Creating a contemplative service in church

With the turn toward mindfulness in mainstream culture, we have an opportunity to put together a contextual contemplative service as a missional opportunity, writes Shaun Lambert. A space to go deeper, rather than to entertain with endless variety.

Here are some foundations for what that might look like

I have often been asked what a contemplative service in church might look like. One of the most common forms of contemplative service would be a Taizé service. I have also run introductions to contemplative mindfulness in a Costa.
 
However, with the turn toward mindfulness in mainstream culture I think we have an opportunity to put together a contextual contemplative service as a missional opportunity, which might look different in each setting.
 
There are some foundations that are helpful to think about.


'Begin practising contemplation yourself'

One of the challenges of mainstream or secular mindfulness to the church is an ethical one. If you want to teach mindfulness, you need to have a personal practice as you are sharing out of that personal practice. I remember at Bible college doing a placement for a year with a minister and asking him if he could teach me to pray.

Very honestly, he said, ‘I don’t pray, I’m too busy…’
 
If we are to lead a contemplative service, we should at least be practising contemplation, however much we feel a beginner or a sincere struggler. We can’t just teach theory, or we won’t understand the struggles of others. So before beginning a contemplative service, begin practising contemplation yourself.
 

Don't worry about numbers - face the reality of what is

There are some common factors shared between mainstream mindfulness and Christian contemplation. The first is to have an intention to practise every day. We know this if we try to pray more generally on a daily basis. Nothing happens without an intention.

In the same way, have an intention to lead a contemplative service regardless of who turns up and how many. Part of the necessity of contemplative prayer is that it helps us resist our consumer culture, not conform to it. In contemplation we face the reality of what is, rather than trying to find an ideal state of mind or heart.


Ways to help train attention  
 
Another common factor between mainstream mindfulness and Christian contemplation is the emphasis on training our attention. It was early Christian contemplative Evagrius (4th century) who said that ‘prayer is undistracted attention.’

This is very timely as we live in an age of distraction where our attentional capacities are held captive and fragmented by the virtual world and media technologies. It is being said that we live in an attention economy – everyone is trying (and succeeding) to capture our attention. We say to children in school, ‘pay attention!’ But we never teach them how.
 
A central purpose of a contemplative service should be to help train attention. James Williams, a philosopher at Oxford University and former Google employee says, ‘the liberation of the human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.’[1]

One way to begin this would be to have a corporate Lectio Divina, a slow meditative reading of scripture. Instead of a sermon, invite those attending to share any reflections.
 
Contemplative writings are often poetic or parabolic because they are working at the edge of expression. Read a poem, a psalm or a parable, or other story each week, but don’t explain them. Parables and poems challenge our automatic reactions and move us into awareness of those reactions and possible wiser responses. The Desert Fathers and Mothers have many stories that can be read as a source of wisdom.
 

Planks in eyes - become aware of our attitudes

A third common factor between mainstream mindfulness and Christian contemplation is the concept of becoming aware of our attitudes. We cannot change what we are not aware of – and one of our most common attitudes is the critical negative judgement of others, or our own self. Perhaps read the words of Jesus every week as an invitation to become aware of our judgemental attitudes:
 
‘Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way as you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.’ (Matthew 7:1-2, NIV).
 
There are many Desert Fathers and Mothers stories that take up this theme. We cannot see clearly or reperceive (Matthew 7:5) if our perception is distorted by negative judgements.


Do not persuade, help people to reperceive

The early church contemplatives talked about one of the aims of contemplative prayer to be diorasis, to see clearly. This metaphor has been critiqued by disability studies, so I prefer the term from mainstream mindfulness – reperceiving.[2] In reperceiving we see reality as it is, or in Christian terms we see others as God sees them. This is the fourth common factor.

In his parables, Jesus wasn’t trying to persuade us into the kingdom, he was trying to help us reperceive. A contemplative service isn’t about persuasion, it is trusting the Holy Spirit and scripture to lead people into a reperceiving of the kingdom of God that is near them.


An emphasis on silence

Another common factor at work is the emphasis on silence. Jesus modelled this for us, ‘Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.’ (Mark 1:35).

Later in the passage the disciples hunt him down and bring the noise of the world to him.

Silence is uncomfortable, and yet it is another way to resist our consumer style worship which is about coming to get an experience. It is in silence that the things we have ignored come knocking on the door of our attention.


Contemplative music

I began with the idea of contemplative music. It is too easy to let this dominate but it can play an important part moving us out of distraction into a place of open awareness where we can sense God’s presence (or not). If you have the option to sing a psalm that is a helpful part of a contemplative service.

There are also many other short, sometimes called ‘paperless’ songs where you don’t need to give people words or a piece of paper, or a screen – they can just be sung and picked up very easily. Perhaps with a piece of music you can offer an image to meditate on. You can of course take all of this outside and contemplate nature as creation or bring nature into the church.


'Training the muscle of attention'

The single most helpful thing I’ve learnt is to teach about the muscle of attention. As part of attentional training, we might ask someone to focus their attention on scripture (you could use chocolate, or an image, or a candle).

The first thing that happens (and it happens quickly and repeatedly) is that our mind wanders. We have this beautiful capacity to notice that our mind has wandered and what it has wandered to, called meta-awareness.

Having noticed that our mind has wandered, we direct it back to what we are focusing on.[3] This enables us to learn to sustain our attention, switch our attention and cultivate deep attention. It should be taught in schools.


Anchor it in our bodies

Lastly, we should make the service anchored in our bodies, with opportunities to use our bodies in liturgy, prayer, or sung worship. We can invite people, if they are able, to stand, to kneel, to raise their hands, to prostrate themselves.

I have created a liturgy that uses British Sign Language (BSL) with the words of the liturgy. Words like breath and heart and sorry have beautiful signing.

As Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith says, the church has been obsessed with information rather than transformation, ‘In other words, we imagine human beings as giant bubble-headed dolls; with humungous heads and itty-bitty, unimportant bodies.’[4]


'Jesus came to live in a body to show us how to live in a body'

In all of this use the creativity and wisdom of those attending – a contemplative service has to be sustainable and not the product of one person or having an emphasis on something new every week. What we are doing is spiralling back to the foundations of our faith and seeking to go deeper rather than to entertain with endless variety (as social media seeks to capture our attention).
 
I think many Christians are dissatisfied with their spiritual life because they have been taught a disembodied spirituality, a spirituality that is all in the head. People in our culture (the virtual world) are flocking to mainstream mindfulness in their millions as an act of resistance – because above all things, mindfulness is about inhabiting the body (and the emotions, and the imagination, in fact every part of our being).

Jesus came to live in a body to show us how to live in a body. It is also a relational body – designed to interact with others, God and the world. So, in a contemplative service let us pay attention to what is real (our embodied existence) and what is Real - the presence of God that inhabits our material being.

 

Image | Ajay Karpur | Unsplash

Shaun Lambert is a Baptist minister, psychotherapist and Honorary Mindfulness Chaplain with Scargill Movement. He is currently writing a new book on spiritual formation through mindfulness. 

[1] James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, (CUP, 2018), xii.
[2] See Shauna L. Shapiro et al., ‘Mechanisms of Mindfulness,’ Journal of Clinical Psychology 62, no.3 (2006): 374, for the aspects of intention, attention, attitude, reperceiving in mindfulness.
[3] Wendy Hasenkamp et al, ‘Mind Wandering and Attention During Focused Meditation: A Fine-grained Temporal Analysis of Fluctuating Cognitive States’, Neuroimage 59 (2012): 751.
[4] James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos Press: 2016), 3.

 

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