Spiritual Reflections from Your Pastor, For Such a Time as This
The Rev. Jonathan Linman, Ph.D.
Week of Holy Trinity Sunday 2020: “Another Look at Home Worship”

Dear Friends in Christ:

Our worship at home continues and will continue for the foreseeable future. Only this past week did we have the first meeting of a re-opening working group. Discernment, decision-making and planning for when and how we will assemble again in person for public worship is in its earliest phase. Meanwhile, another working group has been meeting for the past few weeks to make plans for a single watch-through worship video alongside individual video files to accompany and complement the Home Worship resources that we make available each week.

Here is some of what you can expect as our efforts to support worship at home evolve. First and foremost, we do not intend for you to passively watch the video as you might a TV show or movie. No, not at all! What we wish to encourage is your active participation from beginning to end in ways appropriate to your circumstances and routines at home.

The video will begin with a welcome from me as your pastor, inviting you to individual reflection if you are alone or to be in conversation with others at home concerning that which is on your heart and mind as you enter into the time for worship. This will lead into a meditative musical prelude offered by Barbara to accompany and inspire your active reflections.

The order of service in the video and its content are that which is provided to aid Home Worship each week. We are not producing an alternative worship service to that which we otherwise provide. No, the worship video seeks to complement those resources. Which is to say, your active participation can be enhanced by following along with our resources during the video. I will offer the opening acclamation and greeting. Lay readers will read the lessons. You can join with Barbara in singing the psalm. I will, as usual, proclaim the Gospel reading and offer a sermon.

Following the sermon is another opportunity for your active engagement – an invitation to reflection and conversation at home based on the themes of the readings for the day and the sermon. You may even wish to hit pause on the video to allow for that reflection and conversation. After that you, too, can share in gospel proclamation by singing the Hymn of the Day at home, led by Barbara’s accompaniment and a familiar voice among congregation soloists.

Your active participation continues with the prayers of intercession led by Resurrection members. In the pauses, pray your own prayers. The service draws to a close with another hymn, a closing prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer led by another lay member. Before the final blessing, I will invite you to turn your hearts, minds, and attention to your anticipated ministry in daily life in the coming week. Let the reflections and conversations continue into the day as the video concludes.

So, you see, there will be opportunity for active engagement from beginning to end. The ideas for encouraging dialogical engagement in worship emerge from a book that I wrote several years ago, Holy Conversation: Spirituality for Worship (Fortress Press 2010) in which I apply to the shape of the church’s liturgy the movements of lectio divina, or sacred reading, a meditative and prayerful spiritual practice to engage the scriptures. As my book’s title suggests, dialogue or conversation with ourselves and with each other and with God speaking through the scriptural and liturgical word is an important dimension of worship.

The weekly worship video will be crafted and edited by member, Carson Brooke, whose passions and studies focus on videographic creative work. While there will be sights and sounds from our church building, where we long to return with each other in person, you will also see and hear people helping to lead our worship in their own homes. I will continue to offer my sermons seated in the living room of the parsonage, my new home. Hence, worship at home, an extension of the church as intended and practiced by Martin and Katie Luther and their family.

This weekly worship video is a servant tool, an aid, to nurture your active worship at home. The video is not that worship! It’s simply a tool, a resource that serves to complement the other resources we provide online and in print which all lead to your worship. Please engage these resources in ways that are appropriate to your circumstances and routines at home. We aim to be flexible in what we offer, knowing that your domestic realities are not uniform, even as our resources also seek to nurture our common worship when we are apart.

Please make the most of our resources, again in ways that make for your active, reflective, conversational, worshipful and prayerful presence at home. As I have said before, true worship of God is not a spectator sport!

Worshipfully and conversationally in Jesus’ name,

Pastor Jonathan Linman