Ministry Moments: U2Charist


For those of you who didn’t know, I worked this year for my field placement at an Episcopal Church: Church of the Holy Nativity. It’s amazing how much change a small parish can make when they have around 110 people at worship on Sundays.

The U2Charist. These worship services have become a fad for Episcopal and Lutheran churches and we weren’t ashamed to try one for ourselves. The U2 catalogue contains the anthems that could make up hymnals for the faith of many Christians. Using them in worship seems as natural as using Psalms in prayer. Aimée (my boss) and I went to a different U2Charist service last spring and thought we could do one at CHN if we built up to it. We did it.

The evening was a MAJOR success. We had over 180 people and the attendees donated over $3000 for our two charities: Episcopal Relief and Development and Opportunity International.

U2Charists can happen successfully with little planning; but, as with all ministry, the more work that goes into them the more meaning can come out. How much planning did it take?
Aimée foreshadowed it to the church an entire year in advance. Back when I was just visiting the church as an attendee (but late enough we knew I’d be back this year as an intern), Aimée had the church dream up future special events they wanted to do. She planted the U2Charist and it stuck. At least two of the volunteers on the planning team had been mulling it over since that announcement!

But just giving a year’s advance warning wasn’t enough to help our congregation understand why we do a different worship service. The messages of many of the U2 songs have to marinate before people can draw the links for themselves between the mission they hear on Sundays, the music they listen to on Tuesdays, and the special worship experience we had on that Friday.

So we started the education process early; five months early, to be exact. Back in January, Terry Johnson and I led and organized the “Living into the Millennium Development Goals” adult education series. We split the goals for one every other week – with intro and final reflection sessions – so our congregation could command and conquer them in the full goal of eliminating the world’s extreme hunger and poverty — or at least know how we could try …

I was particularly proud of the reflection process we spurred in people at the beginning of the series. We handed out labels with statistics and reflection questions so people could put them on whatever they normally read and think about the goals at times beyond Sunday mornings. Think of it: have a magazine you peruse at the breakfast table but one author in there seems like he just tarnishes the luster of that literary gem? Well, cover it up with the stickers! Have those extra blank spaces on your refrigerator calendar just because the month didn’t end on the last day of the week? Well, cover them up with stickers!

The series lasted for five months. We tapped lay leaders to help lead sessions on most of the goals. For instance, one of our members who’s a leader at a Chicagoland literacy non-profit led our session on Universal Primary Education. One of our members who works at Argonne National Laboratory teamed up with another member who does landscaping to lead the session on Environmental sustainability. The training was happening, and the church was preparing itself for the worship service, and more importantly, what will happen after the worship service.

The plug-n-play team of eight members showed up when they could, took on responsibilities as they felt able, and pitched in to plan every detail of the event. They deliberated on meta-event questions, like “who should the money go to?” and “what are the resources in scripture and in the songs that are the backbone of the worship service?” They on micro-event questions, like “is there a way to move the first four rows of pews out so that people can sing and dance but everyone can still see the communion table?” and even better, “what should we do if we get too many people? Do we have overflow areas and ways to still include them?”

So our planning started with two requirements: 1) listening to recorded music could get lame and boring, so we needed a live cover band, and 2) the U2Charist would happen at the end of the spring at a date that worked for the cover band. Oh, and there was another blessing for the service – an offering had to be taken to support work on the MDGs (apparently this was part of the reason U2 let these services happen without charging royalties).

The cover band turned out to be GREAT. They called Elevation and they band members are from the Chicago and St. Louis areas. The lead singer, “Danno” (real name = Daniel) knows how to work a crowd and knows how to make the music fun. I was running the on-screen lyrics and graphics for the group and knew the songs well enough I didn’t need to look at the group continually, which turned out to be full of surprises, like when I looked up and Danno was at the top of the loft singing with the youth. Or like at the end when I looked up and he was in the middle of a conga line snaking its way around the sanctuary.

The night was capstoned in a comment I heard from one of CHN’s most energetic parishioners. She went up to Danno, and didn’t say, but shouted at him: “I don’t know a single one of these songs, but that was awesome! This is one of the most exciting nights of my life.”

And then she gave him a huge hug. But it turns out that it wasn’t the last time she would see the group. This was a Friday night, but then they were performing the following night at a nearby town’s Irish Pub and the next week they were performing at Navy Pier. She took her daughter and granddaughters and at the Navy Pier gig, Danno even called one of the granddaughters on stage to sing with him. The whole “epic” nature of it is kind of funny.

Oh, and I HAVE to mention why we had such great pictures for the event. One of my high school youth group members at CHN, Lucas, was willing to use my camera after I shoved it onto him. He did marvelously!

MDG 1: Extreme Hunger and Poverty

I swear: one of these adult education MDG sessions at Church of the Holy Nativity, I’M NOT GOING TO FORGET MY CAMERA!!! The scene is set for the perfect lifelong-learner shot: the lighting’s decent in the morning, the faces are bright and anxious. I just keep forgetting the second-most important piece of equipment. (The most important, after all, is the photographer’s brain — NOT the camera!).

This Sunday the Youth of the church led the session and taught about extreme poverty and hunger. They did a great job of mixing up the story (in a good way!) by alternating between their own reflections of post-hurricane work in New Orleans, the global and local stats on poverty, and testimonials and advertisements for their annual 30-hour famine. (They’re fasting on March 7th and 8th; it’s coming right up, CHN!)

Probably my biggest “wake-up!” moment in the session was Eve Lebaron’s description of Six Flags. She painted a verbal picture of the amusement park in New Orleans as an abandoned mess – the roller coasters have moss and grass growing on them. What a tragic image of the death of fun! But it illustrates the point: for the systematically hungry and impoverished, fun isn’t even an issue … it’s an impossibility.

Here are the labels for our journals. The first is an insert for the back inside cover (or wherever you choose to put it!) with some great ways to engage. Even though they’re mostly monetary options, they’re still great causes:

  • Episcopal Relief and Development – http://www.er-d.org – the Church’s outreach organization, focused on immediate disaster response and long-term sustainability.
  • World Community Grid – http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org – Donate your computer’s idle time to aid in socially-conscious scientific research.
  • End of Poverty book site – http://www.earth.columbia.edu/pages/endofpoverty/index/ – A website with research, practical tips, and a hopeful outlook on the future from Jeffery Sachs, an economic adviser to Kofi Annan in the formulation of the MDGs.
  • Kiva – http://www.kiva.org – A micro-lending network loaning money only to those poor enough; similar to the work of 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank.


Millennium Development Goals

I try not to admit this, but I “fly by the seat of my pants” more than I should. This morning I led the Adult Forum (adult education) with Terry Johnson at my church. We’re starting a three-month series on the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. I didn’t know exactly what I’d say, but I knew Terry and I would have trouble limiting all we’d planned. The 45-minute session was way too short for the wealth of the MDGs … which is why we have nine more Sundays to work on them.

I didn’t know what I’d say, but I did know what we’d hand out. Our series is trying to make the MDGs practical and inescapable. We want to constantly be thinking of them and always have ways we can act (and think of new ways to act!). So we’re using journals. They’re a little low-tech — perhaps even a little old-fashioned — but these journals are great!

CHN has taught me the magic of labels. The parish forwent creating permanent name tags by using disposable, one-use address labels. People don’t have to worry about turning in their name tag before they leave or remembering to bring it back the following Sunday. They just stick a new label on each week. Well, the same logic works for our curriculum. We didn’t want to create content or worksheets or anything that was formulaic; none of those would have worked. People think, write, and reflect in different space. If their journals were to make an impact, the structure needed to be customizable. Enter the sticky labels.

We started with the cover. The bland non-dimensional images from Episcopal Relief and Development weren’t going to work. Last Thursday I wasted two hours as I held my head and hoped for Photoshop inspiration. (I’m sure it looked pretty funny to Bettie working in the office beside me). Then came this logo. 20 minutes later, I left CHN just after the last journal cover printed.

I love the logo: broken world; shadowed countries in the “2/3 world”; hopeful highlight below the borders. Hopefully the logo works. 😀

In addition to the cover, they each got “stickers” with the eight MDGs and these reflection questions:

More to come … and I’m excited. As Terry said at one point in the session: “Adam, they’re salivating!” Our congregation is so ready for this … !!!