Epiphany

Today I really got back into the swing of church work because our regular groups started meeting again in the new year. This morning, it was the Sharing As Caring Christians fellowship, or SACC. They meet around food and take turns sharing devotions and then a lesson for the day.

This is one group that I really feel blessed to be a part of, because normally, I’m just another member of the group. I don’t have to have my pastor or teacher hat on, unless I want to have it on. I can simply come and be.

For the next six weeks in the group, I will be leading our lessons based on Joyce Rupp’s “The Cup of our Life.” It is a study that I have been wanting to do with others for some time now, and I’m really looking forward to it. A hidden desire out of this is also to get the group to each bring their own mug for use each week, so that we aren’t constantly using styrofoam cups.

After SACC group, I took some time to finish work on the bulletins for Sunday. I am a very rudimentary piano player… I can pluck out a tune with one hand, and sometimes I can get some harmony in there if I am really slow about it. But it is always easier to pick hymns if I am at the piano and know what each one sounds like. It lets me know how easy they are to sing, how familiar they might be, and something that is also important to me – how well they each fit together.

One of my passions in worship is a well fit together service. I want the message in the music to match the message in the written word, to match the message in the spoken word, to match the message in the prayers. Then, at least in one way or another, the congregation will have the gospel come to them, and hopefully reinforced.

What makes that difficult, is that it takes a lot of time to put a service together. And because I change the order of worship and the liturgy to match whatever season we are in, it also is a challenge each time a new season begins to craft the structure for the next few weeks. The upside is that the congregation never fully settles into a routine in worship, and at least while I’m here, they can’t ever say “but we’ve always done it this way…”