Minister's Inter-faith Blog Page 13

Some thoughts on our Easter Celebration


Firstly,  many thanks to all who contributed their talents, voices and energies to Holy Week and the Feat of the Resurrection, Easter.  I was moved by so much of the week, as I made my own difficult journey from light to dark, from my times of depression to a deep sense of Christ present and raised up in our here and now.

As our facilities planning group does it hard work of discerning, what physical space would meet our future vision of ministry in Squamish?  We need to think about what the ministry would look like.  The practical realities are very much part of our planning, but we must dream beyond the confines of our present, just as the disciples when experiencing the risen Christ had to rethink
radically the patterns of their lives.  The well attended Easter service and the very positive responses at the door of the church may suggest that we need somehow to continue and to expand our space as a place of welcome, but perhaps in other formats and ways than we have in the past.  The one hundred or so people who attended Easter came for very many different reasons, but we need to focus on their needs and possible ways of meeting those needs.  I wonder if we might consider other times and forms of worship to add to our current 10:00 a.m. worship time.  Are there other forms of music, and other ways of gathering that we might want to explore?  The way to grow, Church growth expert Clair Woodbury suggest is by adding alternative forms that draw in people not served by current patterns.  He argues that "adding" and not "subtracting" is the way to go.  Keep what you are doing and add new forms. 

This, then, is a call to begin to imagine what these new forms might be.  I hope we can put some of this into practice in the New Year.  Let us dream.  Perhaps a blog of dreams might be one way to open ourselves to the working of the Spirit?


Again thanks to all who contributed to Holy Week and Easter celebration!  Christ is Risen in our time and place, Christ is Risen Indeed!

Daniel .


It is always encouraging to see a good-sized crowd at our Easter services, and it would certainly be nice if we could persuade even a few of these folk to attend church on a more regular basis.  Given our seven-day a week economy, there probably is a need for some alternative time when people could worship, although you are already offering three other types of experience- the mid-week video group and Bible Works, as well as the contemplative worship on Saturdays.  This seems the most that we can expect of one person, and indeed already presents people with a variety of formats.

I think one important lesson from this spring has been the success of the video group meeting in a parishioner's home.  Here is a simple, zero-cost and environmentally friendly method of adding variety to our worship space, one which probably found frequent utilization in the early church.  One could envisage two age groups of Sunday School and Youth students meeting mid-week on a similar basis in the homes of one of the parents of the children concerned.  It would certainly be a mistake to envision building a larger church facility on the basis of Easter attendance; even with a hundred in church last Sunday, this did no more than compensate for small congregations in the summer, so that of the available 8736 hours in the year, we are currently using about a third of our existing space for at most 100 hours per year; this represents an effective utilization of only 0.38% of potential person-hours of space- hardly a creditable environmental record.
Roy S.








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