Excavated Worship

It is possible to orchestrate worship: indeed, this is what happens at church services week-in, week-out. But it is also possible to excavate worship: to uncover worship, or discover it already uncovered, ‘out there’ in the world. And that is what we did (though such discoveries cannot be planned) yesterday. Passing-up on the opportunity to attend a family service, we packed the kids in the car and headed-off to Magna, a Science Adventure Centre in a former steel mill in Rotherham…

First up, sung worship (which regular readers will know is not necessarily my favourite thing)…driving along the Sheffield Parkway, the radio tuned to Radio One's Ibiza Week…Vernon Kaye live from Café Mambo…and Jesus, true to form, partying with the beautiful and damned, lifted up at the centre of the dance floor:

Sometimes I feel like
Throwing my hands up in the air;
I know I can count on you.
Sometimes I feel like
Saying Lord I just don’t care;
But you’ve got the love
I need to see me through.

Sometimes it seems that
The going’s just too rough,
And things go wrong
No matter what I do;
Now and then
I feel that life is just too much,
But you’ve got the love
I need to see me through.

When food is gone,
You are my daily meal;
When friends are gone,
I know my Saviour’s love is real,
Your love is real

Every once in a while
I say Lord I can’t go on;
Every once in a while
I get to feeling blue;
Every once in a while
It seems like I am all alone;
But you’ve got the love
I need to see me through

Occasionally
My thoughts are brave and friends are few;
Occasionally
I cry out Lord what must I do?
Occasionally
I call up Master make me new!
You’ve got the love
I need to see me through.

Sometimes I feel like
Throwing my hands up in the air;
I know I can count on you.
Sometimes I feel like
Saying Lord I just don’t care;
But you’ve got the love
I need to see me through.

“You Got The Love” by The Source, featuring Candi Staton


Next up, an interactive Bible story…the massive ex-steel works at Magna houses four pavilions, each themed to explore one of the classical elements: earth, water, air and fire…visitors approach the Water Pavilion along a steel walkway that bisects a vast pool of water…the walkway is perhaps three feet below the water-level, lined by glass walls over which the water spills into overflow drains, to be pumped back into the pools…the effect is a scaled-down version of walking across the parted Red Sea…we stopped for a moment half way across to recall the story – only to be sprayed by a shower of driving ‘rain’ from sprinklers set overhead! But later on in the day, as my daughter watched me preparing our evening meal, we returned to the experience, thinking about how we felt, and about how the people who walked across the sea might have felt…


We didn’t ‘go to’ church yesterday. But it was a day (already made holy by God) marked as holy, nonetheless.


worship , spirituality , emerging church , church