On this Saturday before the first Sunday in Lent, I am sitting at a San Francisco apartment with an incredible view of Alcatraz and the whole Bay where I am dog-sitting my wonderful English Bulldog friend, Lola. Lola was born during another Lent season a few years ago and is always a reminder to me about that special time when I was helping her Momma (a minister-friend) do a Friday night special Lent series of worship. It was one of my favorite Lent seasons because of this weekly gathering in candlelight where we entered a deeply contemplative and communal, yet also personal, time of connecting with the Divine. Then as leaders we would gather for dinner afterwards and unpack the riches of the worship and play with tiny little Lola. I pray that your Lent worship will offer you this “saturation of soul” in contemplative, communal, personal and delightfully surprising ways that will live in your memory for a long time.

This kind of experience as a worship designer and leader is why I’ve created this online coaching tool called the Worship Design Studio. I want your life of worship to be a deeply satisfying, deeply artful, deeply enriching aspect of the scope of things that you do in your life. I want you to feel like the paths you are walking together in your journeys of congregational worship matter greatly, that the subjects you steep in are at the center of what it means to be fully human and spiritually-infused.

After 20 years of teaching on the road, hearing staff where I’ve consulted say, “I wish we had you on our team all the time,” and hearing workshop participants say, “I wish the rest of our team could have been here,” I began to dream about how I COULD be on your staff… how I COULD be accessible to helping the whole worship team, even when those faces change over time.

Today marks the 5^th month mark after launching this particular online format for the Worship Design Studio. As I’ve been living into it, the vision is becoming clearer about what it is and how we can benefit from it together:

WDS is my coaching/mentoring/teaching tool that allows me to be “present” with you in your work for a fraction of what personal coaching costs.  You can read, watch videos, listen to podcasts and join me in live webinars (right now there are weekly, monthly and quarterly opportunities to join me live). This aspect of what the Worship Design Studio is has lately cropped like cream to the top of my understanding about what I’m doing here. It is turning out to be a combination of when I’ve been standing in front of hundreds of people teaching and when I’ve sat around a table with a staff of one church. I get to teach to a lot of subscribers AND my subscribers also have personal access to me if they really want it.  I’m loving that and think that this perhaps is, alone, worth the “price of the ticket.”  Next week is a particularly rich week of opportunity to be on a live webinar with me (two times on Tuesday and two times on Thursday): http://www.worshipdesignstudioblog.com/online-events/

As a professor, WDS is what I love best about teaching a course in an educational setting (and not what I don’t like) and you get a guided educational journey… if you want one for a fraction of the cost of going to a class. I get to spend my time discerning what materials and wisdom to offer and recommend to my subscribers in manageable bites that’s doable for busy folks who have limited time to continue their education or train others. And I get to just put it out there and you get to take advantage of it or not–it really is up to you to decide how much to take in… I don’t have to grade you or spend my time in administration AND it is open, accessible and doable for lay and clergy alike… which is one of my deepest convictions about who is responsible, who is trained, who is creating worship… the people.

WDS offers me connection to you in ways I have not had in an ongoing way. It allows me to be both your coach and your cheerleader (and a player on your team… whoa)! I have been getting e-mails and FB posts about people who are utilizing the series ideas and hearing how they enhanced them for their context and how it infused a new excitement about worship in the whole congregation. As a freelance teacher for so many years, I’ve thrown out a lot of ideas along the way but the joy of having a feedback outlet that this online venue gives me is such a blessing. It’s like the experience I described above of getting to have dinner with the leadership team and unpack and savor what just happened in worship. Yum.

Friends, thank you for all you do. Dive deep this Lent and saturate your soul… in worship and in learning.

See you in the Studio!

Dr. Marcia (and Lola)