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Let Story Form Your Worship: Old Testament and lectionary dramas
According to a Barna Group study, about 62% of Protestant churches in the United States use live drama in worship services. Churches say they include drama in worship to:
- present slices of life that lower people’s defenses
- allow actors to use God-given talents
- engage people in looking to God for answers
- win the lost
- communicate biblical truth
- provide an insightful yet often hilarious counterpoint to the sermon
- manage emotions in ways that draw people in
Meanwhile, surveys show that Bible literacy continues to drop, even among Christians, according to Gallup, Barna, and surveys at Wheatonand Seattle Pacific University.
Among many excellent models, two theater professors help students produce worship dramas based on biblical texts. Jeff Barker revives the tradition of presenting Old Testament narratives as plays. John Steven Paul dramatizes lectionary readings. Both say their methods will work in nearly any kind of church.
God is still speaking
Slice of life worship dramas may strike you as more relevant than stories of what God did millennia ago. Yet enacted Bible stories often surprise worshipers into realizing that God is still speaking.
“There’s a difference between hearing a solo storyteller and seeing a Bible story acted out. Putting the text on its feet puts the Bible in the present. But for years I was hung up on the past tense nature of the Bible,” says Jeff Barker, theatre professor at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa.
Two things shifted his “old old story” perception. He experienced traditional kabuki theatre in Japan. And in 2002, Tom Boogaart, a professor at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, shared his theory that Old Testament historical stories are written in play form. Since then, Barker and his students have been performing the Hebrew Bible in simple and elaborate ways.
“In kabuki, I saw men playing male and female roles. Offside there’s always a singer and instrumentalist. I learned that person was the narrator. I started to think about how in the Old Testament, there’s always a narrator and character voices,” Barker says.
In kabuki, at least one character speaks directly to the audience. To modern ears, this feels odd. But this ancient dramatic device was common till the 1800s, when realism came into fashion.
“Narrators are valuable for stories that need to make jumps in time and space—especially in worship settings where other activities segue in and out of the storytelling. And the narrator can acknowledge the congregation’s participation in worship,” Barker says.
Stage it to see it
There’s another similarity between kabuki and original Old Testament texts. The English language has up to a dozen ways of using verb tenses to precisely pinpoint an action in time. Japanese, however, uses past tense more ambiguously and doesn’t have a future tense. Hebrew has no tenses at all—no past, present, or future.
Still, we often read English translations of the Hebrew Bible as if all God’s actions were completed centuries ago.
“We tend to read what is familiar into the unfamiliar,” Boogaart explains. He quotes Abraham Joshua Heschel’s caution that “what impairs our sight are habits of seeing.”
Boogaart spent years “trying to ‘see’ the group of biblical texts that contain the people of Israel’s remembrances of their ancestors, commonly called stories or narratives.”
He notes that our culture transmits essential information through written documents. But most Israelites couldn’t read or write. “They held information in memory and transmitted it through ritual and performance,” he says.
“Dialogue demands voices, and, once voiced, the characters are alive again,” Boogaart says. The narrator is central in biblical texts. He or she reveals the presence of God, in part by empathizing with characters. The narrator “mediates between the action and the audience, drawing the audience out of their time and into the time of action.”
At a recent Calvin Symposium on Worship, Barker’s students performed his Elisha play, “Jars of Oil,” based verbatim on 2 Kings 4:1-7. A single storyteller spoke the narrative lines. Separate characters spoke the words of Elisha, the woman, and her son.
“Elisha is saying, ‘Here’s what you should do.’ The text doesn’t show her filling the jars with oil. But theater has this ability to show two times at once. So, at the same time in the play, you see Elisha talking to the woman—and you see forward as the woman and her sons fill borrowed jars with oil,” Barker explained.
Meanwhile, the narrator stood near the (invisible) jars with one arm up and one down, so it seemed oil was flowing from God down into the jars.
After the brief play, Boogaart said, “A common biblical theme is that all power and love and glory begin with God and spill over to all the world. In the Elisha play, the woman starts with an almost empty jar, yet gradually fills so many jars—all by the secret miraculous providence of God—that she can pay off her creditors.”
Barker added, “You don’t get the expansiveness of what Tom is talking about just from reading the text. But when you put it on the stage, you see it.”
Recover a full concept of worship
Barker says his Old Testament performances depend on resources every church has—the Bible and people in the pews. “Almost every church on the planet can do the texts in this way. You just need some platform space, a mike, and a drum or rhythm instrument to mark scene changes,” Barker says.
Just as his students do, your church drama team can begin with a translation meant for speaking, perhaps the King James Version orContemporary English Version, though the NIV works, too.
Look at the interplay between images and scenes. Have characters mime simple actions while a miked narrator reads the text. You don’t need costumes. It doesn’t matter which gender plays which character. Someone who feels secure as a singer can hum or vocalize—no words necessary—to convey dramatic flow and climax.
Barker and Boogaart believe that recovering Old Testament texts as plays will help churches deepen their theology…and their concept of worship.
They say that too many people equate worship with music. Or they think the only part of worship that matters is the sermon. Barker urges churches to integrate Scripture, story, music, and image in more ways, including drama and enacted prayer, in worship.
“ ’Bible story’ has become synonymous with children’s Sunday school. Adults, it seems, can bypass the story and go straight to the moral. God’s work in the lives of his people today is good news that remains unspoken and thus unremembered in many of our churches,” he says.
Base Worship Drama on the Lectionary
In contrast to Jeff Barker, who often presents Old Testament passages as brief plays or mimes in place of or during the sermon text, John Steven Paul writes liturgical plays long enough to replace the sermon.
“I have been writing liturgical plays—designed to fit into worship services like sermons—for 18 years,” says Paul, a theatre professor and director of the Soul Purpose drama ministry at Valparaiso University, in Valparaiso, Indiana.
He bases a play on a lectionary reading but writes it so that the congregation “hears echoes or allusions to the other readings and psalm for the day.”
Inspired by the lectionary
Paul’s choice to stage lectionary dramas flows out of his heritage. He grew up in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, married a Roman Catholic, and teaches at the largest independent Lutheran university in the U.S.
He’s used to hearing the Bible each Sunday—“mainly in chunks.” The lectionary tradition lets you hear, sing, or speak four passages each week. But Paul notes that if you don’t also read the Bible on your own, you might not grasp the stories or understand the Bible as a whole.
“It always bugged me that actors weren’t as welcome to contribute their art to liturgy as musicians and banner makers have been. I think there’s been more openness to drama in evangelical churches than on the Lutheran and Catholic side,” Paul said at a recent Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing workshop.
Writing lectionary drama is a practical way to fit drama “unannounced, as seamlessly as possible, as a reading or sermon,” into highly liturgical churches.
“Barbara Brown Taylor has called the liturgy a road map back to God. It’s a neat way of thinking about liturgical drama. God comes to us, calls us in worship, heals us, forgives us, enables us, empowers us,” Paul said.
Unlike some playwrights, Paul says his head isn’t filled with stories. He’s not a natural joker or storyteller. He gets his inspiration for non-liturgical plays from the newspaper and listening to people talk.
He finds that using the lectionary as a story source is also a good way to cross boundaries out of liturgical drama into other drama.
In about one of five performances, Soul Purpose presents a lectionary drama in a non-lectionary church. “It’s liberating, because we can perform any play that seems appropriate,” Paul says. The plays seem to work well whether or not churches follow a set cycle of Scripture readings.
Internalizing Bible stories
Paul likes how lectionary plays serve his students and the church. His playwriting workshops start with very close readings of lectionary texts. Students repeat readings till they really understand a passage’s setting, emotions, and meaning. They use the New Revised Standard Version, and Paul asks students who know Hebrew or Greek to contribute their insights.
The group identifies various voices in a passage and applies classic theater techniques, such as panning, pulling back, framing, and posing a central question to keep the plot interesting.
These techniques even work for lectionary passages that aren’t narrative, such as the Beatitudes or the Prophets. “Pulling back from Matthew 5:1-12 helped us see Jesus telling his disciples who the really blessed people are…and that they’re on the non-blessed side, even though they’re with him,” Paul says.
Next workshop students write dialogue to overcome what Paul calls “a dehydrated presentation of Bible characters. They don’t say much. You have to fill it in to humanize characters and create dialogue.”
Paul says, “The actors come to understand the Bible stories in a profound way, because they explore and internalize the stories' action and character. They contribute to the worship life of the church with their art. They find a source of spiritual support from the other members of the company with whom they tell the stories.
“The people in the congregation are engaged and surrounded by the Bible stories in new ways that appeal to all their senses. They also see the way in which these young people are committed to communicating the Gospel in these creative ways.”
Drawing in worshipers
Paul knows that, by its nature, theater can polarize a group intoactors and audience. His lectionary dramas use several methods to overcome such polarization in worship.
He stages a play so the audience feels in the middle of the story, not leaning back, looking up at the pulpit. In “A Fish Story,” based on Luke 5:1-11, a church balcony becomes a boat. Simon, James, and John lean over the balcony, straining to hold onto a net (an invisible one) stuffed with fish. Paul confides, “By the end of the play, it’s the people in pews who will be caught in this play.”
Paul’s lectionary dramas often use humor, not to divert but to alienate. “When people are alienated, they think. When they’re awash in emotion, they cry. That’s okay, but there needs to be thinking, too.”
He chooses simple images to help worshipers connect with the story. “The Hard Part” is based on two stories about leprosy, Naaman’s healing in 2 Kings 5 and Jesus healing a leper in Mark 1:40-45. (These readings fall on the 6th Sunday after Epiphany in Year B of the three-year lectionary cycle.)
Lepers in “The Hard Part” wear a single latex glove and aren’t allowed in the temple for ritual cleansing. Paul says the contemporary image of a glove is stunningly effective in making worshipers think about non-leprous situations that make them feel scared or alone.
If it’s okay with the church, Naaman and the entire cast, including the lepers, wash their hands in the church’s baptismal font. “It’s a way for church furniture to reinforce ideas about baptism and healing,” he explains.
Every play ends with a song. “The Hard Part” ends with “Healer of Our Every Ill.” Paul says, “When actors and audience sing together, it unifies people.” And this unification helps worshipers easily segue into whatever comes next in the worship service.
Learn More
Download Jeff Barker’s Old Testament play scripts and watch video clips, including the “Jars of Oil” play and an enacted prayer scene. Get tips on doing enacted prayer in your church. Go to Barker’s blog to read his new book on the art of story and worship, Quiet Demons and Screaming Peter Pan.
Book a summer performance of “Sioux Center Sudan” by Northwestern College students. See results of a Vertical Habits grant Barker used to help story form the worship at Trinity Reformed Church in Orange City, Iowa.
Listen as John Steven Paul explains how to turn lectionary readings into dramas. Download Paul’s liturgical drama The Wedding, first performed at a wedding. Book Soul Purpose drama ministry to be part of your worship service and give a drama workshop.
Request a catalog of lectionary dramas by writing to John Steven Paul, Valparaiso University, 1401 Linwood Avenue, Valparaiso, IN 46383. “You may then order free perusal copies of plays in which you’re interested. If you decide to produce, there is a one-time royalty fee,” he says.
Attend an event to learn more about doing worship drama in church:
- Christians in Theatre Arts National Networking Conference, June 13-16, 2007, at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois
- Embodying Ministry! Moving Sundays for Pastors, the Public, and Performers, July 12-14, 2007, at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan
- Network of Biblical Storytellers Annual Festival Gathering, August 1-4, 2007, at Simpsonwood Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia
Study theater resources recommended by Jeff Barker and John Steven Paul:
- Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic by Nicholas Wolterstorff, especially the chapter “The Responsible Servant”
- “Christ in the Concrete City” and Tell It with Trumpets: Three experiments in drama and evangelismby the late playwright and Anglican priest Philip W. Turner
- Craddock Stories and Preaching as Storytelling (three part audio workshop) by Fred Craddock
- Dramatists’ Toolkit and Solving Your Script by Jeffrey Sweet
- Improvising Real Life: Personal Story in Playback Theatre by Jo Salas
Read Barna Group research on how Bible reading frequency affects Christian behaviors. Consider the power of biblical content as you choose dramas to use in worship. Read a thoughtful essay on biblical illiteracy among Christian youth. Brian Singer-Towns, general editor of The Catholic Youth Bible, explains how to move from biblical literacy to biblical spirituality.
Check out Calvin Institute of Christian Worship drama resources and Reformed Worship stories on liturgical drama. Order dramatic songs, scripts, CDs, and devotionals for drama teams from Lillenas Drama.
Browse related stories about biblical storytelling, visual arts in liturgy, and worship aesthetics.
Start a Discussion
Talk about using liturgical drama in worship.
- Describe your experiences with seeing (or performing) liturgical drama in worship. In what ways did it add or detract from how you understood a Bible passage or felt connected to God or fellow worshipers?
- In an average year at your church, how many worship services include drama? What are the pros and cons of adding drama to your worship services?
- Jeff Barker and John Steven Paul both recall feeling, as teens, that the church had no use for their acting talents. Barker says, “I never heard ‘Play a new play unto the Lord,’ only ‘Sing a new song to the Lord.’ ” Does your church follow a hierarchy of which gifts are valued and used in worship?
- How would you rate your congregation’s Bible literacy? How might you use worship drama so that Bible stories begin to shape your worshipers’ lives?
Share Your Wisdom
What is the best way you’ve found to use liturgical drama for Scripture reading, sermons, or other places in worship services?
- Did you find a conference, workshop, book, multimedia series, or other resources that helped you build a biblical drama ministry?
- Did you create a worship or education series to help people experience a certain genre of worship drama? Which genres have been easiest to implement in your congregation?
- Have you developed a grid to help you identify various places in a worship service or Sundays in the church year where drama would work well?
Comments
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Heather Taft | Posted Aug 15, 2011 03:22 AM
Great article and great thoughts in here. Thanks