So this year, as would mathematically make sense, has both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day on Sundays. Last week we began contemplating what to do with the Christmas Day/Sunday service. This week, join in as we wonder how to best ring in 2012…in worship. What ideas, thoughts, germs-of-phrases, songs, or actions do you have in mind? What kind of service would you like to have, if you could do anything you wanted?
Share your ideas, hopes, and dreams–for the New Year’s Day worship experience, and the New Year–here!
John Wesley wrote a covenanting prayer for Watch Night, New Year’s Eve:
I am no longer my own, but yours, O God.
Tell me what you want me to do, and I will do it.
Tell me who you want me to work with, and I will join them gladly.
If you want me to work, I will work.
If you want me to wait, I will wait.
Let me be raised up or put down for you, let me have many things or nothing.
I offer all that I have and all that I am to you, glorious and blessed God.
Help me to live each day to your glory.
And this covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.
We’ve done a modified recovenanting/baptismal remembrance service at our church either the first Sunday of the new year or on Baptism of the Lord Sunday – and have incorporated a similar prayer. Always well received. Last year we filled the baptismal font with small clear glass pebbles and invited those who wanted to to come forward, dip into the water of the font, and take one as a remembrance of baptism.
The congregation I serve is having a New Year’s Day Hymn-Sing. I’m off that Sunday, and the worship committee thought it would be fun to do something a little different. (I freakin’ love the fact that the congregation I serve is not so stuck in a rut that they can’t do something different!) So we’re writing some new year’s liturgy and putting together a shell into which they can incorporate some singing. Once It is finished, I will post it here.
I’m going to steal a friend’s idea (Anita Milne, Plainsboro Presbyterian Church in Plainsboro, NJ) and use Ecclesiastes 3 as a guided meditation. I haven’t fashioned the bulletin yet but my hope is to include space for people to take notes as they consider the year behind them and look toward the year ahead.