At different times and places, people have sat, reclined, stood, or knelt during Eucharist. Individual worshipers have received the bread and cup from leaders, passed the bread and cup from hand to hand along the pews or around a circle, or served themselves from plates or baskets set on a table.
I began my vocation in information technology during the birth of the modern Internet, and now as a pastor I am captivated by the next great shift: from the Information Age to the Age of Intelligence, with its potential to transform not only how we live and work, but also how we preach.
There are few things that permeate most people’s lives in nearly every cultural group across the globe as thoroughly as music, and this has likely never been truer than in current days, when the majority of us carry pocket computers holding thousands of songs, with Internet access to seek out thousands more.
Westminster Presbyterian Church’s experience with hosting the renowned Bread and Puppet Theater is an example of how a local church might translate André Daughtry’s discussion of the Judson Model in their own context.
For its 2018 exhibition season, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City mounted a show titled Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, which was a gallery exhibition and performance retrospective highlighting the experimentation of a group of dancers and visual artists who performed in the 1960s inside the Judson Memorial Church situated in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
If your congregation were to close their doors and sell their land tomorrow, who would notice or care? Would the community in which your congregation is located feel a significant loss? Are there mission partners within your town or city who would suffer?
Others, experts in worship and liturgy, explore how liturgy (the order of worship) is the work of the people. Some of these experts have sought to make sure that the people who are at the heart of liturgical work are as diverse as possible. As an eco-theologian, I return again and again to the words of Genesis 1:1 (and following) as a starting point for liturgy and a guide for faith—as a way to map whose work it is to create and be part of liturgy.
I’ve been asked to offer blessings in a lot of different settings throughout my years as a pastor. I’ve blessed children, pets, dinner tables, new homes, backpacks, marriages, and burials. I’ve been asked at the last minute to say the blessing at a wedding reception so many times that I keep a prayer saved in my phone to pull out at a moment’s notice. But I had never blessed a tree, until this year.
I grew up fishing every summer with my family. We would travel to south central Missouri to fish for rainbow trout in the valley of the Ozark Mountains. We skipped a few years when I lived farther away in seminary and then as my wife and I were starting our family.
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