Video Transcript: Unit 4, Video 3

Well, welcome back last segment for this week, and we're going to talk about  Universal Design in worship, meaning our corporate worship. So we had fun  thinking about our children and youth ministry context, and now we're going to  talk about our corporate worship context, and I'm going to explain a little bit  more about what I had started a while back talking about universal design for  learning and that idea of show, engage and express. And so I'm going to kind of  revisit that idea, and we'll look through what that looks like in our worship  settings, meaning our corporate worship settings. When we're all together, we  kind of have our song time and our preaching time and and we're all together in  that. So here we go. When we're talking about show, we're talking about multiple means of representation. So I want to share with you, this is a guideline from the idea of the Universal Design for Learning, and I think it really resonates a lot  with a lot of what we do in our worship services. So we're showing a lot of  information in our worship services. We're showing God's Word. We might have  Bibles. We might have hymnals. Centuries ago, we had illustrated manuscripts.  We have stained glass windows in our churches, right? There's a lot of depiction of what it is that's supposed to be happening in these worship settings, some  modern settings have projection screens with the song lyrics on them, right? But we're showing a lot of information, so thinking about the options we can provide  to show the information, is it written and in a book? Is it projected up on a  screen? Is it in pictures, right? So these are the kinds of things that we're talking  about. So for example, in our order of worship and the information we really  want people to get a hold of, maybe our church bulletin, right again, multiple  means of representation. So do you have some icons and some images in your  order of worship? Do you have children's bulletins that have some engaging  ways for them to follow along with what is happening. Are you using pictures  and printed materials? I know a lot of churches around the world are trying to be very eco friendly and not use printed paper anymore, so they just have digital  versions of their announcements and things like that, or they simply verbalize it.  But remember what an individual said, if I didn't see it, you didn't say it. And we'll come to that idea a little bit later on. But just thinking about right, we need to  provide a lot of different handles to grab onto. As one pastor put it, I like to give  a lot of different handles for people to grab on to. And so that's what I want you  to be doing as you show the information within your ministry settings, because  then people can engage in the way that works for them. So this is the second  guideline of Universal Design for Learning, and we're going to borrow it for our  ministry context, and say, universal design for worship, thinking about our  engagement, the element of learning in worshiping is to do the things of the  worship service. So again, thinking about options, we may consider how  everybody's connecting with the information and the opportunities offered. So as I mentioned once, it's about how can people give their offering? Well, how can  people give their prayer requests? Can they type them in? Can they kneel to 

pray? Can they use their words? Can they use sign language? What are the  options that you're allowing for them in order to express their prayer requests  within the community. So yes, God can hear us all the time, but how about  sharing our prayer requests among one another? What are the ways that we  can engage one another in that? And so thinking of multiple different ways that  we can do that. Now, I was a part of a church service, worship service with  some others, not that long ago, and I will just lovingly call it my experience of  fish guts, our worship too. We were trying to involve options for all of the senses  to engage in this worship service. And so what it meant was that we, we took  Jesus’ example of being the good teacher. And took it quite literally and said,  Okay, if he taught us to remember me, and gave us something that we could not only hear in words, but also experience other sounds, and we were able to see it and to feel it and to smell it and to taste it and to move with it. What would that  look like in our worship setting? And so we picked a passage of scripture, and  we happened to pick a passage in Luke. And so yes, we heard scripture by  actually listening to it read out loud, but then we also watched the ASL version of Scripture. That's the American Sign Language version. So if English is not your  first language, I encourage you to look into sign language in the language and  the culture that you're experiencing. But we watched this or heard scripture  spoken in ASL and out of a written scripture. And then we watched scripture. We watched this video put together by the LUMO project, and what they have done  is created a bunch of videos of direct translations of scripture in many, many  languages. So I encourage you to look at links to the LUMO project videos. So  we watched scripture unfold in front of us by watching this segment of Jesus.  And so that was our sort of seeing the word. Then we we felt it. So I had brought some fishing net into the room with us. And so we got to touch fishing nets. And  then I also brought some fish, some sardines with and so we could touch the  fish. We could definitely smell the fish. And some of us even tried tasting the  fish. Even though I'm not a fish eater, kind of Gag a little bit, but, but I engaged  in it because I thought I want to engage my whole body and experiencing  scripture right now, and experiencing this worship opportunity, and experiencing  what Jesus experienced, and really be with him in this. And so fish guts are a  part of worship too. And so we offered options, so that even if I didn't connect  personally with the sign language version or the watchable version of scripture  or the fish, but among them all, it offered me options for how I could hear God's  word and engage with it. And so I just want to encourage your imagination to be  sparked to think about the options that you could offer for people to engage in  worship in your ministry settings. So let's move on to express so multiple means  of action and expression. So this is thinking about the third guideline of  Universal Design for Learning, and again, we're borrowing it to say Universal  Design for worship. So this is how we, the congregation, express our faith, our  learning, our relationship with the Lord. So thinking options should have us 

considering the ways in which everyone can praise. We can ask for help. We  can express what we've been learning. So this is our opportunities to express  love for God and understanding of His Word and His will, our praise for his  presence, our gratitude for his salvation and and these are, these are all  developing habits, which we're going to talk some more about really quickly. But  in this in education, this guideline also wraps into supporting the formation of  strategy in our personal goal setting and our achievement, and that's something  that we could consider as as as we think about our faith or our faith formation  and our opportunities for options. So this isn't just about, can people actually,  you know, verbalize or pick a different way to express something within our  worship service, but it's actually also thinking about, how do we form who we are as worshippers? How do we grow in our relationship with Jesus and grow in  maturity in our faith. And so this Express kind of has a lot to it, but I think it's  really important to think about, are we offering some simple ways to engage in  this, like a yes, no, thumbs up, thumbs down, way of responding when you know when, when we're posed a question, or when we're engaging in Bible study. And so really offering simple options, including simple options for something like the  Lord's Prayer, which many of us might know by heart. Maybe we say it quite  often, but could we move it? And so I was introduced to a beautiful version of  this prayer, and I will have this also in the resource links here within the course  so that you could practice this as well. But I did this in that multi sensory worship service, and it was such a beautiful thing to corporately have all of us using our  entire bodies to offer the Lord's Prayer as we said it together and moved it  together. We did it with just words, and then we did it with words and motions,  and then we did it with just motions. How powerful is it to pray with your body  and not words? So thinking about these things and offering multiple ways to  express our faith, our growth, our worship, I think are really important things. So  I hope that this has inspired a little bit for you to think about, and now we're  going to move on to our next segment, which will talk about examples of  universal design, and specifically thinking about what I hinted at a few minutes  ago, some habits that we develop in our faith formation and in our worship  services that we will call vertical habits, which we'll get to next week. But as we  wrap up this week, we're just going to think about these ideas of Universal  Design in worship. And next week, I want to share with you some examples from students and churches, just like I've done with some other things previously in  the course. And then you'll hear again from Barb about those vertical habits, that idea of a conversation with God that we call worship, that we develop habits in  in our faith formation. So all of that is yet to come. Wrapping up this week, enjoy  some of the resources, and we'll see you next week.