In our worship, is variety the spice of life or does consistency build community? Where do we strike the balance between the two?

As a minister in the Church of England, I have a wide variety of authorised liturgy available to me to use while remaining within a consistent shape and pattern of worship. As a leader in the Church of God, I have a duty to help his people engage with him in corporate and collective worship by making it both familiar enough to connect with and sufficiently fresh as to not grow stale (see the connection between freshness and a lack of staleness).

It's never an easy balance to strike, especially as there is the added layer of working in a multimedia world with an increasingly media-literate population (and indeed, those of the emerging generations for whom a rich diet of media is expected) - the temptation to use cool new worship resources for the sake of it or to satisfy one's own taste is strong. Undoubtedly, employing a variety of media in worship can help keep worship fresh while maintaining consistency - I saw a fantastic way of presenting the Eucharistic prayer at college last week, an audio-visual presentation to accompany the president in place of simply projecting the words or the words with a static image (inevitably, normally, of bread and wine) onto the wall or screen.

There is a real air of permission-giving the Church of England, the sheer number of alt.worship groups is evidence of this. This may well be in part down to the fact that a lot of alt.worship is profoundly liturgical. Where our history is not only recognised but honoured, it is easier to give permission for the expression of worship to be changed, updated or adapted.

I hope that in Bursledon, we are moving towards striking this balance well. Our Conversations service (which will soon see a tweaking of style) and our 1662 Communion (as well as the various other services we run) show that there are a number of points within the cloud where we reside. I use the word cloud rather than continuum or the more ecclesiastical candle because I don't think that worship shows a linear move from liturgical to experimental or catholic to evangelical but rather it's a cloud with three (or more) dimensions in which people move.

So, variety or consistency? It's a balance, we can have - and indeed need - both. We need to keep worship fresh while also remaining grounded. We move towards the future while honouring and being nourished by the past.