Biblio-drama

Guest teacher Dr. Anna from Sweden
"Change is painful"

Dr. Anna has been visiting UTS since 4 to 5 years back. She came every year to teach Creative Liturgy. Though I have seen her several times but this was the first time she came to our class to teach us on how congregation can actively participate in the worship.

She reminds me of one church I used to attend while doing my B.Th at Kerala, South India. It was an Independent Baptist Church in small locality called Chathanoor. There, we do something like biblio-drama but in different way. Of course we started with singing malayalam songs. One of the most interesting experience I had was the clapping of hands. As the song slowly picking up the rythm, our clapping also intensified and wooow by the end of the song, we were singing and clapping like a "bullet train". It was very fast and if you are not strong enough, clapping the whole song through was a challenging task. Now, after the songs, Pastor will pray first than anyone in the congregation, male or female, boys or girls, youth or old, local or international, will follow in prayer one by one as the Spirit lead us. About 4 - 5 peoples will pray. After the prayer was the testimony time. We have good numbers of members sharing their testimonies. Some were very interesting while some are not that interesting.

I thought Dr. Anna taught us something similar in the class like the church in small chathanoor baptist church. But she taught us something new and interesting.

We were divided into 6 different groups and allow us to come up with an expression with our body movement for the Lord's prayer. Though we fumble here and there, I think, we did well in the class. The whole point I am trying to learn from this activity is freedom of the spirit to express our prayer. While, my current church has few "deaf and dumb" members. So I thought this should helps me immediatly! She also taught us how to bring changes in the tradtional concept of Father God and heaven. This can be done through biblio-drama. For instance, we always look up or lift our hands to the skyward while referring to Father in heaven. Now instead of looking up or lifting hands to the skyward, looking around, lifting the hands of someone next to us, etcetera etcetera will bring something change to the atmosphere of the congregation. People will immediatly react to that. Reaction means effective. God is in us and among us then why should we look just to the skyward? This is just a tips of an iceberg! I don't think there should be rules or principles for liturgy to be creative but it is all about freedom of expression which convey the message best to God and to one another.