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BY MELISSA LAUBER
UMCONNECTION STAFF

Be the light. Those three words were meant to serve as a theme around which to plan the BWC's third annual Prodigal Worship Conference. But they became instead a poetic mantra, a promise, a prayer and a challenge to guide the more than 400 participants who gathered at Queen's Chapel UMC in Beltsville for the event April 21.

Sermons, prayers, Scripture readings, music, witness, invocations, offerings, confessions, doxologies and benedictions - the work of the people - are at the heart of United Methodist Sunday mornings.

But none of it means anything, if it's not linked into the heart of the Gospel story, connecting people with God and one another in significant ways, said the Rev. William Chaney, the event's director. "We're called in all that we do to lift up Jesus. We are called to be missional, relational and incarnational."

In the past eight years, churches within the Baltimore-Washington Conference have focused significant energy on offering meaningful worship experiences, aware that worship is often an initial place where people enter into a deeper relationship with God and the church. Worship attendance is also thought to be one of the best indicators of church vitality.

From 2005 to 2010, 198 congregations grew their average worship attendance. From 2010 to 2011, 262 BWC congregations grew their average worship attendance. This represents a 32 percent increase in the number of congregations growing in worship, reported the Rev. Andy Lunt, chair of the Grow Congregations Team.

Lunt regrets that, overall, there is a decline in worship attendance throughout the conference. However, this decline has been significantly reduced in the last six years. "Average attendance from 2008 to 2009 declined 3 percent; from 2009 to 2010 it declined 2.7 percent. But decline from 2010 to 2011 was cut in half to 1.4 percent. If that trend continues, decline may be reversed in 2012 or 2013," he said.

One way churches are increasing worship attendance is by starting new services that reach out in new and creative ways to the community. In 2011, often in consultation with their Guides from the BWC, the Annapolis Southern Region started five new worship services; the Western Region began seven new worship experiences; six new worship services were started last year in both the Baltimore and the Washington regions.

Many of these services describe themselves as contemporary services that focus on multi-sensory worship.

Prodigal Worship was designed to equip churches to enliven their worship experiences and create liturgical excellence in the context of each church's community. It's a difficult challenge in a culture where many researchers report fewer than 40 percent of Americans attended worship last Sunday.

At the Prodigal Worship conference one of the plenary speakers, the Rev. Leonard Sweet, chair of evangelism at Drew Theological School in New Jersey, shed some light on this phenomenon with a live Google search he shared with the audience.

Projecting Google onto the screen, he typed in "Why are Christians so…" The top three answers that people had requested searches for were "intolerant," "mean," and "crazy." An alphabetical search turned up hundreds of more negative adjectives.

"This is what our culture thinks of us. This is the world we've got," Sweet said. "It's not the moment I'd have picked, nor is it the moment I've been prepared to do ministry in. But this is the moment we've all got and we are called to serve the present age."

In a homily that brought people to their feet, the Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli of St. Matthew's UMC in Bowie, addressed the spirit of decline that threatens to corrode the spirits of some United Methodists, challenging them to put aside the sense that they are self sufficient and able to do all things and, instead, take up the Easter promises of God.

"Clearly things are challenging," she said. Many pastors feel stymied and exhausted and congregants are frustrated. "It's easy to feel that we're getting it all wrong. But what if the church is simply in the crucible of new life? What if God is doing something new through the heat, the pressure, the rapid changes all around and within us?"

Perhaps the church is in this crucible, experiencing the transformation of a "refiner's fire" - the kind talked about in Malachi 3:3, Gaines-Cirelli suggested. She told about a silversmith who was asked about this process of refinement. The silversmith revealed that the refiner sits by the fire the whole time the silver is in the flame, making sure it's not destroyed. When asked, "how do you know when the silver is fully refined," he smiled and said, "Oh, that's easy - when I see my image in it."

For God's image to be fully reflected in us, we must remember that "What is to give light might experience burning," said Gaines-Cirelli.

She suggested that to do this, United Methodists must be willing to experience humility, surrender, failure, sacrifice, unrequited love, risk, doubt and vulnerability. "We can't share what we don't have, what we haven't experienced or what we don't believe," she said. "To be light you have to know and dwell in the light."

Throughout the day, those at the Prodigal Worship event attended two of 18 workshops designed to provide them with spiritual and practical tools to "be the light." They also learned about best practices in a variety of different styles of worship, which were modeled in two worship experiences.

Throughout the experience, presenters encouraged people to realize that worship practices of the past may not be the best to reach out to people in today's culture, in which image and story are the primary means of conveying information.

Sweet encourages those present to do ministry in the church, but also to go out as missionaries into their communities. "God is going to be in this in the future, whether we are or not," he said. "I want to be a part of what God is doing. This mission field needs Jesus; you are all missionaries," he said.

The Rev. Rudy Rasmus, Prodigal's other plenary speaker from St. John's UMC in Houston, Texas, urged those present to come to worship honestly, yield to the Spirit, lavish our gifts upon God and then leave the building to go and serve.

The outcome of worship, he said, is love.

Love, Rasmus said, liberates us. It enables us to find the truth in Rev. Martin Luther King's words, "If you haven't found something worth dying for, you haven't found anything worth living for."

Love is also other-focused. There's no formula to this, he said. "The only way you can be other-focused is to be others-focused."

Love also honors veracity and it engages with the community.

"We can't punctuate beyond love," Rasmus said. "We have to love. Period."

And that, Chaney said, is the heart of worship - putting love into action with praise, prayer and thanksgiving - daring to encounter God and be changed as individuals and communities.

Additional Prodigal resources

• Read the sermon by the Rev. Ginger Gaines Cirelli.
• Read the spoken word reflection by Lynette Weaver.