If you’ve been in youth ministry for longer than a week, you’ve almost certainly been in a situation where something you planned didn’t go quite right. Suddenly, you find yourself with an extra half hour of time to fill, and you improvise an activity or lesson on the spot. I have been in these situations numerous times, and sometimes they have totally flopped, and other times they’ve been tremendously successful. This type of “oh no” improvisation is decidedly what Sarah Arthur is not talking about. For her, improvisation is a theological concept, and it takes practice to become proficient. “We need to school ourselves in the art of improvisation,” she says.
About two paragraphs into the article, I stopped midsentence, put in my headphones and scrolled through iTunes until I landed on jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s 2006 album The Carnegie Hall Concert. Jarrett is a living jazz legend who is widely known for playing sold-out concerts consisting entirely of improvised piano compositions. On The Carnegie Hall Concert, for example, the first 10 tracks are titled “Part I,” “Part II,” and so on, because the music itself didn’t exist until Jarrett’s fingers coaxed it out of the piano right then and there, on the fly. I thought it would be particularly fitting to finish out Arthur’s article while Jarrett’s virtuosic display of improvisation graced my ears.
In addition to the music itself, which is almost hypnotic, there is another aspect to the The Carnegie Hall Concert that makes it compelling: the audience. The folks who recorded, mastered and released the album made the decision to include every second of the audience’s resounding applause between each improvised track (as well as the five non-improvised encores). It is possible while listening to forget that Jarrett is playing on a stage in front of an enormous crowd, until the audience starts clapping. While he is playing, the audience is utterly silent. This is likely due in part to the fact that the piano is not amplified in any way, so the quieter the audience, the better the aural experience for all. But I think there’s something deeper at work: I believe the audience is silent because, in listening to Jarrett improvise, they are all witnesses to the transcendent and are therefore stunned into unspeakable reverence.
This, I think, is the type of improvisation Arthur describes. In contrast to the situational improvisations we push our way through from time to time, Arthur’s improv necessarily pulls a community closer together as all bear witness to the influx of something both sublime and previously unseen. I found her application of Wells’ vision of overacceptance, “a uniquely Christian response, in keeping with the character of one’s training in the tradition, which contains within it the seeds of the in-breaking kingdom,” particularly helpful and insightful.
I’m a firm believer in improvisation in music, on stage and in ministry. I totally buy what Arthur is selling. But I am also a walking contradiction. Like Arthur, I lament the fact that there is not a denominational liturgy for suicide (a fact that was made painfully clear to me this past October when I had to preach at the funeral of a 17-year-old student) because my instinct in times of trial is to seek a resource or material that has been developed for the exact situation.
So, in some ways, I find the article a little depressing. It seems that both our denominational institutions and the Christian Resource Machine (i.e., blogs and websites, publishing houses, conferences, etc.) are structured in such a way as to effectively stymie the use of improvisation in ministry. That is, the times when improvisation is forced upon us are slowly diminishing as situation-specific resources are created to fill in all possible gaps. Need a prayer to offer up as your youth group stands around a van with a flat tire on the mission trip? No problem! Just flip to page 86 of the new book Oops! Group Prayers for When Things Go Awry! Desperate for liturgy appropriate for the blessing of high school seniors on their way to college? That’ll be $14.95, please. Why improvise when the work has already been done?
Here’s why: Because the best Halloween costumes aren’t the pre-fabricated, store-bought kind; they’re the creative, homemade ones—the improvised ones.[1] The subversive undercurrent of Arthur’s article, the thing that’s not overtly stated, is that it’s a reminder and a challenge to youth workers everywhere (myself included) to ignore the instinct to rely on resources and easy-way-out measures. Yes, there are and will always be plenty of times when using resources is warranted and helpful. But we are, as Arthur says, “disciples…who [are] called upon to improvise.” I pray that we have the patience and fortitude to cultivate our own improv skills because our communities, like the audience in Carnegie, deserve to be stunned into reverent silence.
[1] At the risk of sounding grandiloquent, in many ways Arthur’s push for improvisation is anti-capitalist. A capitalist nation and economy has built into it an exhortation to make money off of both real and perceived needs, however trivial they may be. Where there is one person with a desire for a product or solution, there is at least one more scheming about how to make money off of that very product. That’s why a more complete, nuanced and situational version of a liturgy book is both appealing and disturbing. It satisfies my desire for pre-fabricated solutions yet at the same time diminishes the possibility of transcendent improvisation.
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