The Ergonomics of Worship

By Jon Carlson of Club Worship

When I'm not throwin' down at Club Worship, most of my waking hours are spent at my day job, as Production Manager of a Christian television station. Recently, we redesigned and rewired our video editing suite. One of the main reasons we did was to create a more ergonomic working environment. (Design factors, as for the workplace, intended to maximize productivity by minimizing operator fatigue and discomfort.) We lowered the desk height, replaced the chair, added new lighting, and brought the computer monitors down to eye level. All this was done for one purpose: to make the working environment as conducive to the task at hand as possible. Overall, I think we succeeded. Now, you may be asking, what in the world does this have to do with worship?

Have you ever thought about how the environment you worship in shapes how you worship? Maybe you attend a church with pews (like I do.) Maybe your church has those nifty stackable chairs. Or maybe you worship in a house church, sunk down deep in your La-Z-Boy. Where ever you worship communally, the ergonomics of the environment will, in some ways, shape your worship.

Think about this: there are two common words in the Bible that have been translated "worship." One means "to bow down," the other is a Greek word, proskuneo, which means, "to kiss towards." Both of those are physically active words, but maybe the environments we worship in aren't conducive to those actions.

That's part of why I love worship in a club environment: we have an ergonomic setting that allows people to bow down, to dance, to spin, to become "undignified" (to borrow King David's term.) Worship leaders have freedom to bring people together in a prayer circle, to have people form small groups to pray for each other, to call people to their knees. There's nothing in the design of the room that's holding people back.

Now, I understand that pews and chairs serve a purpose. In my church, many people (myself included) viewed the way we got our "new-to-us" pews as God's hand of provision and blessing. It's important to have a place to sit for a sermon (if you've ever spent 45 minutes on the floor, trying to pay attention, you know how hard it is.)

But there's something special about a wide open space where people's "hearts scream 'I Am Free!' I am free to run/I am free to dance/I am free to live for you."

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