Tuesday, 21 July 2009

Let the whole world praise God's name

I have just returned from a trip to a conference - much fun, and lots to think about. We came from all parts of the world, and a variety of cultures; Indian, Burmese, UK and US, Australia, Canada and Aboriginal. On two occasions we sang the old hymn "In Christ there is no east nor west, in him no south or north, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth". Very fitting and sung with much gusto. But after one of our sings, one of the conference attenders (conferees?) asked whether in fact it was an affirmation we wanted to make. Reflecting, as we were at least part of the time, on the damage that we can do by refusing to acknowledge the reality and legitimate presence of "the other", and our insistence that others should become like us. We talked around it for a while, and came, as with many of the other questions during the week, to a variety of responses.
But it has started me thinking about worship at Bloomsbury. We are delighted by the fact that we come from a variety of countries and cultures. However - we can in no way say that our worship reflects our variety. We may occasionally (OK - it hasn't happened yet, but come along this Sunday evening....) say the Lord's prayer in different ways, and we have been known to use hymns from different cultures on very rare occasions. But our ways of worship could never be described as anything other than European. We are not unusual in this of course. The arguments about worship style often focus on music, but even among the different categories for which people argue, the styles and types are still predominantly Anglo-American - and white Anglo-American at that.
Is this true of who we are? We recognise about 20 different nationalities among us regularly. By no means all Anglo-American. Certainly not only European. How can we reflect our cultural diversity in our worship? Do we want to? How might we do it and retain authenticity, avoiding "tokenism"? Are there ways - both musically and in other parts of worship, where we might find more resources to enrich our worshipping? I would love to hear what people think about this. If you worship regularly at Bloomsbury, let me know about forms of worship from other cultures that you know about, please. If you worship elsewhere, and have worked at multi-cultural worship, it would be wonderful to hear about what you have learned.

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