The Importance of Worshiip

Kazimierz Bem has written an thought-provoking essay titled “Christianity Cannot Survive the Decline in Worship.” The essay argues for the primacy of worship and the need to resist pressures to scale it back—particularly to make it briefer—and to emphasize good works in the community to the detriment of worship.

When I was on the Worship Commission, I think that St. Paul’s considered splendid worship as its special mission. Even then, I worried that worship needed to be balanced with God’s work in the world.

Read the Bem essay and see what message you see for our parish.

More on Our New Sign

After a number of complaints—mine was probably the least of them—St. Paul’s revised its sign message about being a welcoming church to a message a bit less arrogant. The original message was

The Most
WELCOMING
Church
for All

The current message is below.(When I wrote down the message, I failed to note line breaks and capitalization. Thus, the formatting shown may not be exactly what is on the sign.)

A Most
WELCOMING
Church
for All

Not really a big revision, is it? We have toned down the suggestion of our unique virtue, though we have retained “for all,” suggesting that other churches are more selective in their hospitality.

My personal preference would be to stick with the tried and true:

The
EPISCOPAL
CHURCH
Welcomes You

This message is more personal and doesn’t besmirch the competition. If we do want to emphasize that all are welcome, we could use a message that Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh has used on buttons:

The
EPISCOPAL
CHURCH
Welcomes All

PEP even has buttons with this message I suspect it would be willing to donate.

In any case, I don’t know exactly how to fit messages on our sign. We still have not figured out how to display reasonably legible letters. For example, “8,” as in “8:45,” is pretty much an unreadable blob. How much money did we pay for this? I suspect the problem here is with the software, rather than the hardware. Either we don’t know how to use it, or it simply sucks. There ought to be a fix, and we ought to be insistent on finding it.
 

Lessons & Music

The 10:45 service on the First Sunday after Christmas was described as “Lessons & Music,” which has become our usual label for a version of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,” the service made famous by King’s College Cambridge. The King’s College service is always held on Christmas Eve. Because I had listened to the service on the radio and had experienced a version of it at Christ Church, Indiana, that same evening, I was more attentive than usual to details of the service that St. Paul’s does the Sunday after Christmas. That service is largely the responsibility of the music department, and choir members read all but the final lesson, which is read by the rector. (At King’s College, the final lesson is read by the provost, who, as best I can tell, is the analogue of an American college president.)

Doug always distributes the readings to choir members, but it seems that every year there is some confusion about what readers say before and after their passage of scripture. I had been assigned the first reading, so I couldn’t simply rely on doing whatever the previous reader did, so I decided that we couldn’t go wrong by following King’s College. As you can see from the service bulletin (see link above), each passage is described briefly, and the lesson is concluded with “Thanks be to God.”

I prepared a handout with all the lesson descriptions and the instruction about how the readings should be concluded. When I saw the St. Paul’s bulletin, however, I discovered that (1) we were only reading six lessons, and (2) the bulletin included descriptions of the passages. Our descriptions differed from those I had compiled, but they were serviceable, so I told readers to preface their readings with the descriptions from the bulletin. This worked out fine.

I suppose that, in previous years, I concentrated on what the choir had to sing and somehow missed the fact that we read fewer than nine lessons. I was aware of a fundamental problem with the service, however. It is not a communion service, and, if done at a time when people would normally expect communion—on Christmas Eve or on a Sunday morning—this is something of a problem, however beautiful the service is. Some years ago, we just did our version of the King’s College service, and I felt ambivalent because of the lack of communion. Now, apparently, we shorten the special service and tack on communion at the end. In fact, on Sunday, the service ended earlier than usual.

So what have we cut from the English model? St. Paul’s dropped the reading from Isaiah 11 (no rod out of the stem of Jesse), the second lesson from Luke 2 (no shepherds), and the lesson from Matthew 2 (no wise men, either). You can decide for yourself how essential these readings are.

I have always wondered, by the way, why we insist on calling the service “Lessons & Music,” rather than “Lessons & Carols.” Arguably, all the music paired with the lessons are carols. (Well, I suppose the duet from Vivaldi’s “Gloria” is not actually a carol, but that’s only one ringer.)

Anyway, the service largely went smoothly, although I did have a slight problem. I had misplaced the copy of the lesson (Genesis 3:8–15, 17–19) that Doug had given me at our last rehearsal. When I asked Doug on Sunday morning if I could have another copy, he said he didn’t have one and suggested that I could simply read from a Bible. Happily, I had a backup plan. I had taken my tablet to church and was prepared to read the lesson from my copy of the NRSV on the device. This worked well—almost. In walking to the pulpit, I did not keep my tablet upright, and, when I placed it on the lectern, the device had rotated the text from portrait to landscape orientation. (I had not thought to  lock the display.) I read the introduction to my lesson and turned the tablet 90 degrees. Unfortunately, it seemed to take forever to redraw the screen in portrait mode. I’m sure everyone was wondering why I had inserted such a long pause. I hope I made up for any discomfort I caused by reading the passage reasonably well.

You may have noticed that we did not read Genesis: 3:16. This verse was not omitted by King’s College, although I did do a double take when I heard it on the radio. When I saw that it was not part of the first lesson, I knew immediately why. Here it is from the NRSV:

To the woman he said,
   “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing;
      in pain you shall bring forth children,
   yet your desire shall be for your husband,
      and he shall rule over you.”

The verse is a feminist’s nightmare, but its omission is almost as problematic as its inclusion. Beginning in verse 14, God addresses the serpent after the forbidden fruit is eaten. God addresses the woman in verse 16. God address the man beginning in verse 17. By omitting verse 16, it seems that God is ignoring Eve, who is, after all, an important player in this little drama. God’s ignoring Eve hardly advances the cause of gender equality.

The choir readers were on board with how the lessons were to be read. No one spoke to Lou, however. I assumed I was not going to convince him to do what everyone else was doing unless it suited him. We hoped that he would observe what we did and choose to read the final lesson in like manner. That didn’t happen. He cited the passage and ignored its description. He ended with “The Word of the Lord,” to which the congregation duly responded with “Thanks be to God.” Sigh.

Do We Welcome LGBTQ People?

The image below shows both sides of a cardstock handout from Integrity Pittsburgh that I was given at last month’s diocesan convention. (Sorry about the crease. I had to fold the card to put it into my pocket.)

I am told that the Integrity chapter contacted every church in the diocese to ask if the church wanted to be listed on the card. Why is St. Paul’s, Mt. Lebanon, not listed. If we are such a welcoming church, shouldn’t we stand with Calvary, Redeemer, St. Brendan’s and other diocesan churches? Perhaps this is a question you should ask our leaders.

Click on the image for a larger view.

Sign Messages

As I mentioned in my last post, I noted that our new electronic sign displays multiple messages. As of yesterday, all the messages were generic, however, as opposed to referring to special events. One of the advantages of our sign is that it can be easily changed. Difficulty of use, after all, was at least one factor that resulted in our manual sign’s having fallen into disuse. The big question now is whether changing our new sign will be seen as too much trouble. After all, we are now showing the name of the church, our (questionable) tag line, our worship schedule, and a notice about church school.

What led me to thinking about the use of our sign was the incorporation of a performance of J.S. Bach’s Cantata #28 into yesterday’s 10:45 service. The music was glorious. (Disclosure: I was one of the singers.) In general, Bach cantatas, despite being a treasure trove of marvelous church music, are seldom heard. There is reason to believe that more publicity, including notice on our new electronic sign, might have brought visitors into the church. Why didn’t we post a message on the sign like the one below?

Bach Cantata #28

at 10:45 AM Service

Sun., Nov. 16

We missed an opportunity. How many more such opportunities will we miss?

New Sign

By now, most parishioners will have seem our redesigned sign outside the main entrance of the church. The old-fashioned black interior with moveable white letters has been replaced by an electronic sign with bright—very bright, as it turns out—yellow lettering. The custom frame has been reworked to accommodate the electronic insert and has in other was been spiffed up. Take a look; the redesign has been very nicely done.

There are a few problems with the sign. One is that it is virtually invisible to cars traveling south on Washington Road, as a large equipment box for the traffic signal is in the perfect place to hide the sign. This is not a surprise; we know about the problem going in, but Mt. Lebanon insisted on keeping our sign in the same location. At some point, we might be able to get the equipment box moved (across the street, say), but doing so would be expensive.

I don’t know all the capabilities of the display, but I suspect that we can adjust the size of the letters, as well as their thickness. At the moment, we are using big fat letters that not only restrict how much text can be displayed but also, curiously, are hard to read. One hopes that, with experience, we will get smarter about this.

An advantage of an electronic sign, of course, is that the message can be constantly changing, a capability we are already using. One of the messages is “St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.” Someone remarked, however, that when this message is not being displayed, there is nothing identifying the church at all. Perhaps, the same message could be displayed in small letters at the top of every message; or perhaps not.

Alas, my worst fear (and that of many parishioners) has been realized. Our boast about being a welcoming church has made its way to our newest advertising medium. I have complained more than once about the tag line “The most welcoming congregation in the South Hills for all generations.” (See, for example, “Our ‘Welcoming’ Congregation.”) It seems to show up everywhere. Here it is, for example, posted next to the elevator:

On our new sign, our slogan has been abbreviated:

Our arrogance has grown. We now not only insult every church in the South Hills; we slander every church in the world! I am assured that the rector is responsible for the messages on the sign. He should be ashamed. This message is an ecumenical disaster, and it should be deleted, never to be seen again.
 

Inequality for All

Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh believes that our commitment to Jesus’ message should cause us to be concerned about the growing income inequality in America. To encourage Episcopalians to recognize this problem, PEP is hosting a free screening of the award-winning Robert Reich documentary Inequality for All on November  14. Details can be found on my other blog here.