Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Give ‘Er A Quarter Turn

I have a vague memory of a strange little Canadian film about a couple of artists who fashioners some sort of bull’s head. They took the thing on tour and proudly showed off their piece of “art.” The problem was that the horns were not angled correctly. A fact they didn’t discover until and elderly man, who looked like he might have been a farmer, told them to give the horns a quarter turn, hence, the title of the film.

I couldn’t find the film on YouTube, so it might be just my imagination. Never the less, the point I was going to make is that from time to time, even the things we are most sure of, need a little twist, a little tweaking.

That goes for our liturgy too.

It’s been over a year now since we have decided to have a 10:00 am service. I knew that no matter how hard we might have tried, the 10:00 o’clock service could never be either the old 9:15 service or the old 11:00 o’clock service. So, let’s try and create something new at 10:00 am.

Now, it is time for you to help tweak it, and make it better.

The Worship Team has heard that there are people who feel as though something is missing. We need to ask, “what’s missing?” And, how can we improve our liturgy?

The word liturgy comes from the Greek word, leitourgia, and means the work of the people. This is your work; it is not the work of the clergy that everyone else must endure. It is your work and is intended to enhance your experience of the Divine. Not a small task.

Mostly, people seem quite happy with the new time, but what about the liturgy itself? There will be an opportunity following the 10:00 am service on Sunday, February 28. It is a chance for you to put your two cents in. It will be known as Tweak Day.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I want to comment about the liturgy, but I can't seem to get away from "Give 'Er a Quarter Turn" and get on to the Liturgy comments space.

I want to support John's point that the liturgy is "the people's work". To me, that means that we all take part (We sing all the hymns, offer prayers when appropriate, include everyone into the sharing of The Peace etc.)and it means that many different people help with the readings and the Prayers of the People (not just the same ones over and over)and that we help in whatever other ways that we as a community can imagine. With so many clergy in the parish, this could be difficult to accomplish.

Including everyone in the sharing of The Peace means to me that we make sure everyone near us is included, but we wait to greet our friends on the other side of the church or several aisles over until after the liturgy is completed. By doing this we would not leave visitors or new members or people with few friends to stand all by themselves in the midst of the otherwise enthusiastic
searching for people as friends. We are offering The Peace (of Christ, incidentally). We are not having a social contest.