Worship Metaphors

From a forum (2004)

Our teams look to explode the metaphor in a variety of ways:

1. Graphically. Like a few weeks ago, the metaphor for a message on God's irresistable grace was the Etch-a-Sketch. All the projected graphics looked like an Etch-a-Sketch.

2. Interactive: Kim Vander Ploeg, our worship leader, kicked off the worship celebration by handing out a bunch of Etch-a-Sketches and gave each person an instruction: Write your name in cursive, or draw a triangle with a circle in it, and so on. Then the band kicked into the opener (a song about do-overs, I can't remember what it was), and after the opener, Kim asked to see the results. Obviously, there was a lot of scribbling and mistakes. She turned over the Etch-a-Sketches, displayed the blank slates, related it to grace, and then we rolled into a set of worship songs that focused on grace.

3. We hand out a very non-linear outline every Sunday that really is used more as a small group discussion guide for our various small groups during the week. It is keyed to the theme and metaphor.

4. The environment team will do whatever comes into their creative minds to transform the whole church building somehow keyed to the theme. Sometimes it might just be, "Well, etch-a-sketchs are red with gray screens and white knobs, so they'll use lots of red, gray and black color swatches all over the place.