Nathan Longfield on Embodiment, Creativity and Trauma-informed Worship

Nathan Longfield 00:00:04  

When we scheduled the woodworking workshop, I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this will be a space of healing,” necessarily. But it was. So to kind of see how God works in those spaces when we do engage our bodies in a prayerful way and in a playful way was really cool and also really informative just to how we do ministry.

From the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, you’re listening to Public Worship and the Christian Life, a podcast that amplifies people and stories that share wisdom and wonder about Christian public worship. I’m Kristen Verhulst, producer and host. In this season’s episodes, I share conversations with project directors who participated in the Institute’s Vital Worship, Vital Preaching grants program, an initiative that provides funds and encouragement for worshiping communities across Canada and the United States in order to design and engage year-long projects that connect public worship with Christian discipleship and faith formation.

In this episode, I talk with Nathan Longfield, pastor of Emmaus Reformed Church, a newer worshiping community in Holland, Michigan, where he led a project that explored embodiment and trauma-informed practices to more deeply engage in worship as a congregation and community. Welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Nathan. I’m so glad we could talk today on the podcast.  

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Would you tell us about your grant project? What were you hoping to do?  

Yeah, of course. So the church that we got this with is called Emmaus Church and we’re a newer worshiping community. We’ve been doing things for a little over two years. And one of our big focuses is hospitality and just being in life together. And we’re focused on the de-churched community— bringing in those who have been hurt by the church, who have stepped away from faith—and doing things maybe a little bit differently or kind of creatively in our rhythm and practice. So birthed out of that was our grant, which was focused on embodied worship, which we took as kind of thinking about how all of our faith and our worship experience isn’t just something we do with our heads or our speaking—we don’t just stand up and sit down with music or whatever—but how all of ourselves enters into worship. We lean into the Hebrew idea of nephesh: We’re an entire being. We’re not just a body or a soul coming to worship God, but all of us enters into worship and enters into community together. And I think a piece of that too, and how it serves our particular ministry and mission, is for people in the de-churched population, engaging in faith in this embodied way, in this new way for many people, is really helpful, especially for those who are healing from trauma, that’s an embodied thing, and so healing and entering into worship in this embodied way is really helpful; it also serves to do that. That was also one of our learnings in the grant. is how effective it was in that in ways we didn't always expect. We kind of tackled embodiment through a lot of ways. We did scriptural enactment. We did embody disciplines in different ways. One service we did an enactment of the Genesis 2 creation narrative, and then actually went and, like God did when God created, went into the dirt. We planted flowers together. We kind of bring those things to life. We did a pottery workshop, a woodworking workshop. We did different forms of embodied prayer practices and learned about those. And just a couple other things, including we had a specialist in trauma-informed therapy do kind of a playful arts and crafts creation in a trauma-informed way. So all of those just helped us engage all of ourselves and then take those practices and those stances into our worshiping life and really help shape our community. So yeah, we really wanted to engage that, and the grant allowed us to explore and get creative with it.  

It sounds like embodiment and community would be a beautiful way to stretch across generations. So tell us a little bit more about what the worshiping community is like in terms of generations and so forth.  

Nathan Longfield 00:04:45  

I think compared to most American churches, we’re on the younger side, certainly average age. Most of our community is in their 20s and 30s. And then we have some kids. My son turns one in a few weeks, so he’s certainly the youngest. But then we have some elementary and other ages kind of up into college, adulthood there, including some college students since we’ve got Hope (College) here. And we really strive to have that multigenerational practice in our church. And I think something that was great about a lot of our events is they allowed for that, and sometimes in ways I was surprised by—and certainly a hat tip to some of our specialists who led those events and did a good job of coordinating them. We made it clear we wanted that, but it’s not always easy to accomplish. We did a workshop with pottery that birthed some elements for our worshiping community too.

We had . . . I think 6-, 8-, and 11-year-old sisters there and how they engaged it, how they actually used it as a healing from some of their past experiences was really rich. And then that flowed into how they engaged in worship with those same elements as we integrated them.

We really try to make sure that all of our worshiping life engages all of that. As a small church, it’s not like we have a robust Sunday school program or all of those sorts of things, so bringing all of our community into every element of what we do is a big part. And so we definitely wanted to do that.

A lot of embodied practices, they don’t have to be but they often can be a bit more playful, or at least creative or unique, and that helps when you’re a 10-year-old. A sermon can get a little boring, even the best-preached ones, but an enactment and then an engagement in some way can be a really good way to invite them into that to think about life and faith in a way that I certainly didn’t experience when I was growing up in the church. I think that’s one of the ways we kind of pull on that multigenerational aspect of what we do.  

What were some of those unexpected, surprising moments where you saw things click in ways you weren’t anticipating?  

Nathan Longfield 00:07:08  

So when we did our pottery workshop, our instructor was pulling on the passage a little bit, the scripture of God being the potter, but was also talking about how you need water within pottery to shape clay. And for the three girls who were there, . . . one made some connections that I was not expecting in terms of that to the sacraments, in terms of that to the Table, and all of these beautiful elements of, oh, this is how these things tie together. And I think for them, it also was a sense of connecting their baptisms to that and kind of entering into that community and healing in a way, and in that space getting their voices empowered, where they were the ones being able to answer those questions.

I think also we had a woodworking workshop where we made these crosses that then connected to a cross we had made for our worshiping space. And I think for a lot of people, just the working with your hands in that way—We had a master woodworker leading it. So he was able to help us do things both safely, but also “I have this vision. How do I make it happen?” And he’s like, “Oh, we can do it this way.” And I think that also helped people kind of engage things in a new way. And then getting to take that home, right? I made this thing, and I could take it home as a remembrance of this thing we did in community and this thing that we created.  

So I think those are some of the surprises with that, and then just hearing people reflect to us as we process how that led to healing. When we scheduled the woodworking workshop, I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this will be a space of healing,” necessarily. But it was. So to kind of see how God works in those spaces when we do engage our bodies in a prayerful way and in a playful way was really cool and also really informative to how we do ministry.

Kristen Verhulst 00:07:08  

When you think about your own preaching ministry before the grant project and now having gone through that year-long project, . . . how have you been influenced by this learning in terms of that preaching role you play in the congregation?  

Nathan Longfield 00:09:41  

I think some of it is just practices we’ve learned pulling forward. So our last service, we did an enactment of the text before we went into it. And the way we do enactments, we’re not adding any words to scripture. The words are still the same, but we’re bringing some visualization, embodiment to it. And I think doing that then informs how I’m preparing my sermon because as we prep this enactment, what did I see come to life? But then also I can be referring to that as we’re engaging the text and people now have this image in their head, which is, I think, more impactful than just me reading the text. And so they might visualize something, but now they have this visualization, and we have a shared visualization of what happened.

I think too, we’re a community that comes to the Table in every worship service, but when we do that, it puts the sermon, I think, back in its proper place, which was always true, but as we engaged this grant, since communion and intinction is, again, an embodied practice, I’m kind of leading us there when I’m engaging the text. And so I think it just kind of helps us think about it from a hospitality perspective and just thinking about it creatively. And that also lets us not . . . We don’t have a sermon every service. Sometimes it will be what we call shenanigans where, right, we saw the text of God creating in the dirt and then we went in the dirt, and then we reflected on it, and maybe I speak for three minutes, but it’s not a full sermon. And so I think there’s just sort of a freedom to this too of maybe we can reimagine what the section that we call in our service “The Word Engaged” looks like. It doesn’t always mean me or somebody else talking about the text, about what God is saying, but sometimes it’s us engaging it creatively. So it kind of invites that creative space and approach.  

Kristen Verhulst 00:11:44  

Do you feel the members of your community are also now . . . coming to worship with different expectations through this project experience?  

Nathan Longfield 00:11:57  

Yeah, I think so. I think one of the fun things when we’re planning worship with this is, you know, if someone’s not involved in those conversations, they don’t know . . . if they’re going to be planting a flower at worship or hearing a traditional sermon. They don’t know what they might encounter always. So I think there might be a little more creative intrigue, I guess, for our members. But I also think the way we did a lot of this with the pottery and the woodworking, and how that then shaped the elements in our service, every time they come now, they’re seeing things that recall them back to that space. For some of them, they helped create some of those things. And so I think seeing that and engaging in that, and those elements we use in what we call our opening gestures, where we kind of recognize God’s presence with us,  

I think it’s a helpful way to invite in, because now it’s not just like, “Oh, there’s that stuff up there, and we’re using that physically to remember God is here,” but “There’s this stuff up there, and I know the story of how that got here.” And so I think that also helps shape how people enter in, because it’s not just “Oh, you paid someone and they made cool things.” It’s “I was part of that story. This is my space.” And so, yeah, I think that’s interesting. It’s a question I want to ask some of our people more because I know what’s going on when I go to worship because I help plan it. But for those who don’t, that’s an interesting wondering.

I wonder if maybe you’d just touch a little bit more on the trauma-informed aspect that popped up in the project, especially for churches out there who really sense this is something they need to explore more as well, knowing that this is just around us so much more and where people are starting to talk about it.  

I think it was something that as a church we had always cared about but didn’t always know necessarily how to engage it everywhere. And I think one of the pieces we saw was just where we saw healing happening in spaces where we didn’t think that was necessarily going to be the space, like in crafting pottery or woodworking.

And so I think we started to see it there. We did have one event that was led by a trauma-informed specialist and it was far and away one of our most interesting events. I think for me especially, I just had no clue. Even having talked to the person in planning I didn’t know what to expect. And it involved all these different things and elements and sort of playfulness and creation and using our bodies in different ways that helped people engage and enter into community and relationship, which was part of her focus, knowing about past traumas, knowing we hold these stories and these weights. I think, too, though, that doing that and seeing it also helped us realize what we didn’t know—or, maybe more accurately, realize we didn't know things. So it’s something we continue to ask questions about, something we’re continuing to explore, including that we just applied for another grant that has a focus on that, because we need to know more about this. How do we do this? And so I think it was something we were already passionate about, and we think we thought we knew some things—and we definitely did—and there were definitely things we realized there’s a lot more here to unpack. There’s a lot more here to learn. How do we do this even better? How do we do this well? Where are spots we might be completely blind to? And so I think seeing how these embodied practices, these different ways of praying, all this stuff we engaged, how that was trauma informed but also could be more trauma informed, kind of helped us think, OK, what do we do? That’s a point for us to keep learning and growing and asking questions. And I think for any church, that’s a huge question and should be a huge concern, because it’s something we need to know more about. There are people doing some really great work on it right now. So yeah, certainly I would encourage people to dive into that. It is not an easy or light thing to dive into, but it is one, if we’re going to do ministry well, that we need to be paying attention to.  

Kristen Verhulst 00:16:16  

It’s great to hear you applied for another grant. And I wonder maybe as we wrap up here, what encouragement would you have to other pastoral leaders or just church leaders listening in here, participants who maybe think they have an idea too, but they don’t quite know how to take it to the next level and consider a project and an exploration of an idea?

Nathan Longfield 00:16:39  

I think, obviously, if they’re listening to this, they’re probably aware of the Calvin grants, but apply for them, get creative. It’s a great resource for that. I think too in churches we often, I think, can get kind of “This is how we do it” visions. We get the luxury of being a newer church, so there isn’t really a status quo, per se, that we have to upset—at least not in our space, maybe on a bigger stage. But I think invite your congregation into uncomfortable spaces to try stuff. I think a lot of times churches feel like there’s this distinction between worship and anything creative or playful. And I think it’s a false dichotomy. How we engage, God calls all of us into worship. God calls our bodies into worship. And we might be uncomfortable using all of who we are. I know there are spaces within this grant where I was like, “Oh, I got pushed in a way I was not expecting”—and I helped apply for this grant.

But I think just take the invitation to be creative, to be playful in worship, to think about how God calls all of who we are in worship. And what does that mean? What does that look like? I think one of the beautiful things that we saw in this is it invites all of the congregation into worship in a more robust way than simply “You’re gonna sing” or “We’re gonna do a corporate confession”— all of which are great things to do, but sometimes we can come to church with the expectation of, well, I’m gonna sit here and the professionals are gonna do something. And an embodied worship says sure, they might have prepped stuff, but we’re all here to worship together. This is a communal space where we come together to worship God.

And I am sure you will get pushback if you are in ministry leadership doing this. So, sorry/not sorry if that happens. It’s a good thing to try to do. Try to get creative, try to be playful with that. And invite your congregation into this. This isn’t a top-down thing. It’s a community thing, be that you got a grant that has a team working on it, or you just have people with the giftings and resources and skills—invite them into it.

That’s certainly something we found as we started exploring. People have gifts you don’t know about, and skills, and the body is rich in using those things. So if you’re a worship person, leader, pastor, and you’re saying, “I don’t know how to do this,” that’s fine. There are resources. One resource we found invaluable was Wayfolk Arts. It’s a small company based in Holland that does a lot with creative liturgies and practices.

Reach out to people. Ask questions, certainly. I’d be happy to chat, but I think, just dream a little bit and get creative and playful about this, and see what God might be doing or calling your space to.  

That’s beautiful. Thanks so much, Nathan, for talking with me today.  

Learn more about the Vital Worship Vital Preaching Grants program through the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at our website, worship.calvin.edu.