One Sunday service during Lent
A happy convergence of factors has come together to make this Lent an auspicious time for a liturgical experiment, meeting in one service on Sunday mornings to offer worship together on five Sundays in Lent. We need your help, and we enthusiastically invite you to join us in this experience.
Several times last year we gathered as a single worshiping community. A common response was, "That was fun; we like worshiping with people we don't often see. We like the combined choirs and the multi-generational experience! Let's do it more."
All summer, our services were held "in the round," with the altar in the middle of the nave. Again the response was positive: many parishioners liked the sense of the whole, visually and liturgically. There was, from many, a desire to join together more often.
We have never tried a single service over a given period, to feel what it is like to be together as a whole more than two or three times a year. The Lenten five-Sunday liturgical experience will give us the opportunity to be together for a series of Sundays and to share our experience of this time and join together in discussion and evaluation. The service will take place at 9:30, followed by education for all ages.
Our Long Range Plan includes a focus on developing some new liturgical experiences. We will be experimenting with a Saturday evening service, but also wanted to extend our creativity to an offering in which all parishioners would take part.
Our Canon Precentor, Mark Howe, returned from sabbatical last year with wonderful ideas for enriching our worship life. He is excited, as are our clergy, about the richness that will result from coming together as a worshiping community. It will allow all our resources to be focused on one service: choirs, lectors, acolytes, ushers, altar guild.
Lent is a perfect time to try this out. We will be able to journey together through Lent, centered on worship. We will follow the theme of "desert" in both preaching and study. Education for All Ages following a single service will also allow us to offer a focused and thoughtful adult Lenten series enriched by our joint worship.
Lent will also offer us a time to be together for a month as a church family as we prepare to say good-bye to Dean Ken Poppe. Praying together during the Sundays in Lent as a gathered faith community will enable us to engage in our good-bye process more directly and more richly. The intentionality and quality with which we say good-bye to someone central to our life at St. Paul's sets the stage for the intentionality and quality with which we will discern and then welcome a new Cathedral Dean and Rector.
This is an experiment. Would it work for the summer, for Advent? We don't know, and a good way to test the waters is to try this in Lent. You might wish to take mental or physical notes and share these during our feedback times.
Consider this an invitation to enter into the experience as deeply as possible as we offer prayer together as one body during Lent. Stay awake and alert to blessing. Let is wash over you. And remain open to all that you experience and feel.
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