Ravenswood Covenant is one of six churches surveyed before a final selection was made. The study, funded through the Eli Lilly Foundation of Indianapolis, Indiana, is co-sponsored by Loyola University of Chicago's Institute for Pastoral Studies.

Dr. Todd Johnson, graduate program director of the Master of Divinity Program and a liturgical, sacramental and systematic theology teacher at Loyola, is helping coordinate the effort. Others on the team include Jim Caccamo of Loyola's Theology Department, Rebecca Burswell of North Park University and Lester Ruth of Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.

As part of the project, the team will videotape three worship services - a typical service this winter, an Easter Sunday service in April and an Advent communion service in December. The project team will interview parishioners to determine how they experienced each videotaped worship service. They will discuss how worship services are planned with senior pastor Bryan Kletzing and Leslie Hodgkinson, the church's director of worship and the creative arts. They also will research the church's history to show how the evolution of the congregation may have affected its ministry and worship style.

The project team videotaped a dedication service last fall to introduce Ravenswood Covenant to the concept before the congregation agreed to be part of the study. Other rites and sacraments will be videotaped as well, according to the project team.

The goal of the project according to project members is to provide a "flight simulator for ministry." They see the study as a resource to train ministry students in the art of applying the history and theology of worship to the local congregation. They hope that, after the Ravenswood Covenant project is produced, they can conduct similar experiences with a handful of other congregations.

"When a seminary student comes out of school, we need to teach them the questions to ask in terms of ministry," said Johnson, a parishioner at North Park Covenant Church in Chicago and an ordained Covenant pastor. "And within each denomination, interpretations of worship are different. There is nothing out there to teach pastors how to do that. This technology will allow us to interview people at a church, to get the demographics of a church. There's the theology and there's what's in a book, but we'll show students what it's like when something actually happens in worship."

"We're entering the life of a congregation for a year," Caccamo said. "And it will change the course of this congregation's history. We needed a congregation that understood and saw the value. And if this succeeds, it will change how we teach worship in this country. That's a great blessing to us."

Project leaders perceived Ravenswood Covenant as an ideal subject for the initial study because it has a theology and church population (about 140 in average worship attendance, according to recent statistics) that many seminary students could envision serving. "We needed to choose a church that a wide variety of Protestant seminarians could have an open mind about," Caccamo said. "And the Covenant church, from what we had heard from others, was thought of well. We didn't want an obvious barrier (theologically)."

Leaders also believe Ravenswood Covenant is a good model because it changed its worship style from traditional to contemporary during the 1990s without discernible strife or attendance fluctuations. Average worship attendance, according to recent Covenant Yearbook statistics, ranged from 159 in 1991 to 168 in 1999.

"Worship is splitting the church and we need to help pastors negotiate the minefields that divide the church," Johnson said. "We need to ground our future ministries in the process of discerning liturgical issues in the church. Ravenswood Covenant reflects the ongoing change of worship - like it or not - and the way the church did it went successfully. That made the church attractive."

Kletzing believes that his church will benefit from being part of the worship study. "I'm proud to be part of the study and I'm proud for the church," he said. "They had a lot of criteria for this and I'm glad they saw us as a congregation that was open to being part of it.

"I am excited about entering into this study of our biblical theology and practice of public worship," he continued. "We envision that our experience will strengthen our understanding and application of worship, which weaves together diversities within a teachable urban congregation into a spiritual family of God. We are honored, and I am grateful to Leslie Hodgkinson and our Ravenswood Church people for welcoming this occasion."