How was church today?

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We heard a message, "what gives you life?", based on the Acts lectionary passage about the raising of Dorcas. I'm always intrigued when we dip into Acts, because it's really not a book with which I'm familiar.

Little factoid, the Greek word to describe Dorcas/Tabitha's role in the community of Joppa, meaning "female disciple", is apparently unique in the New Testament.
 
I've always been interested in the story of Dorcas – perhaps because it is a surname in this area and it seems to strange to me as a child to hear it as a given name. I like it. My Sunday School papers(pre-new curriculum) picture Dorcas as a young girl that I identified with. As an adult with more Bible study and reflection, I picture her as an older woman, probably a widow who would have been destitute if she didn't live in a community of Christians. She contributed to this community by sharing her talents in making clothing and she was much loved and cared for.

Back to the question 'how was church?'
I was back in my home congregation this Sunday sitting in the pew. Our usual minister who leads in worship was away, so the Minister of faith Faith Development and the service. It was a nice change to have a different voice from the pulpit. The message was a bit light, but comforting and affirming. She has a talent for letting her personality show through and she loves working with children and teens. Two young girls shared in scripture reading and did an excellent job. The conversation time following the service was delightful after having missed it for two weeks in a row.
Although I love occasionally doing pulpit supply, I miss worshiping in my home congregation.
 
We had Dorcas themed window over the door of my old church; and one of the UCW units called themselves the Dorcas Unit.

Skipped church to spend the morning with family. Missed last week too as the local marathon precluded access without going many miles out of my way. Maybe this week ...
 
We had a really fun/moving Mothers' Day church service. In our opening hymn "Draw the Circle Wide", I spotted (from the choir loft) a few ladies dancing, holding hands, and raising hands in wide circle actions. It was beautiful, partly because I know the trials these people have faced in their lives and to see such communal joy was wonderful. Then our newest choir member sang "Wind Beneath My Wings" which was the organist's late mother's favourite song...sang it to taped instrumental music so the organist could sit back and enjoy. Welcome, transformative tears were shed by many. The minister told her usual jokes at the beginning of her sermon, but then shared personal stories of strong, faithful women in her life. Afterwards I told our minister that, although it is the combination of people and spirits that makes our church a family, her leadership and personality also have played an important role. She is not an ordained minister, and sometimes I think she feels a little 'lesser than' when she is with the other local ordained ministers. So, I think she appreciates acknowledgement sometimes. But she also shared with me, that when she saw the ladies dancing in the pews, she shed a few emotional tears.
 
We attended the Anglican church this Sunday. One of the other Anglican parishes in the City is joining us for 3 months, as their sanctuary is being renovated. Our priest took advantage of this to take a sabbatical, so we will have their priest leading the services until August. He has a very different style, but I really liked the way he preached about the passage of Acts that talks about Dorcas. He took an interesting road to talk about our lack of faith based on scientific assumptions that are in fact very new in human history, and have changed so many times. He also talked about how to connect or reconnect with the divine, and the "supernatural" experiences of many people.

I've also been listening attentively to my wife's faith needs and decided to start two groups at the Anglican church as an answer. One will meet every other Sunday after the service to talk about our faith, drawing from the scripture of the day and how it resonates in our daily lives. The other will meet every Monday evening to pray together. We had the first faith talk last Sunday and it was great, and I could see in my wife's eyes that was the kind of experience she was longing for. She was really happy. The other people who joined also seemed to have enjoyed the experience and are looking forward to the next meeting. I used a group Lectio Divina to guide the discussions - so we read, reflected/discussed, meditated and prayed about the topic.
 
GiancarloZ said:
Last week I led the Protestant worship service at the long term care residence where I volunteer as a Spiritual Care visitor.
It was a thrilling experience. I just had 30 minutes to fit call to 4 hymns, call to prayer, collect of the day, prayers of the people, the Gospel reading, a message, doxology and benediction. So it was kinda rushed. But it worked well and I'll lead again on June 30. This time I'll cut something to make it flow better. ...
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How many verses did you do? Where I grew up (Roman Catholic Church), our choir always did ONE verse of any hymn we sung. We very rarely did a second one on famous hymns like the Minuit Chrétiens or on those where we could sneak one in English or German and one in French. So it's always a shock (and a bit boring) when in the Anglican church, we always sing all the verses of a given hymn.

So with your senior people, I would suggest you stay with the first verse or maybe the refrain + one verse. They will have the same amount of music, plus the words they remember the most.

For prayers, I suppose you are using the old Book of Common Prayer (or the equivalent Lutheran one). It uses older English with is much more difficult to pronounce, but those are usually the words they remember by heart.
 
mgagnonlv said:
How many verses did you do? Where I grew up (Roman Catholic Church), our choir always did ONE verse of any hymn we sung. We very rarely did a second one on famous hymns like the Minuit Chrétiens or on those where we could sneak one in English or German and one in French. So it's always a shock (and a bit boring) when in the Anglican church, we always sing all the verses of a given hymn.
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I didn't know about this use! In both church I grew up, i.e. RC and Lutheran, we always sang all the verses of any given hymn.

mgagnonlv said:
So with your senior people, I would suggest you stay with the first verse or maybe the refrain + one verse. They will have the same amount of music, plus the words they remember the most.
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That's actually a great idea. I'd never come with it by myself. This is one of the reasons I love WC2. Thank you very much!

mgagnonlv said:
For prayers, I suppose you are using the old Book of Common Prayer (or the equivalent Lutheran one). It uses older English with is much more difficult to pronounce, but those are usually the words they remember by heart.
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I do use prayers, call to worship, etc., from the Book of Common Prayer. Sometimes I change one thing or other when the word or sentence would be difficult for me, but otherwise it worked just fine.
 
KayTheCurler said:
Even when there is an 'approved' Order of Service, people make changes. Probably no one at a Nursing Home service will complain to a 'higher up'!
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The problem is not the order of the service itself, but the number of hymns to be included and the necessity of including also the prayers of the people - those are elements well loved by them.

The problem is more how can I include those, and other things that I deem necessary, without making the service too rushed. The last time I was really uncomfortable having to speed up, leaving no room for some silence/contemplation and calmness.
 
When I was involved in that type of service we sometimes offered music and meditation instead of a sermon. The services were quite flexible as they weren't specifically provided for a particular denomination. Often a mix of UC, Anglican, Baptists, etc...
 
BetteTheRed said:
Oops, didn't realize I'd already endorsed that idea.

Nice poetry (Mary Oliver is always hot) followed by meditation also nice.
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Mary Oliver used to live next door when I was young but a substitute to the celebrity one ... however with a tall dark daughter of some attraction!
 
I have a daily email from the Bible Society with a short reading. Today it was about Judas betraying Jesus. As soon as I started to read it, I figured no way, don't need Judas today so I deleted the email. Then I go to church and Rev. John preaches a longer than usual sermon on, you guessed it, Judas. Ha ha sometimes you can't run from the negative stuff in life...;)
 
Jude was the power of burying the lighter part in the myth ... dang me and hang it ... thus profound anecdotes and dosey dotes!

Sleep onite ...
 
Another good day of worship in my home church. Our regular minister was back after two weeks in Italy with St. Francis of Assisi. She shared some details of her trip during the talk with the children. The sermon was based on the story of the two people who Jesus walked with as they returned home from Jerusalem after the crucifixion. Love the story – hospitality to a stranger; knowing Jesus in the breaking of bread.
Seelergirl joined us for worship. It's always nice to have family even though she arrived just before the service and had to leave soon after – she's a busy girl and she wanted to get some garden planted before the rain.(Since it seems to rain every day here now, it's hard to find a few hours to do outside work.)
Music was good – familiar hymns. Praise with Joy the World's Creation; Stay with us Through the Night; Bless now, O God, the Journey; and I See a New Heaven. I especially like the second and the last hymn. Stay with us… It's slow and quiet rhythm, and I see a new heaven… Filled with hope and joy and optimism. A great closing hymn.
(Not being musical myself, I'm no judge of the music, but I do know what I like.)
 
Our talk was about disassembly and how the social structure of humankind is unravelling and loosing interest in the story as AI is doing all the processing for us and thus we get a bit zombielike ... walking daedalus? ID travels ...

In the myth the body of humanity is left behind as remnant of the prior past! Present hangers-on don't look fore or aft! Thus that isle feeling ... Merlin being in the depths concocting something in his container ... Jaerd as meta aphorism .. thus the forest beings ... oh Din ... the chaos of fear of the shadows under the trees that form our bour ... the leader of literal function ... essence of strict protocol ... the brokenness of blind healers and modern medicine ... some say it is white coat syndrome and another vision is that this is a form of hypochondria ... chondrosis being a consuming dis ease! We should get out and extend ourselves more ... as a stretch or ankh ... snow Job? --- my blank impression ... like being in the glare of mysterious observer (muttering gods)!

Then in a land where much is ineffable without a good leis ... some flowering politician? Stamen is an alternate of stamina and some of us go to seed ... wee grains of mystery! There's a stranger thought than grasped commonly ...
 
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Well, let me tell you about it.

Every once and awhile my Office Admin takes a vacation and we have agreed that I am photocopier competent so I can run off the bulletins for the service.

This wasn't my first time doing this task. I arrive a smidge earlier on Sunday morning and run off the bulletins. Easy peasy.

We have a special invitation that I have been asked to run. No sweat.

I run the invitation first because I figure I can print it double-sided, cut the page in half and have two invitations to stuff in the bulletins. Not only am I photocopier competent I am paper cutter competent.

I'm midway through the invitations when it dawns on me that I probably should have rejigged the quality of the attached photo. It looks great but no doubt it is using quite a bit of toner. Not that I am worried. A quick look at the storage shelf shows that we have more than a few unused toner cartridges to choose from.

Invitations are printed and cut ready to be stuffed.

I start the bulletin run and know that because of the time it takes each bulleting to print I have enough time to fold a completely printed bulletin and stuff the insert before I need to retrieve the next completely printed bulletin. I'm three copies in when it becomes apparent that we have lost toner.

No problem pause the print job and replace the toner. I can do that.

Ordinarily, I can do that.

We have a new printer/photocopier. It has no pause button. At least not one that is immediately observable.

No problem cancel the print job and start a new one. Buttons are immediately obvious and allow me to do that with ease.

Temporarily.

The computer connected to the printer has a feature which allows it to restart canceled print jobs if they are not killed by the printer control on the computer. Probably a saftey feature in case somebody pushes the cancel button on the printer accidentally.

So understandably the printer resumes the task.

Again I use the printer controls on the printer to cancel the print job while moving to the computer only to not be able to find the printer control options anywhere.

Printer resumes task and I continue to root around on the desktop for the kill function. Which I never find. So I listen to my printer/copier spit out extremely faded bulletins until it has reached the full count.

Oh well, change the toner cartridge and start again. Easy.

Usually.

After much searching, I come to the conclusion that none of the toner boxes sitting on the storage shelf are actually designed to be used with this machine.

Which means we go into the Sunday service without a bulletin.

Lots of Churches do that.

Most of those Churches have the liturgy on powerpoint slides that get projected onto screens.

We don't do that.

So . . . I take the three completed copies I managed to run off and head to the Church. I will use one. I will give the second to the organist. The third will exist in a first come, first served capacity and I will essentially improvise a service using my bulletin as a guide.

I explain to everyone what is going on as there is some consternation about not knowing what will be happening next.

Fortunately, we have the Liturgy for the Lord's Supper already prepared and in the Church so I don't have to improvise that from memory. Which I could do because I know what is expected of me as presider.

I'm slightly unhappy because I use a lot of responses in the service so that we all participate more fully in the service. It is an aberration and we will all live with it. I just have no back-up if I miss something.

Service continues apace. I get to do more extemporaneous prayer than is typical. There is more extended silence where they are doing some directed silent reflection than is usual.

Some appreciate the change and suggest it is something we could do more often.

None express any dissatisfaction.

More attention is paid to the fact that the Iceberg that ran aground in the Cupids Harbour last week is still stuck in the same place.

Office Admin does not get back until Saturday and she has said she will take care of the bulletins then. Normally I don't shoot her emails while she is on vacation. I respect her time away. I think I should let her know ahead of time that we need new toner or I am likely doing the same sort of thing next Sunday.
 
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