Satellite Liturgy Labs: A Circle of Worship in the Midst of Many
By Justin Kosec, M.Div. ‘13
In the heart of the campus of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville—a university of 27,000 students in one of Tennessee’s largest cities—stands Tyson House, an oasis for worship and prayer. Just before 6 p.m. on any given Sunday, the common room fills with the buzz of conversation and the smells of a home-cooked meal. Familiar faces greet new students who have found the campus ministry on their own or come at a friend’s invitation.
Rev. John Tirro, the chaplain for this joint Lutheran-Episcopal ministry, greets the group with a warm “The Lord be with you.” He blesses the evening meal, and then all eat a hearty supper prepared by one of Tyson House’s eight partner congregations.
Sometime later, piano music from the adjoining chapel slides into the hum of dinnertime conversation. Soon other instruments join and all are called to worship. The timing of the transition is liquid, natural. It happens when it happens. Gradually everyone forms an irregular circle within the rectangular chapel. Worship is lovely, sparse, human, filled with silence and the smell of burning sage. Students, professors, and folks from local congregations sing and listen and pray.
After worship, after Holy Communion, the meal continues with dessert in the common room. One Sunday these transitions may be seamless, on another a bit ragged. But this is Tyson House, where ragged edges are welcome: the movement from world to word and back again, cycles of transition bound by fellowship, food, and faith.
When Tirro, Nyein, and teammate Emilie Casey delivered their introductory presentation at the ISM Congegations Project, they described Tyson House as one circle in the midst of many other circles. The community and programs of Tyson House fit together like a series of “intersecting, intertwining, interconnected circles,” they said. And this describes this ministry’s relationship to its partner congregations as well.
The congregations that support this ministry take turns preparing and serving the weekly meal. Their members also converge on Tyson House for service days, installing floors and painting walls, and some also serve alongside students on the Tyson House board. In turn, Tyson House students work in local congregations as volunteers and lay ministry staff. It’s a relationship of “constant engagement” that transcends a budgetary line-item, Tirro explains.
But something beyond community engagement has also developed among those who worship at Tyson House on Sunday evenings. A sense of intimacy, a welcome space for silence, and deft musical and liturgical leadership from Tirro have led many worshipers beyond familiarity to discovery. Tyson House worship is at once recognizable and foreign; it occurs in the intersections among liturgical traditions, accessible songcraft, full embodiment, and honest vulnerability.
Worship works at Tyson House. And that’s part of the problem.
Folks who come to Tyson House from its partner congregations recognize that worship there works in a remarkable way, and some are asking how to take it home with them. Likewise, the Tyson House team recognizes the continuous challenge church leaders face as they search for new worship resources that will work where they are. So Tirro, Nyein, and Casey came to the ISM Congregations Project with a simple—but also enormously challenging—question. How might this ministry find a way of sharing its worship and musical resources, moving them from where they work to where they are needed?
This question demands attention to the fundamentally contextual nature of Christian worship. It also means fostering relationships that can foster life-giving worship—not only among individuals or from pastor to pastor, but also between different church communities.
Sensing that it is well-positioned to develop such relationships, Tyson House is developing one possible approach to sharing resources, through what it calls “satellite liturgy labs.”
Satellite Liturgy Labs
Satellite liturgy labs are retreats to be offered during the quiet periods that open up after Christmas and Easter, when many pastors and musicians are planning ahead for the next season of worship. Focused on selected topics related to worship, each “lab” would share the wealth of resources at Tyson House, including songs written for worship by Tirro (who came to ministry after a career as a chart-topping songwriter and musician) and gifted students like Nyein (who served both as Peer Ministry Coordinator and Director of Music and Liturgy before his 2010 graduation from UT-Knoxville). Through these retreats, Tyson House could be “a teaching resource when it comes to finding, choosing, and incorporating music repertoire,” says Casey, a 2013 UT-Knoxville graduate who served as Peer Ministry Coordinator.
Such teaching would not come solely from Tyson House; each lab would aim for the spirit of mutual sharing that characterizes the ministry’s relationship with their partner congregations. Further, each lab would invite one or more field-leading experts on worship or music to join the conference over Skype or Facetime. Tirro hopes this model could “flip the typical distance-learning model,” where learners gather in a distant academic center of learning. Instead, through technology, the “experts” could join practitioners in the field.
When John, Emilie, and Zack shared this vision during the Congregations Project Summer Seminar, participants encouraged the Tyson House team to open the Sattelite Liturgy Labs to churches throughout their region, or even nationwide, as well. One day, perhaps, the project could expand to include many churches, or be replicated on the regional level through synods or diocese. Yet Tirro expressed a more modest hope for the fledgling project: to share with the partners in mission with whom they are already so thoroughly intertwined.
“Grace-full” Work
When asked to describe Tyson House, Tirro portrays a community that is “nestled in prayer and enacted prayer, in loving actions and gifts lovingly given: congregations working together to supply the place, to care for it, to provide home-cooked meals every Sunday evening; students working with the chaplain to provide a ministry open to all.”
In many ways, satellite liturgy labs are an outgrowth of this philosophy, only extended to the natural heart of congregation life: worship.
As satellite liturgy labs tackle big questions about Christian worship—what can translate from one context to another, for example—the answers are bound to seem a bit messy. But this might just be what fills the project with grace. Nyein says this is not unusual at Tyson House: “sometimes people don’t know where to go for communion. And sometimes the liturgy in general is a little rocky. But it’s always graceful—full of grace.”
“Tyson House has a wonderful and vibrant worship life,” says Casey, “but we’re not the only ones with experiences to share. Our goal is to initiate a culture where churches come together with their own worship questions, hopes, and challenges. Where churches set aside competition and fear, and allow themselves to be vulnerable to learn or teach something new.”