EPIC/Expereintial Worship

Today started so the wrong way...
I was supposed to go to the Kimball Art Mueseum in Ft. Worth with my good friend Evan Jones and check out the new exhibt of early Christian art. We were going to go, check it out, set-up some docent tours for our respective churches and brainstorm about how to incorporate the arts more in our churches. The exhibit is a landmark one and I was so pumped to go and then the text came. Evan could not make it, sickness was running rampant at his house. So, what to do? I could have gone myself but two brains are certainly better than one. Do I drive to Argyle and work up there, or do I work from home (thus somewhat reducing my ecological footprint today).
Hard to imagine, but I decided to work from home and I am so glad that I did! Not only did I get to get alot of administrative work done in the morning, I was able to spend the afternoon researching and thinking about worship in our context at Argyle, and the church in general.
My job description at the church where I am the minister of music, worship, and the arts, features Len Sweet's thoughts on the postmodern mindset as found in his acronymn: EPIC. It stands for Expereintial, Participatory, Image Rich, and Connected. In other words, the thought is that worship at Argyle needs to be moving towards a more EPIC way of being. I love it! It's a great idea...now...how does it happen, what does it look like...
I am struck that our worship is generally not expereintial, participatory, image rich, and it is only somewhat connective. On the whole, our people come to church, talk through a prelude, sing a hymn, greet one another, listen to a pastoral prayer, say the Lord's prayer, sing another hymn, listen to the children's sermon, listen to an anthem, give of their resources, listen to a thirty minute sermon, sing another hymn and go home.
Clearly, the majority of the service is spent sitting and listening. The participatory acts are in the singing, the greeting of one another, and giving back to God in the offertory....we've got a long way to go.
Worship, it seems to me is glorifying God and being connected to God and transformed. Bob Rognlien says, "worship is when God is glorified and we are changed. We give ourselves to God in such a way that God is glorified and we are changed." (Roughly, this quote is something of a paraphrase). He believes (as do I) that worship is bidirectional encounter where God comes to us and we respond.
In worship at Argyle, we are only using our limited senses in this respect. We are not using our full humanity in our ability to expereince and respond to God.
So this leads me to some questions...Rognlien states that the biblical directive of Jesus is worship is the Shema: to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. He associates the heart with volition, the soul with emotion, the mind with the intellect and strength with what we do physically. We are not doing this at the moment, though I believe it is unintentional. We tend to stick with the heart and the mind to the exclusion of the soul and the strength.
My quesitons are becoming these: How do we do this in our context? What does it look like, and sound like, and feel like, and smell like? How do we love the Lord our God with our heart, soul, mind and strength and love our neighbor as ourself in corporate worship in Argyle? These questions are beginning to dominate my thinking in how we plan worship.
Unfortunatly, I'm running late for an evening appointment but, clearly, I've got some work to do! So, even as the day began in a way that I didn't plan on, it is ending wonderfully! God is so good! What a blessing it is to be able to begin to be asking the right questions! More to come later!