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    Spoken Worship
    Spoken Worship
    Spoken Worship
    Ebook138 pages55 minutes

    Spoken Worship

    By Gerard Kelly

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    About this ebook

    Spoken worship … is poetry of the soul, reaching out to the soul’s greatest lover. Where deep calls to deep, spoken worship heeds the call.Spoken Worship is written with the conviction that the spoken word has a unique power – power to reach into the heart, power to transport us to where we could not otherwise go and transform us into what we would not otherwise become. The forty poems in this collection go beyond image and emotion. They are created to be not merely read silently but spoken aloud in a way that brings both the speaker and all who listen into a fresh new experience of worship.With performance notes for each of its eight sections that offer insights into the why as well as the how of spoken worship, this book is designed for use in every setting: church services, home groups, personal times with God, hospital rooms – any and every circumstance in which human hearts long to engage with a passionate, deeply loving God who formed us to feel and to respond to him with emotion.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZondervan
    Release dateAug 30, 2009
    ISBN9780310864165
    Spoken Worship
    Author

    Gerard Kelly

    Gerard Kelly is a writer, speaker and poet, and a director of Café.net. He is an avid reader and abject failure in the realm of diet and fitness

    Read more from Gerard Kelly

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      Book preview

      Spoken Worship - Gerard Kelly

      hf0310275504_content_0003_002

      ZONDERVAN

      SPOKEN WORSHIP

      Copyright © 2007 by Gerard Kelly

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

      ePub Edition June 2009 ISBN:0-310-86416-X

      Requests for information should be addressed to:

      Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

      Gerard Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Kelly, Gerard, 1959 –.

      Spoken worship / Gerard Kelly.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index [if applicable].

      ISBN-13: 978-0-310-27550-3

      1. Liturgies. 2. Public worship. I. Title.

      BV198.K45 2007

      264 – dc22

      2006037559

      Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL 60189. All rights reserved.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      07 08 09 10 11 • 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      For Rob Lacey,

      poet, actor, friend

      and co-conspirator

      In memoriam

      We have only the word, but the word will do. It will do because it is true that the poem shakes the empire, that the poem heals and transforms and rescues, that the poem enters like a thief in the night and gives new life, fresh from the word and from nowhere else. There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. They will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised.

      – WALTER BRUEGGEMANN,

      FINALLY COMES THE POET

      Contents

      Cover Page

      Title Page

      Copyright

      Introduction

      Rob’s God

      The Barred Bard

      Performance Notes

      The Blessing

      Blindness and Sight

      Worth-ship

      One

      Glad

      Elemental

      The Power of the Poem

      Performance Notes

      The Games People Pray

      The Taming of the Truth

      I Choose to Forgive

      Stop the Traffic

      Fit Me In Somewhere

      I Got Rhythm

      Performance Notes

      Liturgy: Let Your Kingdom Come

      Performance for an Audience of One

      Gimme Gimme Gimme Temptation

      Mother’s Song

      Prodigal Blessing

      Start in the Heart

      Performance Notes

      The Call

      A Marvelous Healing

      Humanifesto

      Healing Poem

      Savour the Story

      Performance Notes

      Peter’s Rock Song

      When the Walls

      In the Image of My Father

      The Very Thought

      Harold Be Your Name

      This God

      Psalm Enchanted Evening

      Performance Notes

      23 Not Out

      You Catch My Eye

      God Spell

      Seasoning for the Seasons

      Performance Notes

      Christmas Is Waiting

      Behold, I Stand

      Because He Is Risen: A Poem for Easter

      Dedication

      Breadsong

      Emmaus Wedding

      Wedding Song

      Mystery Making

      Performance Notes

      Eight

      This Grace

      Poetic Justice (Because Laughter Is Worship Too)

      Notes

      About the Publisher

      Shere Your Thoughts

      Introduction

      spoken adj 1 uttered or expressed in speech. ETYMOLOGY: Anglo-Saxon specan.

      worship noun 1 a the activity of worshipping; b the worship itself. 2 a religious service in which God or a god is honoured • morning worship. ETYMOLOGY: Anglo-Saxon weorthscipe, meaning ‘worthship’.

      Spoken worship. Is it poetry? Is it prophecy? Is it prayer? Yes, yes and, in a sense, yes. Spoken worship is about the power of the spoken word to illumine human experience in the place where it matters most: connection to our creator. For centuries Christian worshippers from formal hymn-singing traditionalists to chandelier-swinging charismatics have set words to music to enhance the worship experience. In gatherings large and small, in great halls and home groups, in the shower before breakfast and in the car on the way to work, we sing our praises to God. But in doing so, have we forgotten the power of words spoken?

      It’s not that there’s anything wrong with setting words to music and singing them. When it is done well – and it is often done well in our churches – it moves us and shapes us and stirs our hearts to action. But in twenty years of contributing to some of the

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