I am blocked...it's my turn to preach this weekend. We'll be celebrating Communion, so it will be a shorter meditation rather than a full length sermon. There are endless stories and themes in Scripture that could be maturing into an excellent sermon...but nothing is inspiring me at the moment. Even my faithful fallback, the lectionary (a 3 year cycle of readings that deals with the whole of the Bible as well as the cycle of the church year) has let me down; this week's text is the Parable of the Prodigals, and I think that's probably the one of the first sermons I posted here in January. I'll get there; I've just been distracted and tired and need to spend a little focused time reading and studying.
In other news, I've had great fun with music for our new service. Although attendance this week was about half what it was the first week, I think it's something more reasonable. Now we just have to work on reaching out to folks who are unchurched, which is our primary intended audience. What is interesting is that we also seem to be meeting a need in some of our "regular" members for a different kind of worship experience than we are able to offer on Sunday mornings. One of the original aims of this service as I remember it was to provide an alternative for some to the Sunday morning services...so we have a twofold goal. It will be interesting to see how that works out.
So back to the music: once upon a time in a prior life, I worked in Christian retail. While I was there, several exciting things happened: Christian fiction began to take itself seriously, with dramatically improved editing and plots. The Veggie Tales came out. Who knew singing, dancing, talking vegetables could be such fun? And Christian music began to move into the mainstream with new groups like Chris Rice (my favorite living musical theologian) and Third Day. So I learned a lot back then about modern worship music (its own genre at this point). It's been great fun to update what I knew and to learn some of the new material out there...some of it's quite good.
Well, guess I've avoided sermonizing enough for one evening. Time to hit the books!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Due to an increasing number of spam comments, I've had to resort to comment moderation. I don't plan to delete any comments that aren't spam, but be nice anyway. My family reads this blog.