Worship-as-messy-mistake-making

I love Sanctus2nds. It’s our attempt to do the modern church's perennial favourite – “all age worship”. A potentially tricky beast – and I’m not talking about the toddlers here!

The name comes from second helpings, a second generation, second Sundays of the month…

Learning the hard way often means making lots of messy mistakes en route. With 2nds, we started off thinking that having a light touch might be an integral part of our worship – nothing too neat or pretty, and some stuff planned but with a lot of in-built room. Our intention was always to make the planning bit as easy as possible for us all, the eight or so families and individuals who make up the core group. It’s a lot lighter touch for instance than an average Sanctus 8pm service – each of us undertakes to do one space, we all work to a theme and hey presto, a service is pulled together each month. Usually this means that we have a café space, a film space, a creative/ doing space and a prayer space that people can wander around after a communal start (eg intro, candle-lighting, story), coming back together at the end for communion. This means that until the service is over, none of us knows the totality of what’s going to happen during the worship – a real exercise in permission-giving/-taking, letting go, sitting back...

Yesterday, we changed the service format slightly so that we did the same spaces as normal but instead of having time to wander freely, we did them all together. The theme was 3, for Trinity Sunday and we were engaged in all sorts of things – making a candle decoration with three candles in one holder, praying by making triangular structures with paper straws, of course listening to “Three is the magic number”, and making bread with three ingredients, which we then used during communion.

I suspect Andy’s instincts to wait even a minute or two once the bread was brought up the altar were correct – despite the heat, he managed to hold it for long enough to break it in half, but a huge plume of steam escaped in the process… A beautiful, round, steaming loaf of bread that we’d made and were sharing together as a sign of God’s abundance and grace. Truly magic, as De La Soul would have it.

I love the slightly chaotic nature of our togetherness at 2nds, and the spontaneous moments that just seem to click into the rhythm and theme of our prayers, words, actions. And for me of late, this sort of worship-as-messy-mistake-making has become a more important part of my spiritual life than almost anything else.