Living Worship

This unique multimedia resource offers a new way to teach and learn about planning, leading, and evaluating congregational worship. The package contains two discs: an interactive case study (for Mac and PC, on DVD media) of eighteen months in the worship life of an actual church, and a video DVD of interviews with nearly two dozen worship experts. Also see these lesson plans.

The case study is an interactive resource that enables students to learn about worship by doing "virtual participant observation." The program features a host of media documenting the worship life of Ravenswood Covenant Church (RCC) in Chicago. This includes more than twenty hours of video of services, planning meetings, interviews with church ministers and members, and commentary by experts in liturgy; a detailed survey of the history and development of RCC, including ethnic, economic, and social data; a variety of church publications, including bulletins and brochures; and much more. The footage in the program captures a wide array of events in the church's life, including a wedding, a funeral, an Advent service, and an Easter service.

The video DVD presents a variety of perspectives on vital issues and questions related to worship. The contributors to this disc—including Robert Webber, Don Saliers, Don Hustad, and Jill Crainshaw—are outstanding teachers in homiletics, worship, music, the arts, and pastoral rites. Taken together, these resources provide a veritable worship class-in-a-box, offering students insight into the theory and practice of real-life Christian worship. User and teacher guides are included.

Approximate run times:

Interactive case study: 21.5 hours of video, more than 450 pages worth of text, over 400 images documenting the history of the church, a glossary of theological terms, essays covering topics central to congregational worship life, and Orders of Worship reaching back 50 years

Video DVD: 90 minutes (currently unavailable)

Total: 23 hours

A note for Mac users

Apple OS X Lion Compatibility for Mac users of Living Worship in Theory and Practice

We worked hard to make sure that Living Worship in Theory and Practice works well on your Mac. Unfortunately, we couldn't do that with systems that hadn't been released yet. As it turns out, Apple's upgrade to OSX 10.7 Lion ended up throwing a couple of wrenches into the system.

1. All of the fonts in LWTP have reverted to default system fonts, messing up the line spacing, making some words stroll out of view and generally making a hash out of menus and texts.
2. Using the Transcript Viewer now crashes the program.

We've gone back to the workshop and have fixed the first problem. Living Worship in Theory and Practice version 1.1 is now available to download. To use this new version:

1. Download the updated version by clicking the following link: Living Worship 1.1. (The file is a 12.7 mb zip file.)
2.  In order to use the new version, you will need to copy the entire Living Worship in Theory and Practicedisc into a folder on your hard drive. 8.5 gigabytes of hard drive space will be required. (You'll have to do this because you can't copy the new file onto your DVD). To copy the LWTP disc:
   • Insert the Living Worship in Theory and Practice disc into your DVD drive.
   • Click on the disc icon and drag it to the destination disc while holding down the Option key. (A small + will appear on the pointer cursor to indicate that you are copying.) This will copy it rather than make an alias for it.
3. Then, drag the downloaded Living Worship 1.1 into the new LWTP folder on your drive. You will now double click on the Living Worship 1.1 icon when you want to use LWTP. You may throw away the original Living Worship program.

You don't need to do this update if:

• You are a Windows user.
• You are a Mac user who hasn't upgraded to Lion yet. If you bought your Mac before June 2011, it probably didn't come with Lion installed.

Unfortunately, we haven't found a fix for the Transcript Viewer problem yet. It seems to be something in the Adobe Director software that we used to program LWTP, but isn't in our control. We'll keep working on it and let you know when we have it figured out. In the meantime, there is a workaround. You can still view all of the transcripts by clicking on the Print button. This will bring up all of the text and image files in your web browser. Navigate to the transcript you want and keep it open in the background. This is, we know, not ideal. But it will work until we figure out a solution to the problem.