At 2010's Greenbelt Festival, a group of worshippers from Durham, known as Rough Edge, hosted a piece of worship called the Beat Eucharist. It was a celebration of the Eucharist using rewritten liturgy in the style of beat poets such as Ginsberg and Kerouac. The liturgy is a reworking of the Anglican Common Worship Order 1 Eucharist Liturgy together with paraphrases of the gospels and psalms. The whole thing was accompanied by continuous music and video contributing to an intense, immersive worship experience.
This Worship idea is the music for the Beat Eucharist, a continuous soundtrack in a jazz/dance music style. It is designed to run From 3 minutes before the service starts - with a collection of static and snippets of music from later in the service before kicking in with a big bass line. The music is then continuous until the distribution when all music and amplified sound should be stopped dead, leaving the room in as near to silence as possible. This contrasts with the rest of the service's noisy intensity leaving space for people to encounter Christ through the sacrement (bread & wine of communion). The final peace of music - Beat Three - is then played through the post communion 'prayers' which form a liturgical chant.
Having a conitnuous soundtrack for a service is a lot of work and relies on either having good musicians, or good resources. However, it can transform a service by more sharply defining silence and engaging more of the senses more of the time. The Beat Eucharist aimed to provide slight sensory overload which the music provided in conjunction with the visuals and the rapid fire liturgy. Please use this idea as an inspiration for you own experimentations as well as a resource for the Beat Eucharist.
There are three recorded pieces of music, together with a short document explaining how the music fits into the Beat Eucharist Liturgy. The Liturgy from the beat Eucharist is available from Proost and the Videos from here at Engage Worship
Rough Edge is a collecive of Durham based Christians, all of whom are part of the same larger worshipping community. The collective often eat, pray, work, learn and worship together. The collective is passionate about Jesus and discipleship and seeks to express this passion through creative worship using various means, including song, liturgy, art, video, photography and poetry.
