It’s easy to find songs and hymns on the theme of rest and stillness. There’s Anna L. Waring’s “My Heart Is Resting, O My God,” Kari Jobe’s “Rest,” and Fanny Crosby’s “Jesus Will Give You Rest,” which beckons us:
Will you come, will you come?
How He pleads with you now!
Fly to His loving breast;
And whatever your sin or your sorrow may be,
Jesus will give you rest.
Even with musical selections like these, it can be a challenge to bring rest itself into liturgy and corporate worship. And worship leaders, whose Sabbath Sundays are filled with the work of preparing and facilitating services, aren’t always good models of rest in worship.
Leaders at the second annual Liturgy Collective Gathering are exploring how to find rest together through liturgy, art, and community, a topic inspired in part by the sense of burnout that has plagued church staff during the pandemic.
Initially, Tim Nicholson, music director at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville, envisioned the Liturgy Collective as a culture-renewal project as part of his participation in the Gotham Fellowship program in Nashville. He wanted to design a retreat or conference that would increase cooperation and fellowship between the worship directors at the 30-or-so PCA churches currently based in Nashville.
“That project fell on its face,” said Nicholson, who had hoped for a gathering in 2020. The pandemic abruptly put his plans on hold.
As gathering and travel became safer, he and fellow leaders were eager to come together for worship and encouragement after a difficult two years.
“Coming off of COVID-19, there was this need to get together,” said Stephen Estock, coordinator of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)’s Committee on Discipleship Ministries (CDM). CDM sponsors the conference, held at Covenant Presbyerian in Nashville in October.
Estock and Nicholson structured the conference to prioritize rest instead of hype, community instead of crowds. Nicholson hoped to create something that would reflect Marva Dawn’s description of the “ceasing, resting, embracing, and feasting” of Sabbath rest (borrowing from the title of her book Keeping the Sabbath Wholly). They imagined a gathering of worship leaders that would allow the leaders to step away from their responsibilities and experience anew the restfulness of the liturgy. Both see value in keeping the conference small; this year’s will have a little over 200 participants.
In corporate musical worship, rest, quietness, and stillness—think a hiccup in the flow of service or a long pause between songs—can be uncomfortable. It’s the worship leader’s job to keep things moving. Even when silence is incorporated into the service, there may be voices in their ears cuing the next steps.
The gathering has a distinctly Reformed flavor, though all participants are not part of the PCA or a Reformed tradition. More important than a commitment to a particular denomination is the commitment to incorporating varied musical styles and honoring the diversity of liturgical practices within the PCA and the global church.
“Reformed worship in particular starts with God initiating,” said Scott Sauls, senior pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville and a speaker at the upcoming gathering. “Then we respond with worship and confession of sin, then God responds with another invitation to rest by assuring us that we are forgiven of our sin, then we respond with rested gratitude. Then we rest and we receive the Word of God as it’s read and preached over us, and then we rest some more as we are invited to the Lord’s Table.”
There will be three worship services, each focusing on a part of Matthew 11:28, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
The “Come to me” service will feature a folk band and string quartet from the Nashville Chamber Music Society; “All you who are weary and burdened” will resemble an Anglican Evensong service, with organ and choral music; and the final service, “I will give you rest,” will be led by songwriter Taylor Leonhardt and a band.
The PCA has “gone through the worship wars, and there’s a variety in our denomination,” said Estock. “There are those who are more formal, so we’ll have organ, we’ll have strings. And we’re going to talk about jazz, we’re going to talk about gospel music.”
Carl Ellis Jr. of Reformed Theological Seminary will speak on finding God in jazz and improvisation. Trevor Laurence of the Cateclesia Institute will give a talk entitled “Singing for Justice: Pursuing Rest in a Restless World.” W. David O. Taylor will speak on silence.
Sauls will speak from Psalm 71. Lament may not be an immediately obvious complement to the theme of rest, but the conference organizers and presenters have found natural consonance between the two.
“Lament is this invitation that God gives us to express our sorrows,” said Sauls. “Christianity frees us to name what’s hard, but not without hope.”
There is rest in the freedom to be honest about struggles. It is a relief and source of peace to come to God knowing that there is no need to worry about image management,, no need to censor disappointment or grief.
“The invitation to rest,” Sauls said, “is an invitation to be more real and more human and more fully in the image of God.”
