Welcome back! I left quite a cliff hanger with my last post. I hope you weren’t in suspense for too long! OK, onto the specifics for our inaugural service -
We plan to start our service by sharing our common goals, vision, etc, that has drawn us together as a community.
Next, we will have a time of community prayer – where we can each share joys, concerns, and prayer requests with one another both verbally and anonymously. We will have a basket (or several baskets) for people to write their requests on – be it a person’s name, a word, a picture, or even just an “X” to indicate that there’s something that needs to be prayed for, but they aren’t yet ready to share. These prayer requests will either be read aloud, or we may just pray over the entire basket. After each prayer request, the group will recite some common response such as “Lord, hear our prayer.”
After we finish with the community prayer time, we will have communion. The four of us felt like we don’t want to wait for communion, but want to have it be an intentional, important part of our worship gathering.
Once we finish communion, we will have a blessing to be led by the Regional Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) minister, Lari Grubbs. During this time, we, as a community, will ask God for blessings of the location, the communion cups/plates, and the people. We envision this as a time for those in the community to share our hopes and dreams for our new church, as the Spirit moves them to do so.
Following the blessing, we will have a brainstorming session, to help identify key ideas, theological questions, and interests that our community would like to explore further. We will use the ideas gathered to determine, by consensus, what our next topic of discussion/meditation/study will be. We intend to discuss this topic until we’re done talking about it, at which point we will, as a community, determine what to study next. During this first service we only intend to brainstorm ideas – the next time we gather, we will come to consensus on what will be our first topic of study.
We will close our first gathering with a prayer.
We do intend to have music be a part of this first gathering, but we have not yet determined what/when/who will share that (we only had an hour, after all!).
One thing don’t foresee doing is having a weekly time of offering. If there’s a special project that requires a donation outside of pledged monies, then we will have a time to request financial support for that project. We may do a monthly offertory time. We (or at least I) like the idea of having a piggy bank somewhere in the room so that there’s a clear space for people to leave money as they wish, but we are going under the assumption that those who pledge, have already thought about how they are giving, and those who do not already have a plan to give or not – we just need to provide a place for them to give it, should they want to.
Finally, an important thing we discussed was that we do not need to justify our reasoning behind any particular decision we make for a particular worship service. If we are led by the Spirit to try something new and different, we will try it. If it works, we may do it again. If it fails, we won’t do it again – at least not in the exact same way.
I’m so excited to be involved in a Positive, Progressive, and Open-minded church. I can’t wait to see what the future brings!
Discussion
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