ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 85.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> NICK: I'm still not sure I know how to analyze my own congregation�s cultural dimensions in a way that would be most beneficial. Please help me, if you will. >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: To analyze one's own people in the place where you work is a difficult task. But maybe I can give you an approach to that, how to analyze the control dimensions of the people you work with. I'm going to give you kind of a list of dimensions here. You could make a much longer list than I'm doing. But kind of give you an approach that, even without further instruction, you could try. First of all, think about the education level of the people who come on Sunday morning, and think of the percentage of those who are, in a sense, either finished eighth grade, finished college, or have some additional higher education degree. More and more people, in a sense, are trained in society at these higher levels. And this can vary considerably from congregation to congregation. So it it�s an eighth grade education level you're dealing with, you know there are some business with poetry. There's some business with literature references. There's some patterns in society around the arts and history that they just won't be acquainted with. If people have gone through college, they often have been broadened by a curriculum to be aware of more things. And if they have specialized beyond that, or they've traveled a lot, you actually have more things to reference in the service. So you can think of the educational level. We can also think of age. This is the second one. Obviously, if preschool children are there, the most they can do is participate in a few words that they've learned that are not based on reading anything. As they move through their grades, they become able to enter more of this so like about the fourth or fifth grade, they're able to kind of read the same text their parents can. Age factors also have to do with kind of how they live life so that when you get past that college time when they're often living away from home and seldom there in their home congregation, now you can think post that period of the young adults who are starting to have work, social relations, and they may be in your midst. How many people like this do you have? They're looking at life as a future. Those who come with a family already have part of this future with them. They�re oriented to the children and their needs, in many cases. If the children have left home and are mid career, they're thinking of some of the things that may have to do with advancement and work toward greater opportunity or even recreational things that are important to them. And as they get to the end of their career, they're looking at retirement questions. Often, they want a kind of a quiet life with not too much change. And if you have people who are still coming to church, even though they have little mobility because of age, their way of living often will not include any evening services. So you think through the educational level, the kind of age level, the percentages you have, and you may actually want to orient toward your largest group or groups. Now, obviously, you can think about ethnic. I touched on a little bit of European differences that I've observed between Mediterranean people and those who live near the Arctic Circle. But Asian mindset and value system often has the elders and those who have lived ahead of you in a family as important people. Whereas, another group don't think this way about it. They also may have a really strong family orientation. The Hispanic pattern may be somewhat similar, although, now as the Spanish-speaking person, say, a migrant worker from Mexico, may actually be moving from community to community, or they may settle down and begin to become part of your economic region. Now African-American has a special story attached to his coming to the United States, which is not a particularly beautiful or glorious one. But with the civil rights movement, they have found a place and a way to gain access to the economy and education that was formerly often prevented. They have, often, a whole social way and a use of language that's different. The European heritage is more common among us, even if they're a recent immigrant, that could be a different story than one hundred or one hundred fifty years ago. So you can look at the different subgroups you have and how much of this type is represented and begin to understand them as people, to do background reading, to observe more carefully and see these patterns at work that you can use in your designing and selections around worship. You can look at the type of work people do. If they are manual laborers, so-called blue collar workers, they often don't want to use strong poetic words that�s kind of outside their normal way of doing things. If they're white collar workers, they may do a lot with the power of the computer and the computer-generated image and materials and layout for print that is very attractive, may become very important for them. That will alter some of the things you do, even in presenting a bulletin. If they are people who work from home, they don't have the same travel requirements, and they view things somewhat differently. They're able to kind of protect children and others from some outside influences. And then some of those homes that have two workers cannot schedule anything so time becomes a huge factor to them. And when the services are, how long they last, those expectations become a key factor when they choose to be there or not or how to use it. You can think of where you are. An inner city where people can walk up to your door from the community is a different place than in a rural community where you drive to a church building that has a long tradition, maybe, in that community. People may find it hard to cross certain barriers because of that. The type of household you have: is this mainly a single person living alone? A single person living together with another person in order to save money? Is this a married couple? Is this a second marriage with all that it implies? Is it a spouse who is living beyond the life of their former partner in life so that they�re alone? The single parent kind of family has its own problems. So you start to look for the language and procedures that fit with them. You can also think about what denominations do some of these Christians come from. You have a whole spectrum. It won't happen very often, Eastern Orthodox. There's a high sense of mystery and religious rite that goes in their way of doing things. The Roman Catholics have a similar tradition to Lutherans in the ancient liturgies and in having the means of grace and priesthood or ministry. If they come from the reformed background, there is going to be differences in doctrines, especially around the means of grace. The evangelicals often don't have a strong interest in the intellectual side of things, but a strong interest in that that appears in the Bible. So with that kind of group, it often helps to put the Bible passage reference next to something in the service because it�s meaningful to them that it comes from the Bible and is a quote. Then you're Pentecostal oriented people are taught a way that has no need for a means of grace. The Spirit comes directly. They may be actually leaving that because they find it inadequate and not fulfilling, and they're learning to use liturgy and rite and lectionary and printed prayers as a tool that's very helpful to them. So when you start taking all of these factors that go to education and age and ethnic background, the type of work they do, the kind of place they live, the household they live in, you can make adjustments around your service. Now, here are some principles I discovered. The old and the young appreciate repetition. What is repeated is easy to use, and they're prepared to use it. Now, this can be certain actions. It could be certain repeated prayers like the Lord's Prayer will not have an alternate version. It will be one they can use from memory and certain psalms. The ethnic will often appreciate, in an extreme way, something that comes from their heritage that they learned to value at an earlier time before they joined your group. So this should be, somehow, in the mix of what you do in order to let them know they're included by touching their heritage. The denominational mix can be handled in a similar way. There may be song types, say, if they�re from the south and the Bible Belt, the gospel song tradition may be strong. If you can find a few of these that actually do what you need to do in the service and speak it well, that will be a good connection for them. So you have this mix to work with. Strategy is kind of my final point. You can think now, what is my strategy? Is this congregation allowing the dominant group to decide everything? Maybe that's been our most frequent way of doing it. Perhaps it�s better to think of taking turns. So if I have a young age group and an old age group, I need to employ their preferences from time to time to include them, kind of like taking turns. I might think, also, of kind of a third strategy which is percentage. I'm going to look for songs if I have forty percent of my congregation is sixth grade and under, I'm going to look for songs that engage them more directly. I'm going to make that a certain percentage of the songs I sing, maybe even close to the amount they are in the group say they�re 40 percent, 40percent of my songs are going to be songs that they can participate in well. And then their parents, maybe, that's another group and so forth. So you think percentages. Finally, my last point is if you want to the whole group to own it, because all the other things are kind of like sharing act, maybe, this corrugation needs to invent some musical solution or a way to do this particular part that is their own so that it doesn't belong to anybody else out there, but it is an invention of theirs for their purposes. And we frequently see this. In the congregation I'm at, there's a little ceremony called hanging of the greens. I never heard of this thing before, but this is the second Sunday in advent, a powerful kind of design they put together in a way to do Advent. And it doesn't belong to anybody else. You can't claim, well, it's his, it's hers, it's his group, it's her group, but it belongs to everybody who comes to the congregation because it�s new. Sometimes, when it comes off the shelf that wasn�t used for centuries, it is in that kind of a new category so that becomes useful because nobody has been using it. They don't own it. That's kind of how you can analyze and begin to sort out what really fits the folks you work with. It's hard work. There are no quick or easy answers. There's no perfect recipe that anybody can give you.