Writing about Universalist Christianity and improving how churches work
It’s not just Christmas that seems to come earlier every year! It’s August and I recently got a request for next year’s Sunday-only calendar.
Will I do it? Of course: after seventeen years, it’s the most popular thing I’ve ever published, a fact that puts my other writing into a humbling context.
Get your copy of next year’s — and this year’s if you have a need for next three months — at the original page from 2008.
The “low Protestant” end of churches offer a lot of freedom in the conduct of worship but frustratingly little published advice for ministers, at least apart from conducting weddings and funerals. So I was happy to find something to share.
Continue reading “What makes a pastoral prayer?”Once again, by request — and for the 16th year! — I am renewing the Sunday-only calendar, useful for church planning. Get it, learn how we got here at the original post from 2008.
Following my recent inquiry, I thought it might be helpful to survey what Universalist Christian and Unitarian Christian online worship options exist. I’ll start with “mainline
” churches, but if you (dear readers) know of others, please leave them in the comments.
I was inspired by the online worship opportunities list from Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative). I’m not sure how out of their comfort zone online worship is, but Ohio YM seems to take mission seriously, so it’s not so shocking. If Quakers worshipping in silence can list their online options, I can scout around, too.
The Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland is a tradition related to the Unitarians and some of their churches stream worship or broadcast recorded services.
Is there a list of United States and Canada Unitarian Universalist churches that still have services online, or even better, recorded services on YouTube or the like? I’m particularly interested in smaller and lay-led congregations. Hoping to see some samples of worship to get an updated sample of styles and operating theologies or outlooks.
Following up on my last article, I went to see if there were liturgical influences from the Free Catholics in the United States. Since there is some overlap with the liturgical portions of Hymns of the Spirit, why not look on that leading Unitarian liturgist and minister, Von Ogden Vogt? He was on the hymnal’s editorial committee, after all.
That search led me (as usual) to the Internet Archive, and a — to my surprise — a full-text copy of his Modern Worship. (There are several scans, this one is the most “book-like.”) Ah: i published in 1927, it came into the #PublicDomain in the United States on January 1. I’m looking forward to reading it, but since I read slowly, here’s the opening passage. It’s hard not to see later influences, down to the title of the subsequent hymnal, Hymns for the Celebration of Life. On page one:
“Our first thoughts together will remark some of the relations of form and content in worship considered under the aspect of celebration. The second lecture will discuss the place of form in worship by a brief note of the formal elements in any work of art, whether pictorial, structural, musical or other, and the application of the findings to the particular art of worship. The third lecture will offer some definite suggestions of concrete material for the different parts of the liturgy, some specific content for modern worship. The fourth and last lecture will seek to discover the formal values and content possibilities to be developed not through the liturgy but by the church building, its structural forms and the symbolisms of its decoration.
There are many ways of approaching the problem of worship, some of them of great value and suggestiveness. For the sake of simplicity and clearness I am proposing abruptly to consider worship as the celebration of life. For the sake, also, of the so-called religious outsider, I put the matter thus. There are many modern men and women of high spiritual gifts who do not find themselves at home in any of the households of specific faith.”
A recent dip into familiar sources about spirituality led me back to A. Elliott Peaston’s The Prayer Book Tradition in the Free Churches (1964; one-hour loan available from Internet Archive) and particularly to its chapter on the Free Catholics. Less than a tradition, but more than a whim, for about a decade after the Great War, the Society of Free Catholics stood against sectarianism, attempted to integrate the heritage of the Church with the contemporary world and in doing so elevated beauty. I’m all ears.
This is a counter-narrative that the war infected the liberal churches with a terminal malaise. Sure, it’s a shame it was a minority interest, but their books — especially the liturgies — remain. When I read about them, I want to know more, and so for a while most of my articles will be linked to this theme, at least tangentially.
There’s a temptation to put the Free Catholics in the Unitarian orbit, but this would be a mistake. While the leading voices had a Unitarian background, they rejected its sectarianism and in their own lives stayed outside (British) Unitarian institutions. Also, the Society of Free Catholics were a diverse bunch, even embracing some Roman Catholics, though admittedly on the Modernist end. All the same, even if liturgies the created Free Catholics — and those that inspired them — found their way into the Unitarian-Universalist Hymns of the Spirit and into the minority consciousness of what deep liberal Christian worship looks like.
Related articles:
I will be co-officiating the Christmas morning service at Universalist National Memorial Church this year. It will be a smaller and simpler than usual Sunday service. For example, a responsive reading replaces an anthem, the announcements are up front and there’s no offering. A litany adds more voices. The sermon, as yet unwritten, will be brief. We’ll meet in the side chapel, rather than the main nave.
I’m publishing this now as a convenience to church members who might be interested but are unable to attend, and for those worship leaders and ministers who are still scrambling, knowing that the Christmas Eve service(s) will be what attracts the larger congregation.
The lessons are Proper 2 for Christmas Day from the Revised Common Lectionary. The hymns are from the 1937 Hymns of the Spirit, but are traditional and ecumenical favorites. Much of the service itself comes from the proper Christmas service from the liturgical section of the same hymnal, updated for language. The declaration of faith is proper to the church.
If you are in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. at 11 a.m. Christmas morning, please consider worshiping with us.
Continue reading “Christmas Service at Universalist National Memorial Church”
Although I haven’t been writing much this year, I couldn’t let All Souls Day pass unrecognized. I thought to look at the All Souls’ Day service in the 1878 Order of Services for the Days of the Christian Year: Specially Observed by the Universalist Church of the extinct Church of the Redeemer, Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Much of the service is drawn from scripture and appointed hymns. While taste in hymns changes, but the biblical reading evergreen and well loved. I thought it would be helpful to pick out which verses went to make this complied reading. (Some of you might find it more useful if drawn from modern translations.)
In addition to an All Souls Day service, it would good for a memorial service or for private devotion for mourners.
The scripture reading, line by line, is:
I was noodling around some British Unitarian websites and noticed the Unitarian Christian Association has worship at 6pm Sundays on Zoom … perfect as a Sunday morning service for much of North America, or at 1pm on the east coast. They invite you to show up a few minutes early and get settled in.
Information link: unitarianchristian.org.uk/liveworship