December 7, 2004

Running dry on creative liturgical ideas? Take a quick dip from the Episcopal Church's new Worship Well.

The Worship Well, launched December 1 as a collaboration between Church Publishing Incorporated (CPI), the Episcopal Church's Office of Liturgy and Music, The Episcopal Church and Visual Arts (ECVA), and the All Saints Company (affiliated with St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco), serves as an online home for conversation, collaboration, education, and copyright-protected sharing of liturgies, images, music, multimedia resources, scripture tools, wisdom, and more.

The site features sections devoted to various aspects of liturgy and liturgical planning, divided into the categories "Word," "Image," "Sound," and "Wisdom," highlighting particular resources for the current liturgical season. Since the premiere coincides with the beginning of Advent, materials in the current "This Season" section focus on Advent and Christmas.

The idea for the Worship Well came out of CPI publisher and deacon Ken Arnold's experiences at Saint Paul's Chapel in lower Manhattan during the summer of 2001, creating some alternative weeknight liturgies that would attract younger generations of people seeking God.

"The attacks on the World Trade Center forced a complete change of focus for ministry at Saint Paul's, of course, living as it does at the edge of Ground Zero. But I continued to be interested in creating liturgical resources for the church that draw on media, popular culture, contemporary music, and so on," Arnold said in an email. "When I came to Church Publishing in October 2003, I saw an opportunity to begin to bring together creative people from across the church who care passionately about good liturgy and innovative worship."

Even the process of building the site was different. "We started working on the concept over a year ago, at first bringing together people who could easily meet at our New York offices," said Susan Erdey, CPI's director of electronic publishing. "But we soon used technology to welcome people into the working group who are based in California, Massachusetts, and Tennessee. We used e-mail, phone conferencing, and an open-source online workspace to share ideas and post test versions of pages.

"The actual building of The Worship Well site for its Advent launch began this fall, with Stephanie Spellers, our consulting editor for the project, researching and gathering Advent and Christmas material from all over the web. Stephanie also went on the road in October to meet with a variety of congregations and people who are known in the church for their creative and exciting worship traditions."

Accessibility was another important design consideration, Erdey said.

"We made a conscious decision to use CSS-based design for the site, so that the site would be standards-compliant, very clean, and would be easily accessible to users whether they have dial-up or a high-speed connection, whether they're on a Mac or a Windows machine, or whether they're using Explorer or Firefox," she explained. "We don't want people frustrated because a page won't display, or because a document is taking forever to download. CSS-based design also makes the site accessible to users on non-traditional computing platforms, and to visually- and mobility-impaired users."

Though CPI is hosting the site, Arnold said it's the collaboration that counts. "The Worship Well is not our website, it's a resource that we're creating with the church, for the church," he pointed out. "As the publisher of authorized worship materials for the church, Church Publishing Incorporated is a natural location for the development of new worship resources. We're also in touch with parishes and dioceses on a regular basis, and so we know how to reach everybody. As we continue to evolve our software resources for the church, a website such as The Worship Well will also provide us with new ideas for the future."

The Worship Well collaborative actively seeks contributions from congregations, writers, artists, musicians, and liturgists in the church, though the website makes it clear that all materials submitted will be reviewed by an editorial team and that submitting materials does not guarantee that they will be posted to the site.

"Parishes and dioceses are increasingly creating their own worship resources locally, using combinations of the prayer book, hymnal supplements, and fresh materials," said Arnold. "But much localized liturgy gets lost, for lack of a place to collect and store it. And it shouldn't get lost, because when it does, some really creative and exciting liturgy-literally, the 'work of the people'-disappears, never to be seen or shared or experienced again. That's a real loss."

"Less than a day after go-live we already began receiving ideas and resources from readers, which we'll submit to our editorial team," added Erdey. "In the immediate short term, we want to display images that congregations can download and use in their service bulletins or put up on projection screens as devotional aids. We want to add more audio, and show video clips of worship that works. We also plan to create online space in the near future for conversations among writers, artists, musicians, and liturgists."

Questions about the Worship Well or submissions of material may be sent to theworshipwell@cpg.org.

Episcopal News Service