Tyson House Campus Ministries, Knoxville, TN

About the church

Tyson House Campus Ministry is a joint Lutheran Episcopal campus ministry on the campus of the University of Tennessee – Knoxville.  Located across from a coffee house and a deli, a block from the main library, their common room is offered as a “living rom for the community,” hosting groups and events from a broad spectrum of campus and community constituents. The chapel is home to their worship services, which are on Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Musical repertoire draws on European and World classical and folk traditions, paperless contemplative, as well as pop-informed expressions with strong theological content.

Satellite Liturgy Labs
There is a common misconception in churches, that the young only want guitars playing praise and worship music, the old only want organs playing classical music, and the middle-aged only want music stylistically contemporary to 1970’s light rock. While these assumptions may be true for many, they fail to consider exceptions and disregard that, even more deeply than we enjoy being musically comfortable, we all long for community. Musical resources for building community are being composed all the time. All the resources we need for helping each other’s gifts and longings find expression in worship already exist or are coming into existence. The problem is access.
Satellite Liturgy Labs seeks to move music from where it is to where it’s needed, as well as to overcome relational obstacles to resource sharing. It flips the typical distance-learning model, in which the group is at the educational center, while solitary individuals ‘in the field’ join electronically. Here the group is ‘in the field’, with local teaching resourced by the educational center, while the professor or other clinician participates electronically. It builds community, raises teaching, and extends the educational center’s influence, without loss of face-to-face interaction central to many kinds of learning, anywhere a group can be gathered, locally led, and reached electronically.
We hope the Satellite Liturgy Labs model might be adapted to link other divinity schools and seminaries to congregations and campus ministries, for teaching of caregiving and self-care, scriptural interpretation, church history, peacemaking, and other missional and ministerial skills. This would greatly enhance congregational outreach to surrounding communities, as well as the flow of economic resources toward divinity schools and seminaries resourcing the congregations.

Address:

824 Melrose Place
Knoxville, TN 37916
http://tysonhouse.dioet.org/

Team Members:

John Tirro, Chaplain