Mark Pierson
Mark Pierson is the Executive Director of Urban Seed (otherwise known as the Receptionist).
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June 07, 2006
I thought I should wind this ‘pseudo blog’ up properly. This is likely to be my final entry. You can follow further developments under Marcus’s writings at http://www.urbanseed.org/journal/mt/mc/index.html We’ll be moving all our church/spirituality/worship/mission stuff to a new website soon.
At a meeting of the core group of Urban Seed church after worship on Sunday 8 April, 15 adults and two children stayed out of the 20 + 2 who were at worship that night! Not a bad core group. At that meeting I explained that due to my difficult personal circumstances I wasn’t able to continue to provide leadership at the level I had been doing for the previous 12 months. In fact I needed to take a complete break, and as no one else was willing to take it on, it was likely that we would shut up shop.
Out of the next 45 minutes discussion came a phoenix. Three couples decided they were committed enough and inspired enough by what they had seen and learnt in the year, that they would carry forward a reduced form of the order of service we had developed. This was very gratifying. (Maybe not everyone understood what they were getting into – one couple went home saying to each other, ‘I’m not sure what happened there, but I think we are leading the services now!’ They are too). It was decided that future gatherings would take place in a small windowless space (called ‘The Den’) we have in downtown Melbourne, at the same time of 5.30pm Sunday nights. It wouldn’t be called Urban Seed church, nor would it be promoted as broadly as in the past.
So our Easter Saturday service was to be our last at Mission to Seafarers. We went for Easter Saturday because it’s traditionally a ‘dead’ day in the Easter period. Nice and dark, hopeless, ‘on the road to nowhere’ sort of themes. The sort of stuff that is meat to a depressed melancholic cynic. I was also due to go to the USA on Easter Sunday! It was great working with Cheryl Lawrie and Jeff and Paul and Rachael and Blythe on the initial theme. ‘Waiting’. ‘Dead Man Waiting’. Nice. The service was a cracker. 30 punters turned up despite it being a holiday weekend. A good time was had by all if the responses are anything to go by. Behind the scenes the service was a mess. I’d spent more time than I should have on setting up the environment, and not enough time briefing those involved in leading parts of the service. Apparently no one noticed. But I did. Fortunately God is very gracious and she turned up, once again, to transform a very meagre offering in to something that touched the heart of many present. (I have had this experience many times in the last 13 years of doing alt. worship stuff. It only seems to happen if the work is done beforehand, and not if I don’t put the work in. Its as if God needs something to work with – my commitment to the task. Just thinking out loud).
Cheryl Lawrie (my co-conspirator) has blogged nicely about the service, and put up some pix (http://alternative.victas.uca.org.au/, as has Marcus Curnow (http://www.urbanseed.org/journal/mt/mc/archives/2006/05/dead_man_waitin.html). Their technical abilities are far beyond mine, so look there for more info, but basically the venue, which is a large round concrete dome, had as a centrepiece a huge pile of crushed and block ice. Above it hung a ‘crown of thorns’ (barbed wire) with about 8 red conical ‘iceblocks’ hanging off it. These dripped (one drip every 5 seconds from each) on to the clear clean ice. Very nice. Lighting was from projector spill (three data projectors – one either side of the dome roof running the same loop continuously, and one on a sheet in front of the door opening running a triptych loop), and 4 black-light tubes and a few candles. Very minimalist and simple. The service was built around repeating the text of John 16/7 (CEV) ‘But I tell you that I am going to do what is best for you. That is why I am going away. The Holy Spirit cannot come to help you until I leave. But after I am gone, I will send the Spirit to you.’ This was repeated 5 times with a second voice responding in a questioning tone. The 5 segments roughly followed the 5 stages of grief. We went through all the segments, then introduced 5 stations for reflection, based on the same readings and responses. Cheryl lists all these.
After that it was drinks in the adjoining bar and pack out. Unfortunately since we had decided to stop meeting at Mission to Seafarers after that night we had all the accumulated junk of a years worship to move out. I was going to the USA for 3 weeks at 9am the next day. So it was a long night, one very familiar to anyone involved in alt.worship stuff. The kind of night when you discover who your friends are! Fortunately I had plenty. It was sad closing the doors for the last time. It had been a good run with a lot learnt from the experience.
Three weeks away saw me at Disneyland with my wife, daughter and grandson, and at ‘The Church Has Left the Building’ Conference in Seattle. Disneyland was fun, the conference didn’t quite deliver, and I didn’t feel that I did either. The worship I led based around the Prodigal Son story was messy (and God didn’t seem to turn up in any obvious way). Somehow it didn’t hang together. My seminar, ‘How Did an Instrument of Torture Get to be Hanging Out in Madonna’s Cleavage?’ was a new seminar and I didn’t think it went across to the very mixed audience very well. Still, I had fun and met some great people and had some inspiring conversations. And staying at the Shafer-Baillie Mansion on Capitol Hill was an outstanding experience. Wonderful Mennonite Christian hosts in a refurbished turn of the century mansion.
I came back to find that the Sunday night service, now called ‘Seeds’, was flourishing. I love it when I start something that other people carry on. I’m an initiator rather than a maintainer, although I can maintain when necessary, I just don’t enjoy it as much. I didn’t attend worship there for the first 6 weeks or so. I wanted the group to find its head without my involvement. I joined them for the first time last Sunday. 20 + adults and 4 children. Very good worship. Well curated. Good content. A bit thin on broader involvement by people, but well done. I was proud to be a part of the group. Now I’m stuck with curating and doing the rant next week which is Trinity Sunday, my least favourite Sunday in the calendar.
I also found that the wonderful brothers and sisters of the Sydney Anglican Diocese had publicly trashed our Dead Man Waiting service along with most other emerging church worship. The so called ‘journalist – and I use the term loosely – had written an article for their magazine and e-zine that quoted heavily from websites, including Cheryl’s. Misquoted and misinterpreted would be a better description. Again Cheryl covers this incident nicely on her blog. Among other things the journo attributed Urban Seed church to Cheryl and quoted from a site about a Welsh Nudist Beach Mission. She failed to see the latter was a spoof! Those references are now removed from her web article but remain in the hard copy. The Australian Broadcasting Company ran an item about her article on their national television program Mediawatch this week. http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s1655730.htm
I can never understand why some branches of the Church feel they have to justify their existence by trashing other parts who think or act differently. I expect that level of lack of understanding from outside the Church, but not from within it. (Which justifies my love of the spoof, again by the ABC, of Hillsong! http://www.abc.net.au/tv/chaser/war/video/default.htm?program=chaser&pres=20060526_2200 )
So that’s about up to date. Please follow Marcus’s blog and he’ll lead you to the new ‘Seeds’ website when its up if you want to know what we’re up to. We’re looking to pull together all the worship and spirituality stuff we do that is about sustaining our mission here at Urban Seed. We hope it will be helpful to others in similar situations.
I’m going to try to get my Masters thesis on Stations of the Cross finished, and get a book and CD resource on using Stations of the Cross, stations, and ambient spaces etc in mission and worship, to the printers. I’m also trying to pull together a gathering of people interested in creating and using video and audio stuff in worship. Ambience artists. That will be in Melbourne in January. And there will be the occasional worship gig done under the ‘Parallel Universe Worship Collective’ umbrella, and a visit to the West Coast of the USA for a few weeks in August...and I still work for Urban Seed…
Thanks for your interest and support.
Mark Pierson Wednesday 7 June 2006.
Posted by markp at 08:22 AM | Comments (8)
