The Bobby McFerrin Experience and Ours

Technorati Tags: Worship,Leadership,Pamela Wilson

Technorati Tags: McFerrin,Copyblogger,Surratt

There was a fascinating article on CopyBlogger last week written by Pamela Wilson. She describes her recent experience at a Bobby McFerrin “performance” that changed her perspective on business. Go read it. This performance certainly is an experience bordering on the religious.

I posted on twitter and got several retweets including my friends Geoff Surratt and Jon Ferguson. I hope they take this idea to the next level.

The post describes how McFerrin doesn’t just perform but creates an experience with his audience. No doubt, the man is a genius at doing this and through repetition in various cities over the years has honed his approach.

But it certainly stirred my mind on how this would be applied to a gathering of believers to celebrate the resurrection. I am not leading worship these days for a community and I am sure some of the pastors, worship leaders and others that are can take the idea and run with it. I would love to hear your ideas.

But a few thoughts here:

1. I think in a world of complications, simple wins.

Part of the attraction of an experience she describes is that I think people crave simplicity more than the spectacle.

Don’t get me wrong, watching McFerrin you can tell there is some complexity below the simplicity. Someone runs the spotlight to chase the dancers. Someone handles the sound.

But to the audience/participants/co-performers, it looks very simple.

2.Is it an audience, participants, or co-performers?

Or all of the above? At some points during the show you are definitely passive and just an audience. At other parts you have some form of participation that takes your spirit to another place. And at other times you are a co-performer improvising off of a leader like a jazz band

3.My guess is that there is a template but not a script. Whereas most of our experiences have a script sitting on top of a very rigid script.

There are values in each and I am not putting down the scripted thing. My guess is that McFerrin has an outline and has “staged” the elements of the experience to draw people ever more into the totality of the experience, moving from more passive elements to more active elements.

How can we do this?

OK, those are my starter thoughts.

Here is a link to a review of one of his recent performances here:

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/article/786412--bobby-mcferrin-finds-the-crowd-s-creativity

Here is a You Tube Video from one of his performances and there are a bunch more.

Finally, note the comments to Pamela’s original post, they have become an experience in themselves.

And I would love to hear in the comments what your thoughts are from the article and your reflections. So take a minute and type them in there.

Dave Travis

Managing Director

Leadership Network

Technorati Tags: Copyblogger,Pamela Wison,Bobby McFerrin,Worship,Leadership