I’ve been known to say a couple of contradictory things about leading visual worship:
1. Like a good cat burglar, if a visual worship leader is doing their job, no one will know they’re there.
2. Visual worship will impact people when images are thrown on the screen that subvert their expectations.
It’s hard to subvert an expectation when no one knows you’re there. So how do I reconcile the two?
Last week, at Luminous Project in Nashville, Nate Ragan put it into really simple terms. Paraphrase: “The Visual Worship Leader does two things: Create Environments and Tell Stories. Sometimes they do this at the same time, and sometimes they do the two independently of each other.”
For me, “Creating Environments” is the cat burglar thing. I want to create an environment in the services I’m leading where visuals deepen and enrich worship in ways that, hopefully, go unnoticed by the worshipper. I don’t want their focus to be on what I’m projecting; I want their focus to be on the True Object of their worship.
The “Telling Stories” thing is where I want people to engage with what’s on the screen in such a way that it draws them into a larger story, and gives them new eyes to see God in a fresh way. The images are meant to be noticed, and the worshipper is invited into a new way of seeing and thinking.
I loved the way Nate Ragan and Stephen Proctor did both at Luminous, using some of The Work of the People‘s Visual Liturgies. Here are a few they used:
Telling Stories: Psalm 107 and The Merton Prayer
Creating Environments: Doves Loop and Rejoice Loop-1 (Note: these are longer than 30 seconds, and are meant to have some abstract components).
How do you create environments and tell stories through visual worship?
