that would cycle through, but largely not military, all of the different departments, the alphabet soup letters that you have to look up to be able to piece together. I feel like there’s very few churches though where you get the experience where 70% of your congregation is doing one thing or another. And I learned very quickly that if worship didn’t speak to the reality, to the daily lived reality of this subset of our church, they would go with something missing in the end. So I was kind of born into this almost by getting a first job in a congregation that spoke this vocationally conversant language. And so I’ve kind of walked right into it and had to learn over time.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah. So, just lastly, I’d say Case, the book is born out of a complaint about the first book that the first book was very theological and theoretical and a lot of pastors and worship leaders saying, okay, I want Sunday morning worship to really impact the lives of my people, their daily life, but give me something practical, give me something I can do on a Sunday. So that was really the ultimate birth of this book.
Case Thorp
Well, I confessed before we started that I have the new book, but I can’t find it. I ripped my office up. Maybe it’s at home. But Matthew, if you’ll hold it up, you know, I’m holding up the first one, Work and Worship, which is more of the theology. And then you’re holding up the one today that is much more, like you say, a practical handbook. I mean it has got an incredible amount of liturgical resources in there. Now I was honored to be a part of the formation, or at least the greater conversation, to get to this work. Tell us, remind everybody how the process worked to get to this publication.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah, well, Katie and I had been working together, building this website of resources of songs and prayers and blessings. We partnered with a group called Porter’s Gate, which created a number of amazing worship albums for us.
Case Thorp
So good. I love Porter’s Gate. We’ll put that in our notes.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah, so, and those songs really took off. And the resources on the website, you know, with ideas for sermons, ideas for benedictions for workers, like if you wanna bless nurses, here’s a prayer you can put together. If you wanna bless teachers as the school year begins. So we have this website of resources that Katie was building. And we wanted to pair all these resources with some instructions on how to use them in worship. And so this was really kind of the missing piece of the puzzle. You know, we’ve got songs about work. We’ve got prayers about work. We’ve got notes about how to preach about work. But really we needed a workbook that could kind of pull it all together. You know, I think for me, I personally really needed to write this book with a practitioner. As a theologian, theologians, you know, we can kind of float up into the clouds and Katie has a good practitioner, you know, sort of discipline for me, bringing me down to earth. So yeah, that was important.
Katie Roelofs
Yeah, I’ll jump in on that and say that as the resource website was growing, one thing we heard from people, we got a lot of feedback from people saying these resources are great. Some of them don’t really work in my context. So could you help me be able to figure out how this works in my church? Because we’re sold, we love this idea, but that prayer that you posted, that doesn’t quite work for me. How can I do it? And so that challenged us to kind of take a couple steps backward in order to work forward again and do some of the teaching work to say, okay, what does this look like? How do you practically do these things? Not just write prayers, but how do you gather people over time in such a way that it forms them to recognize their vocation and their work within their worship? So a couple steps back in order to be able to teach and to educate people and help them be able to contextualize some of these things for their own churches.
Case Thorp
That website is worshipforworkers.com. Worshipforworkers.com, it’ll be in our show notes. Well, for a number of years, we at The Collaborative have had a Labor Day prayer service. This would be on the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend. And I would generate a number of the litanies and the liturgy and that sort of thing. You better believe I would have loved a resource like this.
Now, let me ask you right in the book, gathered together in the sanctuary, workers will hear almost nothing about one of the most consuming things that they’ve been doing all week long. To your point, Matt, in terms of what that leader said that day, why has work, why has it been so absent from worship?
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think there’s a wide variety of answers that we dive into in the book. One is just the training of pastors and worship leaders, tends to be very theological, spiritual and ecclesial. So worship leaders and pastors just are not trained to engage the working lives of people. They tend to engage, honestly, the family life and the personal life. And we’ve, in many, you know, American churches, the faith has been suburbanized. So preaching and worship speaks to what happens in the home rather than what happens in the city or in the factory or the office. And, the other thing is just, work has become so complex. So, you know, 500 years ago in the middle ages, you could, you know, sing about agriculture and everybody was in agriculture, right?
Case Thorp
Well, do we have songs about federal workers? Come on, Katie.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah.
Katie Roelofs
That’s actually a quote from in the book that there’s a lack of songs for federal employees of the government.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah, so there’s that. Yeah, and I think a lot of pastors and worship leaders are just nervous to talk about work. They feel distanced from it. They feel like they’re not qualified. They imagine that if they talk about work, they need to provide solutions or answers to all the questions people have, rather than just providing a space for them to bring their questions to God. So pastors really do think sometimes like, I just don’t understand the world that these people are in. And then that paralyzes the pastor, and then the pastor doesn’t say anything at all. So what we really try to do is not create worship that ties everything up in a nice bow, but just invites people to bring their questions to God and let the worship do its work.
Case Thorp
So Katie, I’d like to ask you a question in two parts. So talk to us from the perspective of being up on the platform or the chancel in leading worship, and then talk to us as what your research and your own experience from the congregants’ perspectives out in the pews. I mean, this silence, this lack of focus on work, how have you experienced that from the chancel to the pew? And I’m revealing my Presbyterianism, so maybe from the stage to the folding chair.
Katie Roelofs
That’s a great question. One quick thing to note first too, is we included an audit section at the beginning of this book. There’s two of them. There’s one that audits your workers, gives you a better view of when you’re standing in the front and you see all of the faces in front of you, we don’t often think about these people as workers. We don’t think about what it is that they carry with them into worship.
We don’t wonder what was behind the tears or what’s behind the smiles on a Sunday morning. And so this audit encourages a deep dive into knowing your congregation through a vocational lens. But it also gives a separate audit section for wondering how your church got to where it is in terms of why work doesn’t belong in the sanctuary or work does belong in the sanctuary. There’s several different categories that we gave, but like just an audit section that we encouraged people when we wrote it, we said, don’t skip this section. It’s actually really important because this helps you to be able to focus on your people in your specific congregation.
Case Thorp
It’s helpful because like when I’m upfront in leading, I will, a lot of churches will do a prayer for the teachers and students right before school. That one’s kind of a gimme, an easy one. But I know from a pastoral leadership perspective, I’m sometimes hesitant to pray over certain industries because I don’t know that I’ll get to them all.
Any advice to what to do to make sure that if you’re going to tackle this and say all right one Sunday a month We’re going to intentionally pray for a certain industry. How do you not leave people out?
Katie Roelofs
I’d make the case that you probably will at some point in time. And when that person comes up to you and says, I haven’t been prayed over yet, then you say, Here we go. Then let’s have a conversation about that. How can I pray for you this week? It opens up doors for pastoral conversations that maybe haven’t been available to you in the past.
Case Thorp
You’re right. Let’s add that.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah, my wife is also a worship director and she would always, so she did this monthly. And so when she would get that, Hey, you left me out. She would just go, guess what? You’re next month.
Case Thorp
Look, hold on, we’ll get to it. We’ll get to it.
Matthew Kaemingk
But if you’re doing it every month, you can always include more. And another thing that some churches do is they’ve developed testimony. So this is a, you know, an ancient Christian tradition of offering your testimony. And normally when we use the word testimony, we think of like, well, this is when I was saved. But testimony in the terms of a worker interview. So you bring up you know, a school teacher and you ask them, how have you seen God move in your school, in your students, in your classroom? You bring in a construction worker, you know, how are you seeing God move in you as you work on the construction site? And you just develop a rhythm of bringing workers up and letting them tell their testimony of what God is doing. And it helps your congregation develop a grammar, a narrative, for talking about God in the world. And I tell you what, congregations listen to their peers in a way that they don’t, in the way that they don’t listen to their pastors. And they will really pay attention. And there’s something lovely about the awkwardness of talking about work in the sanctuary that can actually be really helpful in training your congregation to start speaking this way.
Case Thorp
Now, we share a Calvinistic theological foundation. I would assume probably a Kuyperian perspective. Are there traditions, if you come across certain church denominations or theological streams where bringing up work is wrong, offensive, not appropriate, seen as unhelpful? Or is it people just don’t think about?
Katie Roelofs
The above.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah. I mean, I think you can find problems in every denomination. Every single denomination fails to do this. And every denomination brings unique gifts to this. So Pentecostals can have and can do beautiful things with work and worship that Calvinists really struggled to do. So I’ll give you an example, like in Africa, there’s these amazing practices of blessing and anointing a person’s marketplace shop where like the pastor will anoint and pray over their shop, you know, or they will dance forward the offering of the work of their hands in a Pentecostal church and a Calvinist church would never do that. So I would say that each worship style has its you know, and theological tradition has its problems and its sort of charisms or its gifts that it can, it can bring to this conversation. But yeah, Calvinism really helps.
Case Thorp
Oh my goodness. Well, I may have shared this on the podcast before, so pardon me listeners and viewers. I was, many years ago, in Madagascar. We had a wonderful relationship for about 10 years with the largest Protestant denomination on the island, which was Calvinistic. And one day we went out to a church that was kind of, I guess, the suburbs of the capital. And I was guest preaching and I was with the leader, the president of the denomination. Well, all of a sudden, after the offering had been taken, a man who I presume was an elder in the church stands up and he’s standing on the floor of the sanctuary looking back down the aisle and begins an auction and starts to do like you would here in an auction house at a farm or an agricultural setting. And people were bringing up to him vegetables and animals and It was just so mind-blowing. I thought, my goodness. I could just see this at First Pres Orlando. Well, after the service I went, I said to the president who was a dear friend and who still is, I said, you’ve got to explain this to me. What did I just witness? And he said, well, for people that don’t participate in the cash society? You know, this is their fruit. This is their product to give and so every Sunday there’s a small auction. People in the church will buy that because they need groceries or they need a newly woven purse. And then the money that they give goes into the offering plate. I was like, my goodness, that is so cool. And would so shock American Calvinists. Okay, but I still haven’t heard. Are there any traditions that push back and don’t want a work in theme or including that?
Matthew Kaemingk
Well, you know, I think some with very strict liturgies that are very set, can be pretty hard. And then you know, I mean, I think some who are very resistant to any kind of planning, you know, in order to connect worship and work, does require a little bit of planning and thought. And then I guess, anyone that’s very focused on performance, you know, including workers who are not performers up on stage, that makes it really hard, as well. So, you know, a plumber giving his testimony might not keep it to two minutes and might not be the most funny, charismatic speaker. So like if you really emphasize performance, that’s going to be tough. And if your liturgy is very strict and can’t move, that’s also tough. I don’t know, Katie, what else, what else would be the big?
Katie Roelofs
I think it’s also particularly difficult for congregations who don’t view worship as a dialogue between the people and God. That if it’s only a one-way communication and it’s not an actual dialogue that’s happening back and forth between God and the people, it’s a lot harder to see the relevance of this and to be able to make those connections. That’s one of the premises of the book is that when workers arrive, they have something that they offer up to God with the expectation that God speaks back to them. And so those who don’t engage in worship in that dialogic fashion, I think are going to have a hard time conceptually and theologically wrapping their heads around this.
Case Thorp
That’s great. I love how you put that because you’re right. So many think they’re coming for entertainment. They’re coming to receive what the performers have to offer as opposed to, no, it’s this back and forth flow.
Katie Roelofs
Also congregations that prioritize individualism are also going to have a hard time with this. Where the worship experience, for lack of better word, I dislike that, but the worship experience is about God and the single person. That doesn’t breed more of a corporate and communal type of feel, because then you are going to get the, they prayed for the plumbers this morning and I’m not a plumber. So an inability to be able to identify and share in the burdens and the joys of those around you.
Matthew Kaemingk
On those same lines, if worship is always happy and positive, that can actually be a blocker for this because sometimes work really sucks. You know, like, work is not always I’m, you know, changing my business for Jesus and everyone’s coming to church and I’m just sort of conquering, you know, the hospital or the school for Jesus. Like sometimes work really stinks.
And so churches that can’t handle sad things or can’t handle hard things or lament, they’re going to have a hard time actually engaging work and workers in a real way because they’re going to sort of force workers to be happy about their, you know, and, put on a happy face when sometimes work really stinks.
Katie Roelofs
They have an allergy to honesty.
Case Thorp
Ooh, Katie. There it is. Like, that’s your next book where you’re the single author.
Matthew Kaemingk
There it is.
Katie Roelofs
And church has an allergy to honesty. Nobody’s gonna pick that up. Nobody’s gonna want that.
Case Thorp
Okay, in the book you write, “God delights when his people gather together to worship in the sanctuary. God also delights when his people scatter out into the city to worship his name through their daily work.” So I appreciate, Calvinism certainly does this, but you’re helping people to reorient that worship isn’t just that one hour in that building. So what does it mean for Christians to see work as a form of worship? Talk to the non-worship leader listening. What difference does it make when they see their work as worship?
Matthew Kaemingk
So I think you have to, I mean, all of this depends upon Christians understanding that their work is worship. And I think you have to start with Adam and Eve in the garden, walking with God, working with God and lifting their work up to God. You know, throughout the Old Testament, I think people just pass over this very strange and weird practice where all over the Old Testament, people are lifting up their work to God as if God cared, you know. Katie and I have kids, Case, I don’t know if you have kids, like, yeah. So, but I mean, anyone with kids understands this. When the kids build a Lego set or they draw something, the first thing they do is they lift it up and they show it to you because they’re excited about what they built.
And throughout the Old Testament, people are lifting up their work to God in worship. And we don’t do that anymore. We don’t lift up our work to God in worship. And there’s something deeply human. I mean, Adam and Eve were created to do this. And so, you know, we talk about gathered worship on Sunday and scattered worship throughout the week so that Sunday morning should be the beginning of a whole week of worship. It’s not a moment for worship, but it’s meant to be sort of this launch for us into the city to continue our worship.
Katie Roelofs
Beyond that also, it’s important for people to realize and to recognize over time that the sanctuary, that work that you do in the sanctuary has consequences for how you live your daily life. The sanctuary is not the place just to give you the warm hug and keep you there. It is always meant to shape you, inform you, help you rehearse the liturgies of your daily life.
So there’s always going to be an outward dimension and like a forward momentum to it. That what we do in the sanctuary should change us. That should have consequences for how we live our daily lives.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. And that’s where I could see this book being helpful even for your devotional life. Not just a tool for a worship leader to utilize, but even for your devotional life. We have a dear, dear man in our church named Buz Ausley. No, not Buzz Aldrin, as he’s been mistaken for. He kind of looks like him.
Matthew Kaemingk
I was excited there for a minute.
Katie Roelofs
I know, that’s what I thought, that’s what I thought you were going to.
Case Thorp
I know. Well, he’s an elder and he’s about late 80s and he is just the most humble, sincere man. Well, there’s this hilarious story where about 25 years ago, he went to the Magic Basketball game with friends who got in, were on the floor on the fancy seats and you had to sign in as you went to your seats and the attendant thought he was Buzz Aldrin and sent word up to the booth and all of a sudden the camera goes on him, his face is on the board. Ladies and gentlemen, we are thrilled to be honored by Buzz Aldrin! Well, everybody stands and cheers and Buzz says, you know what? I didn’t want to embarrass Buzz Aldrin. So I stood up and I started waving to everybody.
Matthew Kaemingk
That’s awesome.
Case Thorp
And if you know Buz, it’s just so funny that he never would have wanted that attention on himself, but he was worried about Buzz Aldrin’s reputation. Okay, I don’t know how we got on this. Sorry. That’s one of my notorious rabbit trails. Buz touches my heart because he will come back during the week and have his bulletin with him. And he will pray the litanies and the prayers that are printed, usually print too many, but he hangs on to these and uses them in his devotional life. And it has really impressed upon me these are more than just throw away items for an order of worship, but can be a tool for such things. Tell me, what’s your hope for this work? What would you love to see in churches in five, ten, twenty years?
Katie Roelofs
I think my deep hope is that nobody needs a cut, copy and paste work in worship liturgy, that they can find that I’ve crafted or Matt’s crafted or someone else, but they gain the tools and the conviction within themselves as leaders to do this work naturally for themselves. And so that the worship that’s being planned for God’s people, the sermons that are being written for them Sunday in and Sunday out, that they have leaders that are passionate about it and are able to do this on their own. And it becomes just the language of the church.
Case Thorp
And we probably should have said this upfront. Every worship style has a liturgy. Even if you’re in a very contemporary format with guitars and drums, liturgy means that order of things and that intentional movement. So don’t just hear liturgy and think Roman Catholics and robes and such.
Katie Roelofs
I think of liturgy as its proper term, which quite literally means the work of the people. It’s not what’s printed in order of worship, it’s God’s people engaging and showing up and being a part of the worship that is happening with their God.
Case Thorp
Matt, what would you love to see in five, 10 years?
Matthew Kaemingk
I think we’re already starting to see it in already pretty amazing and creative ways. Katie and I are constantly getting emails from churches around the country who are doing very creative things to bless the workers in their congregations.
And workers are actually picking it up, as you suggested, and doing really fascinating things. But I think we would love to see a cross-denominational movement of churches who are picking this up and making it their own. And I think we’re already seeing that. I think Katie and I are honestly, we’re trying to be really responsive with this Worship for Workers project, and so every year we kind of take stock of the questions we’re getting and the requests and the invitations that we’re getting and trying to be responsive to where pastors, worship leaders, and workers are. And one of the things we’re looking into right now is the development of spiritual practices for workers in the workplace.
So, you know, the development of prayer, workplace prayers and workplace rituals to practice the presence of God throughout the week. You know, this particular book is focused on what you can do on a Sunday morning. But we’re starting to look, you know, beyond that to help congregations think about worship throughout the week. So, yeah, it’s been fascinating every year, something new comes.
Case Thorp
Now for those that may not like the printed prayer, they would like the more freeform approach. Do you have resources, suggestions for them?
Katie Roelofs
There are plenty of templates in the book that are exactly that. There are templates saying a typical prayer lament includes four different things. It can sound like four words, honestly, it can sound like four words, or it can sound like fully scripted things. But here are things that we think you should consider. Different sections and different movements. We structured it so that to highlight the movement of liturgy, the work of people, the movement of the order of worship. So for people who don’t like scripted, they like extemporaneous, there’s something for them in this book too.
Case Thorp
Give me an example of where you’ve seen creativity out there that’s been sparked by your work.
Katie Roelofs
Do you have a lot of time?
Case Thorp
Hahaha!
Katie Roelofs
Got back from a trip this fall to a church up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They had engaged with us on a number of different fronts and then started a year of very intentional learning around work and worship. And some of the things that they came up with were stunningly beautiful. They took clay from their surrounding community. They’re largely agrarian, they’re largely farming.
They took clay from their own soil, their own native soil, and gave it to a potter who made communion elements. And on each of those communion cups that go to the individual people in the church, there are small etchings that represent the vocations of the congregation members. So as they pick up their own little chalice for communion, they’re holding not only the native soil in their hands, but the work of the potter’s hand with an etching that reminds them of the work of someone else in their community. I thought that was particularly beautiful.
Case Thorp
That’s great.
Matthew Kaemingk
Yeah, I think on my side, one of the things Katie and I have talked about is the slow death of the offering plate, you know, that now that people are, you know, giving online digitally, we still have this time of offering and people are passing an empty plate around, as sort of like a zombie ritual that, you know, no longer totally makes sense. And the zombie ritual.
Case Thorp
Yes.
Katie Roelofs
That’s your next book title, The Zombie Ritual.
Matthew Kaemingk
So the living dead, uh, living, you know, a tithing plate, but I think one thing, you know, we’ve seen churches start to do is use that offering time as a time for everyone to offer the work of their hands, before the Lord. And so, you know, one thing we’ve had churches do is write down on a piece of paper, a trumpet and ash and a tear from your week. So a trumpet is sort of like a victory from your week at work or school. You know, an ash would be like a confession and a tear would be sort of a lament. But offer those things and to see the plate filled up with prayers from a week of work basically is a way to re-envision and honestly resuscitate the offering practice. And frankly, that is closer to a biblical theology of offering than just giving your money. Because as Romans 12:1 says, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. God doesn’t want just 10% of our money. God wants our whole selves. And so when we offer our trumpets, ashes, and tears, we’re giving our whole selves instead of just a portion.
Case Thorp
That’s great.
Well, since COVID, or I guess I should say COVID killed the offering plate for us. Was it radio killed the, or video killed the radio star? Well, it took us out on plates. Couple observations with that. One, I did not realize how much people, especially parents, appreciated the plate for the sake of discipleship of their children in stewardship. Also though, I did not realize that like 90% of our budget was already coming in electronically. That the plate offering, you know, we’re a big 4,000 member church downtown, so this may not be true for all size churches, but very little of the offering that came in was coming in by cash or check.
What worries me and concerns me is we will sometimes go a little too quick in the liturgy. We will kind of gloss over the offering moment. We’ll throw up a slide, hey, here’s the QR code and here’s the text to give kind of options. We do now have boxes on campus if you want to put in something physical. But I have been disappointed at times when we’ve gone a little too quickly and you miss that component of the liturgy of worshiping. So I really like that idea, that’s good.
Katie Roelofs
Some people have started just simple practices of either like a small card that gets put in the plate, like what Matt was saying, even as it’s as low hanging a fruit as a slide that goes up while the plates are being passed, inviting people to a moment of vocational silence as we give our monetary gifts today.
Think about the vocational gift that you want to offer up to God today. What’s one thing that you did in your work this week that you offer to God as your pleasing sacrifice today?
Case Thorp
So good. Well, that is a great segue into our conversation next week. Friends, we are going to continue this conversation, but get even more practical and specific as to how worship can look, if you’re planning that, or even if you’re participating in that. Matthew, Katie, thank you for being here today.
Matthew Kaemingk
Absolutely. Looking forward to next week.
Katie Roelofs
Thanks for having us.
Case Thorp
Friends, you can learn more about their project and explore liturgical resources at worshipforworkers.com. And you can also find a link in our show notes to their new book, Leading Worship for Workers from Baker Academic. Well, thank you for spending your time with us here today. If this episode encouraged you, share it with a pastor or maybe a worship leader that would be inspired to work some of these concepts in. We at The Collaborative create content and unique experiences for Christ-centered professionals in the public square. Come visit us at wecolabor.com, wecolabor.com, to explore our content. Leave your email and I’ll send you our journal on faith, and culture called Zeitgeist. Many thanks to today’s episode sponsor, The Stein Foundation. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
