Debriefing

Six people from our church attended Worship Symposium at Calvin College this January. The group included our pastor, my husband and me. On Friday afternoon I sat next to Amy, one of our church members, before a vesper worship started and we began sharing. She commented that we should all get together and share what we had seen and heard. I mentioned this to our pastor who was all for the idea -- “Any time volunteers are willing to get together and talk about worship, it is a good thing.” So after several emails back and forth we identified the one date in the next two weeks that worked.

As my husband and I talked about how to organize the meeting we thought about writing down all the ideas on a white board but it seemed too much like a meeting where we were trying to get something done instead of a time to share. We talked about making a topic list ahead of time and hitting the topics we were interested in: Prayer, Visual art, Music, Worship, Psalms but again that was maybe too organized for what we were trying to accomplish. At last I decided to just run through the schedule, day by day and see what struck the participant each day. That may not have been the best choice. We began by reviewing Thursday, followed by Friday and by that point we were off on tangents about the things we learned at symposium. I don’t think we ever talked about Saturday. But we did have a great discussion anyway.

So what did we learn? The biggest thing I learned is that gathering to debrief is a great thing – and maybe not having the debrief super-organized helped in the long run. Our discussion quickly focused on a topic I never expected: drama in worship and making better power point presentations. As a group we gathered around these ideas and generated the next steps for our church. We are checking into materials to do a drama at our church. We are talking to the tech committee to see if they are enthused about improving our visuals. We also are now accountable to each other to move this forward. We as a group are accountable for this – not me alone.

The next time I do this, though, I would ask each person before the meeting to think about one thing that struck them during Symposium and begin the meeting with those highlights. Then after giving everyone a chance to speak we could then open the discussion to the whole group. The hour and half was very well spent. Best of all, the ideas we discussed are now owned by the whole group, not by just one person. We are all excited about a couple of new ideas and how we can incorporate that into the life of the church.