Fresh Summer Worship

From the Summer Worship Design Team

The following article by Adrian Luxmoore on behalf of the Summer Worship Design Team appears in the June 2010 Epistle newsletter.

Warm & Welcoming Summer Worship

At 10:00 a.m. on Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2010 St. Paul's will try something new. We will offer a liturgy that has been designed from scratch. We will offer a liturgy that is intended to provide a rewarding and moving worship experience to all of the St. Paul's family. It will contain a wide variety of music, some of it familiar, some of it new - what is new for you may be familiar to your neighbor and vice versa. We will include some quiet time for reflection. We will reduce the amount of furniture in the chancel to allow the focus to be on the central element. Some of the words will be familiar and some will be new, an opportunity for us to hear new messages from God, new invitations to ministry.

We hope to connect our worship to our ministry in the world. Each Sunday we will ask a different group, engaged in a specific ministry, to serve in our worship as greeters, readers and Eucharistic Ministers. We will recognize them in the announcements and pray for them in the prayers. We will connect our ministry in the world with our worship during the service just as we do when we recite the prayer at the end of the service. We hope that the participation of these groups will help encourage a sense of community and perhaps some of you will be moved to make a connection with a new ministry. We hope too that it will involve more people in the worship ministry at St. Paul's

We are going to provide some educational material. Each Sunday the Grace Notes will include a note about some aspect of the liturgy we have designed. Often we will touch on the specifics of why we did it that way in this service but also we will include more general information about the theology of every Eucharist. We will collect all those notes in one area on the Web site for future reference.

Opportunities to Share, Question, Reflect

After the worship service on the fourth Sunday of each month during the summer we will offer an opportunity for anyone who wants to share their experiences and/or ask questions about the liturgy. Or, you can talk to the clergy, write a note on the tear off sheet on page 4 of the Grace Notes bulletin insert, or email your comments to Adrian Luxmoore (amcl@aol.com).

We hope and pray that you will come to worship each Sunday this Summer with an open mind, open to experience worship in a fresh new way, open to God's message to you, open to receive God anew into your life. That you will come and worship in the fellowship of all the members of St. Paul's; those you see most Sundays during the rest of the year and those who you see less often because you are on different schedules!

Our goal is to offer a high quality, warm and welcoming worship experience that involves the whole congregation, honors our diversity and expresses our connections to one another. And especially we hope to provide opportunities for rich experience and deep meaning. Please let us know how we do.

Get Involved

Looking for Groups to Feature

Do you participate in a ministry or group that would like to be "featured" one Sunday during the summer? To volunteer, contact Sally Ray Griffith at sallyg (at) i-c (dot) net) or Adrian Luxmoore at amcl (at) aol (dot) com.

Lay Ministry Sign Up

On Sundays throughout May, we had a Lay Ministry Sign Up table in the Gathering Space for Chalicers, Lay Readers, and Prayer Leaders. If you didn't sign up, there's still time! Contact Sally Ray Griffith at 285-7124 or sallyg (at) i-c (dot) net.