This article argues for the intentional and imaginative use of drama in worship. Its unique contribution is a helpful explanation of the various types or varieties of theater that can be incorporated into worship.
Incorporating the art of theater into the worship setting is an important and exciting ministry. To accomplish this, we must deal not only with practical matters regarding how a drama ministry might be launched in our churches but also with the complicated history of drama in worship. We must understand and accept the nature and limitations of the form and see the art of theater in its large intended creative context—as an art form with the capacity for revelation, praise, challenge, and comfort. Theater does not merely use language or the symbols of love; it can enact love. It can show us the love of parents, of friends or brethren. Theater can also challenge us by exposing sin while reminding us that we are not alone. It is a collaborative art form that places words and ideas in action through character. It isn’t merely oral or sermonic; it’s oral, physical, and visual.
One of the things that intrigues me is the complex history of the theater and the church. As far as we can ascertain, theater actually arose from the impulse of religious celebration and from the need to express the longings of a people for their creator. Through dramatic ritual, humanity gained a glimpse of the divine. In certain periods—notably the Greek and medieval—theater became a primary avenue for religious expression. Yet, even within those periods, ecclesiastical suspicion fell on theatrical practitioners. As Jonas Barish points out in The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), “Thespis, who gave his name to the art of acting, was called a liar by Solon because he was pretending to be someone else” (p. 1). As a church, we are no different. We too are uncomfortable with those who would make their living by dissimulation. Actors of this lowly art were and are still segregated, set apart as somehow unworthy or unclean. As historians note, often theater was abandoned by the institutionalized church, left to thieves, prostitutes, and vagabonds, further polarizing it from the church and, at times, mainstream society. And because no dialogue between believing and unbelieving people occurred, the theater began to live up to its reputation. For example, H. R. Rookmaaker, in his book, Art Needs No Justification, wonders where the Christians were in the eighteenth century when humanism was born. Humanism in this period managed to re-direct society away from the needs of the human spirit so that it might seek pleasure and power. Rookmaaker posits that those believing societies had turned to a purely pietistic Christianity and rejected the arts. “Too easily, large areas of human reality, such as philosophy, science, the arts, economics, and politics were handed over to the world, as Christians concentrated mainly on pious activities” (quoted in Harry Farra, “Theater Position: A Report to the Strategy Planning Task Force,” Geneva College, 1991, p. 5).
This antitheatrical urge has persisted to the present. We readily accept the awesome power of this art to destroy but rarely acknowledge its capacity to heal as well. The church responded to theater too often by pulling away, allowing for an increasing secularization of the medium and eventually resulting in out-and-out hostility. In some denominations, the impulse for keeping theater away from the flock was a matter of theological priority. In his book Contours of a World View [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983], Arthur Holmes makes this perceptive comment:
Traditions with a strong emphasis on the physical in creation, incarnation, and sacrament, like the Roman Catholic and the Anglican, have generally been productive in the arts. Traditions that stress a law-governed creation, such as the Reformed, have put creative energies into government and work. The Anabaptist tradition, emphasizing God’s provision for human needs, has attended to work and works of compassion and healing. American Evangelicalism’s theology focuses largely on sin and grace, and its most creative outlet has therefore been in evangelism and missions. Theology naturally gives direction as well as meaning to creativity. But a complete and balanced theology should direct it into every area of responsibility: art, science, society, and church. (Contours of a World View, 205–206)
Interpreting this statement correctly implies that we have always asserted the validity of the arts but have placed our energies for the most part elsewhere. Incorporating drama in worship will constitute a huge risk for many constituencies. Theater can engender very strong reactions, especially when it disturbs the comfort of those used to more traditional methods of worship. The theater is viewed by many with suspicion and a bit of fear. “What does it have to do with us?” they ask. “It doesn’t belong in the service. Worship isn’t entertainment. We’ve got our focus all wrong. Drama is all right as long as it stays with the children, but keep it away from the traditional service.” Those who view theater in this manner see theater as an enemy, a Goliath, a force that threatens from without. It’s foreign and secular. To many, it simply doesn’t belong.
And, in their defense, it is true that worship is not entertainment. Theater not incorporated properly into the service can seem like mere show. My most effective collaborations have occurred when my pastor and I mapped out specifically the goals and scriptural themes for the service. When I first started doing this; however, there were a few times when the coordination wasn’t there and the congregation was left thinking why was that included? or so what? That shouldn’t happen.
How do you get started? And how do you avoid some basic pitfalls? Let’s talk about a beginning: the basic nuts and bolts of incorporating theater into your service, the types of occasions that theater may be suitable for within your individual churches, and the different styles of theater possible.
The Process of Starting a Drama Ministry
Purposes. There are several different functions or purposes of scripts in worship. A first function would be the use of drama for sermon illustrations. Lasting from five to ten minutes, they provide physical illustrations of a service’s sermon or homily. These are perhaps the most common and popular methods of incorporating theater into your worship, but they are frequently limited by time restrictions and therefore can express only a simple point, not complex ideas. Generally, the tone of these pieces tends to be lighter and more comedic.
A second type might be called evangelical illustrations. Their time length can vary depending on the occasion. They can also take the form of a five- to ten-minute sketch. These openly proclaim the gospel as a means of grace and salvation in the church, to bring people to the altar, or to call us to our knees.
A third type is theatrical plays. These are longer dramatic pieces that on special occasions replace a sermon or homily. The best plays pose questions and don’t offer pat solutions; theater is not meant to take the place of a sermon.
Setting. Any worship setting may be appropriate for theater in your church. Plays can be a part of either morning or evening services, a youth or children’s worship proper, or they can highlight seasonal events, celebrations of the church calendar, retreats, and so on. Your purpose, occasion, and performing space will dictate the length and degree of seriousness of such plays.
Theatrical Style. In addition to understanding the different types and intentions of scripts possible in any of your worship services, you also must have some knowledge about the variety of expressions possible with theater. There are many different styles of theater to contend with as well. There are four basic theatrical styles that are appropriate for use in worship: reader’s theater, choral staging, realistic representation, and presentational performance.
Readers’ theater is a script-in-hand interpretation that reenacts (rather than represents) the actions in the text. It may be used with virtually any type of material or theme. Readers’ theater performances may be formal and static or have limited staging. Churches often use them where physical facilities and sightlines are problematic.
Readers’ theater may be performed with either static staging or limited staging. In static staging, the actor’s focus is directed to the audience. Actors don’t relate directly with their fellow actors; instead, they choose a point out in the audience where the character they address is located. The actors cross their focuses so that the illusion is maintained that the performers are speaking to each other. (If actor B stands onstage to actor A’s right, actor A looks out in the audience to the right at a diagonal. Actor B does the reverse. Thus, focuses are said to be crossed.) Limited staging, in contrast, does involve some movement, generally to indicate characters entering or exiting, and to focus the audience’s attention on specific actors. In the reader’s theater, the manipulation of gesture and body positions is still possible. This is especially essential when actors are playing multiple roles and the uniqueness of individual characters needs to be portrayed.
Choral staging is an ensemble performance that may be either script-in-hand or memorized. This style also works well for churches that have spaces with limited performance capabilities. Patterns of movement among the actors are the key to this style of representation. Most often they take the form of geometric patterns: v-shapes, x-shapes, diagonal lines, squares, circles, semicircles, and so on. Choral staging minimizes the role of individual characters. Actors may speak both in unison or in concert. The group is the character: individual characters are not represented in this style. (Individual voices, perhaps, but they are simply reflective of the whole unit.) This style works well with non-narrative forms, including poetry, psalms, and more abstract prose.
Realistic representation involves a fully memorized performance. This style may have grand or modest production values in setting, costume, and lighting. In this style, the action proceeds as if it is really happening, the virtual present. It represents reality, the reality we observe in day-to-day life. The actors behave as if the audience were not there to witness their activities. The actors are perceived as real people (three-dimensional). Gestures and physical movement should be as natural as the space permits.
Presentational performance is a fully memorized performance. Generally, production values center on the performer and not the setting (e.g., Madeleine L’Engle poetry). The action is directed out to the audience as a presentation of content rather than a representation of reality. Actors are performers representing themselves. Most often they don’t assume the role of other characters. If they do portray a character, that character is most likely to be a stock character or stereotypical character, not a three-dimensional character. This style works well with musical venues, revue-style sketches, poetry, and some prose.
Scripts. There are several types of scripts that may be employed in a worship setting. First, you can employ a literal rendering of Scripture, taking a passage from the Bible and performing it as it is written. Second, you can choose a script that interprets a scriptural event, aligning it in time very closely to the actual biblical reference. Third, a script could be chosen for its application of a scriptural event in contemporary terms, transplanting the events into our culture. Fourth, you may determine the best way to communicate your message is to choose a script that represents contemporary cultural satire. These types of scripts look at the world we live in and expose our cultural values for what they truly are. Finally, you may choose to employ a script that combines cultural illustration and confession. These comment on the human condition and expose our fears, concerns, and failing.
Organization. How do you set up a ministry? Having a coordinator in each model is crucial, as is identifying and describing the parameters of the ministry. One possible model for such a ministry is ACTS (Actors Committed to the Teachings of the Savior), involving a lay minister but relying on no support from the church administration except with special events programming. (ACTS was primarily an internal support ministry that provided sermon illustrations once a month and helped in a special evening of evangelism). Another model is that of Parable Players, a para-professional outreach ministry involving direct administrative support from the church. The artistic leader, a Ph.D. in theater, was a volunteer, but the actors (some academically trained, others not) were paid a small honorarium per performance. This outreach ministry toured regionally with two different full-length plays in its repertoire, performing on average eight times per month. The repertoire could change from year to year, and all roles in each play were the double case, allowing for an interesting mixture of actors from performance to performance. Another model is used at Willow Creek, a large nondenominational church in the suburbs of Chicago, where a professional staff (led by an artistic director with a Ph.D.) provides drama once a week. The ministry involves staff writers and performers in addition to congregational members. Whatever you do, start off small, producing no more than one to three events per year. Build a core of people interested in committing to this ministry. Send lay ministers to workshops and lectures to aid in training. Let your ministry grow through interest, not by decree.
More than Evangelism
To conclude, it is my hope that the majority of Christian people can think of more than Bible drama when they consider church and theater. Theater used strictly as a tool to evangelize limits its power to communicate to us. Legitimizing theatrical endeavor by slapping an evangelical label on it reduces art to function. Stuffed with facts, a dramatic form frequently labors to express tracts and dogma, quoting faithfully and duly Scripture texts that should resound and roar in our minds and hearts. Why not use a sermon to preach the message of salvation and allow the theater to relate to the drama of human experience?
You see, this is one of the theater’s greatest strengths: to hold a mirror up to nature and allow us to see ourselves. And in seeing to change and grow, to mature in the things that matter. Theater can share the Gospel in a powerful and exciting way; it can evangelize when done well. But it can also show us the reality of living in a fallen world and what sin does to our lives. It can show laughter and pain, joy and despair. It can also bind us together as common people. Stuart Scadron-Wattles, artistic director of Theater & Company, a Canadian Equity theater that produces works from a biblical perspective, believes that “we should find ourselves moving from the use of drama to achieve certain religious ends into something broader and more demanding: the dramatic expression of the kingdom of God.”
The most truthful statements about God’s goodness, his creation, and the fallenness of his creatures should be derived from the church. However, as Nigel Forde of Riding Lights Theater Company in England points out, “The reason that the most trenchant, memorable, and truthful statements about ourselves and the universe come from outside the Christian church is that Christians are all too easily shocked by reality; they want the truth to be completely beautiful. Whereas the real truth about truth in a fallen world is that it is likely to be both beautiful and horrible, both pure and filthy” (Theatercraft: Creativity and the Art of Drama [Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1990], 101). We need to be truthful in our churches and allow mature discussions to flourish to nurture and challenge us. Too often when we shove some material aside and say that it’s secular, we create walls between acceptable discussion material and unacceptable, Christian and secular. Think of theater in a broader perspective in your church. “It is the imagination that shows us the truth of what is going on around us. It is imagination that makes art not a copy of life, not a snapshot, but an appraisal, a vision, sometimes a prophecy” (Forde, Theatercraft, 110).
Theater can break down barriers and create new avenues of discussion among the members of your congregations. In The Antitheatrical Prejudice (p. 266), Jonas Barish writes:
The theatrical process works to complicate our judgments and disarm our vindictiveness. It makes us apprehend [theatrical characters] as feeling beings like ourselves, in whom virtue may be strong or nearly as strong as a vice, but for whom circumstances may have been stronger, who have struggled painfully but at length unsuccessfully against their passions. And so, as it makes us less judgmental, it validates our claim to be teaching us something. It educates by widening our imaginative range.
Nigel Forde puts it this way: “Theater does not browbeat man into accepting a rule or message written in flaming letters on stone. Rather it opens his eyes and enlarges his sympathies. If it is written on anything, it is written in water; it soaks in and nourishes the parts that otherwise would not be reached” (Forde, Theatercraft, 109). That’s my prayer for our work in the church: that it would break the stone hearts we carry within us and make us eager to walk in love, as Christ’s ambassadors on earth. I know that means making a small beginning first. But I don’t want to leave you stuck at “GO.” I pray that you catch a vision for the incredible revelatory promise that reconciliation between theater and church holds.
By grace, we can create. Arthur Holmes says, “A world amenable to human creativity, and human creativity itself, bear witness to their creator. These are living God’s good gifts, evidence of his continued creativity in human affairs” (Contours of a World View, 204). Through theater in our churches we can bear witness to our Creator God. Finally, I’d like to leave you with a comment by Lee Krahenbuhl, professor of theater at Judson College:
It is the Lord’s work to demolish walls that divide. When theater makes us less judgmental, when it teaches us something by widening our imaginative range, when it eliminates labels, it continues to work. I find it interesting that the same Hebrew name with we translate Jesus via the Greek of the New Testament, Y’shua, is in the Old Testament translated Joshua—through whom God brought the walls of Jericho tumbling down.
A theater ministry in your church could tear down a great many walls. And build the kingdom.