Marcia McFee Seminar Highlights

When was the last time you experienced an incredible time of worship? What made it so special? Was it music, or silence? Were there visuals that drew you into worship, or was there something interactive? I encourage you to share your stories with the pastors or music director.

Marcia McFee encouraged all of us to be our own "worship consultants". However, Marcia also demonstrated some basic rules for facilitating worship. She encouraged us that worship design does not mean "plug and chug" (plugging in different hymns and Scriptures and using the same format week in and week out) as this leads to dull rather than life-changing worship. On the other hand, Marcia also encouraged structure and predictability in every worship service, thus facilitating a balance between tradition and spontaneity.

Here are just a few ideas I'd like to share from the seminar I attended with our Tri-State District on May 9.

One was that Marcia herself is a powerful worship leader. She uses drum or just her voice, she leads the singing by conducting, she leads people to connect with one another through simple ideas such as having people face the center isle as she leads a time of joys and concerns followed by a simple sung "round." It is particularly powerful to experience the worship leader "out from behind the lectern" really leading the congregation throughout worship.

Two was the use of visuals to facilitate the worship experience. Many Methodists are stuck back in the 1950's where visuals simply meant changing the altar cloth colors and decorating with some flowers. Marcia demonstrated a powerful use of visuals to enhance worship themes. There is no place in the Sanctuary that is "off limits" for adding visuals - palm branches spread on all around the center isle, children's murals hung from the ceiling ... the sky's the limit!

Three was an intentional planning (and rehearsals if necessary) of transitions, or what Marcia called "layered sequences." Rather than having a hymn, then a Scripture reading, followed by another hymn, Marcia demonstrated this method by having a solo voice begin "Shepherd Me O God" (from the Faith We Sing), and then invited the congregation to join in on the chorus, then she invited us to turn to Psalm 23 and as the music continued in the background we each whispered the words quietly to ourselves of this psalm. Then we sang together the same chorus again. The experience of reading Scripture was much deeper because of this layered sequence design. Although these kinds of ideas take imagination as well as rehearsals with musicians and Audio/Visual leaders, most are simple and can be led by even very small congregations.

These are just a few of the many ideas from this seminar. We hope to gather a few folks to begin planning worship for September and October, as a trial. If you might be interested in working with the pastors and music director please let us know.