Category: Preaching

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Good Friday service visit

I almost didn’t go to the midday service at nearby Luther Place Memorial Church (ELCA) but I’m glad I did. My liturgical experiences at this church have been hit-and-miss in years past, but the church conducted worship well and I wanted to comment on what made it successful.

  1. The music was very good. In particular, the vested choir sat with the congregation for the three hymns, only taking their stalls for the final anthem. This filled in the congregational voices. Not there wasn’t a good turnout (there was) but I’ve found Good Friday hymns to be more emotional than most; indeed, I wept and my voice cracked during “Ah, holy Jesus.” (The other two were “There is a green hill far away” and “Jesus, I will ponder thee” which I hadn’t before sung and which successfully escaped the mawkish excesses that Good Friday can all-too-easily develop.)
  2. The readers were better than most I’ve ever heard. One of the pastors — the preacher; sorry, but I don’t have his name as the clergy weren’t differentiated in the order of worship — read the Passion Gospel (John 18:1-19:42) which is one of the longest lessons you’re likely to hear in any church at any time. Breaking it up into three parts might be a help, with music between. But I suggest it not for the sake of easily distracted congregations, but for the reader. It is an emotionally draining passage; the reader wept and choked. I did too.
  3. But I really mention the Passion Gospel because the reader-pastor made an important and legitimate alteration to the text. It is hard to really get into the story when you get a dose of the-Jews-the-Jews-the-Jews. Sensitive Christians have been troubled about this for quite some time, but I confess I hadn’t come up with as elegant solution as I heard today. (And indeed, it was featured in the sermon.) For Jew (religious identity), he said Judean (political identity). It isn’t a euphemism: Jesus was convicted of sedition for claiming (not to play Pilate) the “Rex Judaeorum” and Judean is already used a toponomic adjective.

    There’s enough of a verbal distance to help Christians hear the story without getting coopted into the long history of anti-Jewish violence by Christians, or God forbid, extending it. There’s something to be said by what Jewish friends and family would make of the Passion Gospel. (Indeed, this is the reason I name the congregation, so as to attribute this good practice.)

  4. Polite usher, nicely printed order of service with full music.

Problems? Well, they a modern version of the Lord’s prayer that annoys me because I can’t say it from memory. But they did have it printed out. (Which is good.)

All in all, a successful observance of Good Friday.

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Preachers: don't amen yourself

I know it is a convention — at least in Unitarian Universalist circles — for preachers to end a sermon with amen and sometimes other codas, like blessed be or shanti. This is about amen, if not the others. Stop it. Stop it now. Carl Scovel (boy, I wish he blogged!) broke me of the habit and I thank him for it.

Amen is the word of the people: a liturgical affirmation of what has been said. I imagine the practice is devolution of the prompt, “And let the people say, ‘Amen’.” (Which the people can decline!)

You wouldn’t end a sermon “and we agree with you” so don’t end your sermon (or newsletter column, blog post or what have you) with amen.

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Share your links ('cause that's how the Web works)

Part of the benefit of the ill-named Web 2.0 shift is that

  1. the read-only web can now be both read and written (wikis, personal blogs, YouTube etc.)
  2. a great deal of its strength comes from networks and shared resources

Here’s one that’s easy to learn, use and share: del.icio.us, the link tagging service

  1. Get a del.icio.us account
  2. Use the Flock browser (which I’m loving) or the del.icio.us Firefox plug-in to make tagging your favorite sites easier. (Preachers: this is a great way to mark those tidbits for future sermons.)
  3. Share your favorite links with your friends. Better than those awkward “I’m your cat with a dead mouse/look what I found” emails. Yes, you may share with me; my user name is boyinthebands. (Of course.) And thank you.
  4. Start searching del.icio.us by tags instead of always going to Google. I find great pre-vetted resources that way.
  5. Or perhaps you keep seeing a user’s name. I have a del.icio.us doppleganger and love his links. If the account is public, you can read all of your favorite del.icio.us user’s links in an RSS reader, like Google Reader.

Enjoy your new productivity/obsession.

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Wikipedia helps for preaching

If Google Docs can help me loose weight, why not Wikipedia for preaching? (Not that I’m preaching much these days.)

Not for fact-checking (though I find a well-cited article is helpful for follow-up reading) but for style. Wikipedia has a house style that helps improve reading and factual quality while smoothing out writer idiosyncrasies. While I would hate all preaching to sound alike — and that’s the limit of a common style — there are enough preachers out there (novices, the rusty, the undisciplined, the harried) who could benefit from dispassionate rules and I know there are a few congregations that would approve!

A good number Unitarian Universalist preachers I’ve known have a special set of bad habits, including making broad, unsupported claims. (A breathy, faux-spiritual delivery is another: good style can’t help everything.) Reading and abiding Wikipedia’s counsel against peacock terms and weasel words could well right help.

The full list of style articles (Wikipedia)

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Liberal resources in the old lectionary

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, if you used a lectionary in the pre-Vatican II/pre-CCT lectionary days — and you weren’t from one of the Eastern churches — it was almost certainly the traditional Western lectionary. While today its use is most associated with very conservative folks, this wouldn’t be true of past generations of liberals, say in the Episcopal, Lutheran and Reformed churches.

So what happened to their lectionary planning and preaching resources? Their guides and aids to worship?

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WordPress for sermons

Victoria Weinstein (PeaceBang) introduced me yesterday to a plugin for managing sermons podcast from a church or ministry site that uses WordPress. It’s 0.8 release reference means that all the features planned haven’t been implemented, but it should be welcome in the religious end of web, particularly since it’s easy to install and seems easy to use.

I only wish I preached regularly ’cause I’d want to use this myself!

See here.

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New must-downloads from Google Books

I love a freebie, especially if it’s a book that doesn’t take up shelf space.

The reason I made it to a search of All Souls Bethlehem Church yesterday is because I had just been by the Fourth Universalist, New York site, the successor church to the Broadway church were the famous Universalist minister Edwin Hubbell Chapin once pastored. And I had just found of book of his sermons available at Google Books as a PDF download.

I also found a download of the Gospel Liturgy, which I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before, and Gloria Patria Revised, the 1903 prayer book that gave us the creed I have listed under “Pages”: I had lost my copy and have never been able to replace it! Also a work on early American prayer books that includes the Unitarians — more than just King’s Chapel! — and Universalists. That last volume is helpful because it notes without judgment those elements that made each distinct.

Now the links: