Beautiful Interruptions / Unwanted Distractions

Last week I participated in the NSW Synod Lay Preachers / Lay Pastors / Lay Ministry / Youth Workers / Children Ministry Workers Inservice, a week with people contemplating ministry, recovering from busy lives, learning from each other, sharing stories…

I also finally met Steve Taylor, someone who I was beginning to think was a figment of other people’s imaginations as we’d failed to meet over the last 4 years even though we have both been in the same country and towns we’d managed to miss each other by one or two days…

Unfortunately during the weekend my Grandma, Olive passed away and, as I packed my car on the final day I realised that my guitar, brought down for worship had been stolen.

On the whole not a great week for me.

I’d been asked to prepare a service for one of the mornings, for it to be 15 minutes long and, if possible for it to be based on one of the lectionary readings in the coming 5 weeks. While the morning worship would be 15 minutes approximately (and depending on how early people woke up from their slumber) I was also asked to prepare an hour long service and pass on my ideas to people at the gathering.

I came to the event with a couple of ideas, but as the week started I thought that I really needed to do something slightly different.

So, as is normal for me I started from scratch and put something else together instead.

What I came up with was a fairly wordy (I don’t like words that much) station-based liturgy in two voices based on the lectionary reading for June 13 Luke 7:36-8:3

I didn’t take any photos though, so I don’t really have much to offer in the way of the how I ran the space, but I thought I’d post the liturgy here. there’s a lot that I’d like to do with it to make it more accessible to other churches/communities, for this gathering was for people employed (mostly) in their local congregation and I had them in my mind when I was writing it.

Anyhow, here’s the liturgy for you in a variety of formats, feel free to use, steal, borrow, rewrite…

As for the setting:

Think two different colours, orange and blue,
Think two doors, one blue, the other orange, at each entrance is a copy of the colour’s instruction / welcome sheet
Think two lots of instructions at each station, (orange or blue) but you only use the one that matches your colour,
Think also that I painted something for each station a tear (tears), a clay jar (perfume), a pair of lips (kiss) and a painting of lines of hair (hair)
And one last touch, a candle in the centre with the blessing sheet (also on blue or orange) where we gathered before finishing.

The music I used for the space included: