We have made our Liturgy, Music, and Space Curriculum available for free download, after releasing it at the Bifrost Conference on Liturgy, Music, and Space that we hosted in St. Louis in 2011.
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Our culture has seen many changes in the past fifty years, and those changes have affected worship in all of our churches. Often churches form segregated worship services using distinctions such as “traditional” and “contemporary,” but this decision has done little to lift the burden of strife over worship-related issues. The result is often individuals and families worshipping only with those who share their aesthetic vision, or even entire churches filled exclusively with a single demographic.
Because of this widespread struggle, there are many resources available to churches seeking a more biblical understanding of worship: academic studies, practical guides, and worship-planning manuals. This curriculum is none of those.
While those resources are valuable for individual study and planning good worship services, the information and skills gleaned from them are not enough to shepherd congregations to health in the area of worship; that requires helping our congregations love each other in our differences.
So the purpose of this curriculum is to help groups of Christian brothers and sisters learn healthy corporate worship, which the Scriptures say involves not only our love for God, but also our love for each other. It does this by teaching new ways of understanding biblical categories of worship and by offering new vocabulary to help congregations describe their experiences to each other. The hope of this 13-week study is to help churches and small groups of all kinds to learn one another’s stories and to find healing and reconciliation through the Holy Spirit’s work.
This curriculum is in no way exhaustive in any of its categories. Instead, it is meant to function as a survey of the topics since many participants will be introduced to these theological concepts for the first time. Bifrost encourages all who use this resource to spend time each week in corporate prayer, asking God to be merciful, to grant understanding where there is distrust, and to grant wisdom where there is hurt. May God bless your study and continue His work of building us together into a temple, holy and blameless in his sight.
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