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Looking Ahead: Palm Sunday

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Alright friends, here we go!!! It’s time to work toward Sunday…Palm Sunday! Are you reading Mark’s sparse yet thrilling Entry Into Jerusalem? Are you focusing perhaps on the psalm instead, for a new twist on Palm Sunday? Are you heading for the passion story? Or something else entirely?

Let’s heat this discussion up (even as the weather cools down for many of us!). Drop your words, phrases, seeds, sparks, ideas, hopes, and dreams for a creative Palm Sunday into the comments, and let’s create together!

 

 

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Just two weeks to go until we wave our palm branches and shout Hosanna! What are you thinking about this year? What hymns, images, or words are sparking your imagination? Will you stick with palms, move the service from palms to passion, or go passion all the way?

How will you set up Holy Week this year? Share your ideas, be they one word, one phrase, one image, a feeling, or anything else (half-formed, unformed, or fully formed) and let’s create together!

Looking Ahead: Easter

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How’s that Lenten Discipline going? One month and one day left of Lent! (not that anyone would count down or anything…)

On Easter morning, do you have a sunrise service? Inside or outside? printed bulletin or no bulletin? preaching or no preaching?

What about the service that happens well after sunrise?

What sparks are just beginning to catch your imagination–ideas, words, phrases, images…or maybe just a feeling or a sense of the atmosphere? What do you need for Easter, sunrise service or later? What have you done before, what would you like to try? Let’s work together to create!

Looking Ahead: Holy Week

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One week it’s a special evening service. The next week it’s planning for the next special evening service… But sometimes these things take time to put together–maybe you have a dinner on Maundy Thursday? special music or art on Thursday or Good Friday? Footwashing? Dramatic interpretation of the story? Prayer stations? preaching?

So…what services do you have during Holy Week? What kind of atmosphere do you hope to create for those services? What ritual actions (if any) do you practice?

Are there images or words that can be the spark that gets our creativity flowing? What seed-words might you have that we can play off of to create new liturgy for these ancient holy days?

Leave your ideas–whether it’s a word, a phrase, an image, an idea, a song, an action, whatever!–in the comments so we can create together!

Liturgy Link Does Ash Wednesday

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Many of you know that LiturgyLink began as an idea tossed around at Unconference and then developed on Twitter…and then funded by the S3 Project at Columbia Seminary (thanks to the Lilly Endowment). Well, the original four liturgylinkers were all together at Columbia last week and we decided we would try to write an Ash Wednesday prayer together.

The first thing you need to know about us is that we all serve in very very different churches, ranging from an urban congregation with 25 people in worship to Southern small-city churches, to a suburban midwestern church with over 200 people in worship. To say we have different contexts and different expectations for this kind of special service would be an understatement. After an hour of discussion (some of it heated) we realized that at least one of us was looking to write a long prayer that could be the backbone of the entire service, another was looking for something about the length of an average Sunday’s prayer of confession. One of us was hoping to focus on the otherness of God, while one wanted to focus on the closeness of God. Etc.

You can see where this is going, right?

We know that everyone who stops by here has a unique worship context–and that means you have something unique to contribute! We hope you use what is useful here, and we hope you’ll offer your creativity, even if that comes in the form of one word, or one phrase that you haven’t developed yet but might spark the imagination of someone else. In that spirit, we offer you what we did manage to put together–a list of phrases and ideas that we didn’t end up putting into one prayer that would work for all of us. But we suspect these phrases will appear in each of our prayers as we finish them up this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Take these seeds (posted after the break!), add your own in the comments, and let’s see what this might grow into!

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the rest of the service

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Happy Groundhog Day, everyone! Apparently, old Phil saw his shadow, which means six more week’s of winter. (Not quite sure what to do with that information for those of us in parts of the country who haven’t experienced much “winter” to have more of). Do you find the seasons affecting your liturgy? Or is it mainly the seasons of a more liturgical nature that inspire you? Or, as Super Bowl (and Souper Bowl) Sunday is this Sunday, perhaps the sports seasons are making a rare appearance this week!

Whatever you are working on this week, feel free to share your ideas and thoughts for the rest of the service here. Do you have a children’s sermon idea to share? Or a prayer? What about some communion liturgy? We’d love to hear from you!