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worship survey
The Worship God Is Bringing Forth: Insights into God’s Movement in and through The People of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church
by Rev. Blair Pogue
One of the most pressing questions the people of St. Matthew’s currently face is, “How does the worship of the people of St. Matthew’s need to change and remain the same to help us live into the future God is bringing forth?” Further, what identity is God calling us to live into in a time of great change and uncertainty? This past February and March I explored these question by sending an online survey to the people of St. Matthew’s via email. Of the approximately 303 parishioners documented in our 2010 parochial report, 86 responded. Since our congregation is at least a fourth children age twelve and under, many of them without email accounts, this was a significant response. Clearly there is a lot of energy around and interest in the topic of worship.
Background/Context and Hunches
In the St. Matthew’s Mission Statement the purpose of St. Matthew’s is listed as follows: “to manifest the power of God’s love in the world.” The mission statement then provides four ways the community lives into its mission. The first is “through Eucharistically centered worship in the tradition of the Episcopal Church that proclaims and celebrates the word of God revealed in Jesus Christ.” One of my hunches about the worship life of the people of St. Matthew’s is that the Eucharist is the major way our community meets God. I would also venture that that the Eucharist is a powerful symbol and metaphor for our faith community, not only on Sunday, but during the rest of the week.
While I don’t have exact numbers, my hunch is that St. Matthew’s is a church in which the number of worshippers who are cradle or life-long Episcopalians is equal to if not less than the number of people from other denominational backgrounds. In the survey, for example, of the 81 people answered the question “in which religious tradition(s) were you raised?’ 32 people responded that they were raised in the Episcopal Church (U.S.) and 5 responded that they were raised in the Anglican (international) expressionof the Episcopal Church. By contrast, 20 respondents were originally Lutheran, 11 Roman Catholic, 7 Baptist, 4 Presbyterian, 3 Congregational/U.C.C., 3 Methodist, and 3 Nondenominational. Five people responded “I was not raised in any religious tradition.” Five people skipped the question, and six chose to name the tradition they were raised in (not listed in the survey). The responses of the six were as follows: “Materialism, Quaker, Unitarian and Jewish, MUCH exposure to other faiths/traditions, including Native (American) Christians, German Evangelical Lutheran & Dutch Reformed and Assemblies of God.”St. Matthew’s is an Episcopal congregation that encompasses people who have grown up in a variety of different Christian traditions as well as no religious tradition. Community members and those who join us on Sunday bring with them a richness of perspectives and worship experiences. At the same time we have people who have grown up exclusively worshipping in the Episcopal Church, and even more interestingly, who were a part of the Episcopal Church before the 1979 Prayer Book, when the liturgy was the same each Sunday. Those who were a part of the church prior to 1979 used the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. They are the members of the congregation who have experienced the greatest liturgical changes. They experienced change with 1979 Prayer Book and the experimental liturgies preceding it, as well as with the liturgical experimentation we’ve engaged in since 2005.
St. Matthew’s, while founded in 1889, is now a young congregation, and a congregation people come to after years away from the institutional church. Many of those coming back had “bad church experiences,” including being shamed when they asked questions, and experiencing church infighting and splits. Some of them outgrew the theology of the church or tradition they were raised in. Many of the people who have bravely come back to church find the St. Matthew’s community to be healing, safe and hospitable. They like the fact, as one survey respondent put it, “that you don’t have to check your mind at the door.” They like the fact that while the clergy and many members of the congregation believe in Jesus as Messiah and in God as Trinity, there are a diversity of theological views and opinions. They want a safe place to explore their faith and learn more about God. They want a church that is outward-looking, concerned about social justice and God’s world. And they want to be part of an international and intergenerational faith community. Some of our parishioners tried to go it alone for years and realized that they wanted to be part of something larger than themselves. They wanted to worship and engage in social justice work in community.There has been a hunger at St. Matthew’s for new expressions of worship since at least September 2005.
Some of the questions we have wondered about include, “what are the treasures of our Anglican tradition? What worship treasures is God calling us to carry forward and open up to those new to Anglican worship and liturgy, and what pieces of our worship is God calling us to leave behind? The St. Matthew’s community is at a true crossroads. We have inherited a meaningful and rich liturgical tradition, but the language doesn’t always speak to newcomers and those outside the church. While we appreciate classical and more formal music, we hunger for different music expressions, a greater variety of instruments and music the entire congregation can sing. We want our worship not to feel like a performance, but at the end of the day our space in which fixed pews face an elevated chancel and high altar too often “wins.” While we appreciate the fact that our church is more racially and socio-economically diverse than most Episcopal churches, it is prevented from being even more so by a liturgy, a way of worshipping God and music that is more formal and requires a higher education level to appreciateThe worship survey consisted of 21 questions. The majority of questions were designed so that answers could be tracked statistically. Two of the questions, “I experience a connection between my Sunday worship and my daily life,” and “I understand what we are doing together in Sunday worship and why,” gave survey participants a chance to write a written response to supplement their scaled answer. Three questions required a written response. They included, “Why did you choose to worship at St. Matthew’s?” “Are there parts of the service that you tend to find distancing or disengaging? If so, please specify and comment below,” and “If you could change anything about our worship, what would it be?” The feedback from these three questions, as well as the two additional questions with a write in option is incredibly rich and helpful and will be incorporated into my final thesis. Since no children took the survey I engaged in a separate wondering conversation about worship with the 1st-2ndand 3rd-4thSunday School classes on March 27. The children uniformly asked for “groovy” and “upbeat” music and had mixed feelings about intentional silences in the service. They those Sundays when they have a role in the service.
Learnings
The survey revealed a high level of engagement with and investment in worship. It also revealed how diverse we are as a congregation, including our diverse music preferences. While a handful of parishioners did not like liturgical and musical change and innovation, the majority embraced change and innovation including the global liturgies that have been introduced the last six years,
Of the 86 people who took the worship survey, 84 answered the question “How long have you been worshipping at St. Matthew’s?” Of these 84 respondents 41.7% have been worshipping at St. Matthew’s for more than ten years. By contrast, 22.6% survey participants have been at St. Matthew’s for 1-3 years, 16.7% for 4-5 years, 11.9 % for 6-10 years, 4.8% for 6 months to 1 year and 2.4% less than 6 months.Almost half of those taking the survey or 46.5% attend worship at St. Matthew’s once a week with 16.3% attending worship at St. Matthew’s more than once a week. Twenty nine people or 33.7% said they attend worship at St. Matthews 2 or 3 times a month and only 3.5% of those responding said they attend worship once a month. Thus those who responded to the survey are highly involved in and engaged with the worship life of the church.Additionally 89.3% of 84 respondents said they most often attend the 10:30 Rite II Eucharist service with 6% stating they most often attend the 7 pm service and 4.8% the 8 am Rite I Eucharist.In terms of age, 24.4% of those participating in the survey are between the age of 51 and 60 while 22.1% of respondents were between 41 and 50 and 20.9% are 61 to 70 years old. Twelve percent of respondents were 31-40 years old and 5.8% of parishioners 22 to 30 years old. Only one person falling into the 18-21 age category and one person under 18 responded to the survey.The number of women who took the survey was almost two times the number of men. Of the 84 people willing to identify their sex, 63.1% were women and 36.9% were men. The racial and ethnic background of survey participants was overwhelmingly white (non-Hispanic). Of 85 people choosing to identify their racial background 94.1% identified themselves as White, 4.7% as Black/African American, 3.5% as American Indian/Native American, and 2.4% as Hispanic/Chicano/Latino. Although we have four parishioners falling into the “Asian/Pacific Islander” category, no one taking the survey identified themselves in this way. Only one person chose not to identify their racial/ethnic background.The two elements of Sunday morning worship which speak most powerfully to those who took the survey are communion and the sermon. Both Sunday morning services are Eucharistic, and the Eucharist has come to be an important symbol and icon of our life together.
It was interesting to me that when allowed to indicate what parts of the service spoke to them – with the possibility of marking multiple categories –77.6% of respondents listed both communion and the sermon. This was followed by “other (special) music” at 49.4%, hymns at 48.2%, the “reading of scripture lessons” at 40%, “silences” at 34.1%, the “Prayers of the People” at 30.6%, “Prayers for Healing” at 25.9% , and the “Lord’s Prayer” at 20%.When asked if they enjoy variety in worship, 74.4% of the 86 people taking the survey agreed or strongly agreed. Probing further, 75% agreed or strongly agreed that on most Sundays the music at the 10:30 service “helps me worship God and experience God’s presence.” While 19 of 49 write in responses to the question “Are there parts of the service that you tend to find distancing or disengaging?” dealt with music, 19 out of 75 people commented on music when responding to the question “Why did you choose to worship at St. Matthew’s?” and 7 out of 19 wrote about music when answering the question, “Which parts of the Sunday morning service speak to you most powerfully?”
When asked, “If you could change anything about our worship, what would it be?” 16 out of 45 comments mentioned music.Only five people responded that they most often attended the 7 pm service, which made for a small statistical sample. Each Sunday at least 20 people regularly attend both the 10:30 am and the 7 pm service. Of the 82 people who responded to the question “On most Sundays, the music at the 7 pm service helps me worship God and experience God’s presence 52 people indicated that the question was not applicable to them. Twenty two or 26.8% of those answering the question agreed or strongly agreed, and 9.8% or eight people neither agreed nor disagreed. These numbers are unfortunately too small to be a helpful indicator of whether or not the more contemporary and upbeat music at the 7 pm service is speaking to parishioners in general. The write in comments, however, revealed the profound impact of the 7 pm service on the imagination, especially the musical imagination, of 10:30 service participants.On another encouraging note, 81.4% of those taking the survey agree or strongly agree that they understand what we are doing together in Sunday morning worship and why. Further, when asked if they experience a connection between Sunday worship and their daily life 84.9% of respondents agree or strongly agree.Three questions focused on the cultural makeup and context of St. Matthew’s and the surrounding community. All of them were scaled from 1 to 10 with 1 being “Not Well” and 10 “Very Well.” To the first, “how well do you feel our worship reflects the current cultural and generational makeup of St. Matthew’s?” 81.2% gave a 7 or higher, with 18.8% responding “Very Well” and the highest percentage of respondents (27.1%) responding with an 8.When asked, “how well do you think our worship reflects the culture of those in our surrounding community whom God has called us to reach?” only 12% responded “Very Well.” At the same time, 66.4% responded with a 6 or higher, and the greatest number of people, 24.1%, chose 8. Only 1 person or 1.2% of the 83 people responding answered “Not Well.”Finally, when asked “how well do you think our worship reflects your own culture? (i.e. do we worship in a cultural language in which you feel at home?) 28.6% or 24 out of 84 people answered “Very Well,” and 73.8% or 62 people responded with an 8-10
Analysis and Conclusions
The two questions I asked at the beginning of this paper, “How does the worship of the people of St. Matthew’s need to change and remain the same to help us live into the future God is bringing forth?” and “what identity is God calling us to live into in an area of great change and uncertainty?” are not easy to answer. Discerning what in our corporate worship needs to change and what should remain the same are questions we will probably be wrestling with for a long time. We will also need to learn, as we are trying to do at our Sunday night service, how to “open up” what we consider to be our Anglican treasures to those new to the Episcopal Church and Christianity.
The question of identity, while related to the former question, is also difficult. In a post-denominational and post-Christian age in which God calls us to minister in specific contexts which often look different from each other, does it make sense to have shared liturgies everyone is expected to use? If we wish to reach out to all God’s people, and not just well educated people from the middle and upper classes, we need to take a hard look at the formality of our services, the words used in our prayers, and the music we worship with. And yet one of the challenges of all this is that many of us were drawn to the Episcopal Church because of the power and poetry of the liturgy, as well as the theology expressed in the Eucharistic prayers as well as in the music. Some of the newer Eucharistic liturgies are clunky and definitely not as poetic as those in the 1979 prayer book, and different liturgies speak to different people in different ways. At the same time, the people of St. Matthew’s have recently come across some wonderful Eucharistic prayers and Prayers of the People that, while not for everyone, speak to us. They have helped us to understand God’s role in salvation history in new and exciting ways, as well as God’s call for us. Using these liturgies, many of them from England (Common Worship), Scotland (Iona Abbey), or other places in the Anglican Communion (New Zealand, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Jamaica) we’ve learned that we like to speak to and with each other in worship (many of them have more parts for the congregation throughout the liturgy and especially during the Eucharistic prayers), and that while we want our liturgies to be theological and Trinitarian, they also neeed to be as accessible as possible.
The worship survey was most helpful in highlighting the ecumenical diversity of St. Matthew’s as well as its openness to change and innovation. It is also important to know that the sermon and Eucharist are the worship elements that speak most powerfully to our faith community, and are thus some of the treasures we need to carry forward. It was encouraging to see a high level of enthusiasm for and investment in the worship life of our community. The more than sixteen pages of single-spaced write in comments compiled from this survey indicate to me how important worship is in the lives of the people of St. Matthew’s. These comments will be analyzed in-depth at a later point in time (post-Easter when I begin to write my D.Min. thesis about St. Matthew’s titled “Keeping the Wondering Conversation Going”) and the findings shared with the people of St. Matthew’s. In the meantime the write in comments are being read and discussed by the vestry, staff and Worship Ministry Team leaders for all three services.The write in comments, while not addressed in this paper, also showed me how diverse we are in terms of liturgical and musical tastes, an important reminder to continually strive for a good blend of prayers and songs that are new and old, global and local, challenging and comforting. Probably even more important than what our worship looks like – both now and in the future – is the fact that we are committed to wondering about it. As a community, the people of St. Matthew’s are committed to keeping a wondering conversation going about what God is up to in and through us, as well as the different ways church members are fed spiritually. This is hopefully a good way to keep us from unnecessary, hurtful and draining worship wars. Hopefully we will care enough about each other and the stranger who is not yet with us that we will be open to liturgical and musical elements that don’t speak to us, as well as those that do.
