Newsletter is now Email

The newsletter’s gone full-digital

You’ve probably already noticed that the Friday email looks a little different these last few months. First, we cut back to twice a month, instead of every week, to save time in the office, and because it was no longer needed to send a unique link to each service video each week. When we first went online in 2020, services were pre-recorded, and I would compile all the clips into a single, large video on Thursday afternoons, and upload them on my home computer, which was faster at the time. However, it still took all night, and I wouldn’t have the link until Friday morning, at which time the email went out.

When we upgraded our livestreaming system, we were no longer able to have a link to the videos ahead of time. Instead, you now just go to the church Facebook page, or YouTube channel. Now that it’s the same link you go to every week, the need for weekly emails just wasn’t there.

But, over time, we started upgrading the quality if our emails. Instead of just me sending text, we use a service called mailchimp, which allows us to format emails much like a web page – adding photos, links, color, videos, all sorts of things. As time went on we kept adding more and more notices, events, articles on Fridays. I noticed this fall that we were duplicating a lot of the material between the email and the newsletter, but having to spend the labor hours for Angie to format and email, and do all the graphic design and layout for the printed newsletter. As a stewardship issue, it made sense to just make one, really good, Friday email that goes out twice a month, and print out the email in a booklet for those who need it. This is why the Monthly Log-In you find by the front doors looks so different.

The Friday email will come in two versions: the full, beginning of the month, and the shortened, mid-month. The full version is what’s printed, and will include the pastor’s column, council minutes, worship assistant schedules and such. The mid-month version will be shorter, and will focus more on current events coming up, as well as anything that came up and missed the deadline for the big one. I’ve found, over the years, that getting submissions for the newsletter by a hard week-before-the-end-of-the-month deadline is getting harder, and things are coming up on more short notice. This allows us the flexibility to update if we miss anything at the beginning.

I hope you’ll enjoy some of the new features in the upgraded email:

·        Embedded videos of meditations, services, special events.

·        More photos

·        Links at the bottom to synod news, ELCA news, more of our videos and resources, bulletins, and more.

·        Ability to read all the news on an electronic device, without having to download a pdf and try to move it around the phone screen to see it all.

One more change is that larger articles, such as my pastor’s columns, will not be on the email in their entirety. Instead, we’ll post the beginning, and put a link to the full article on the church web site (lordofgrace.org/news). Our web template allows us to create as many blogs as we want, so we brought back one for news and events that had been hidden for a couple years. All longer articles will go there, so when you click the “read more” button it will redirect you there. The one exception will be the council minutes, which will remain in pdf format. I have a philosophy that members should have access to the business workings of the church, but visitors and seekers online don’t need to.

So, I hope you enjoy the new format. We will continue to print paper copies and put them by the front door, as well as mail paper copies to the handful or so members with no email access. Otherwise, here’s to a new year and a new update.

Pastor Lars

The Church Emerging - Pastor's column Jan 2023

As I was starting in ministry at the end of the 1990’s a movement was starting called “emerging church” (I won’t capitalize it, because, to be cool, they never capitalized anything either). It was full of Gen-X pastors with grunge music in our CD players and postmodernism in our philosophy books. Buzzwords like “deconstruction”, “juxtaposition”, and “bricolage” were all the rage. We wanted something in our churches that seemed to resonate with a new way of thinking and experiencing God, something of a more fundamental change than just updating the musical style and having the pastor rip his jeans and untuck his shirt (an evangelical liturgical garb that has shown amazing staying power). The idea was that, in a post-modern world, people didn’t learn or experience in a strictly linear or verbal way, which is how most church worship has been for centuries. What about non-linear worship, with multiple things at once? What about art and visual media? What about being hands-on, interactive, making things with clay or putting things up? And, does the sermon have to be like a one-way lecture, or could it be interactive?

Emerging worship service I did at Our Saviour’s in Tucson back in 2006. We had tables to sit on, candles on the altar, and this paint project called “the tree of life”, where I projected the tree onto the hanging muslin with an old-school overhead projector. We then painted the tree during the service, and turned the projector off to see what the new tree looked like.

All of these concepts were backed up, to some degree, by research into cognition and pedagogy. We know that we remember better when we reinforce the idea with physical interaction, and we know that lots of people learn better with visuals than just hearing. But to bring that into worship? What would that look like?

So some early pioneers did the metaphorical, and sometimes literal, raiding of the attic. They pulled out the old velvet couches and brass candlestands and icons that had been put away by the church-growth experts as being too “churchy” and not “seeker sensitive” enough. And they got the old sanctuary or the small chapel, decorated it with paintings, and had people sitting scattered around with prayer stations, ambient music, and art projects. It was like Montessori church with candles.

An emerging worship service I did in 2014 called “encounter”

To a lot of people, this was ridiculous. To those of us on the inside, it was the coolest thing ever. I remember how impactful it was to experience the first time, and how excited we were to do this new thing. Of course, no sooner did the evangelical churches hear about “emerging” as the new thing, but they tried to hand the “youth pastor” a budget and the old “youth room” to do that “gen-x outreach”. But, underneath it all, they kept the same fundamentalist theology and social politics. Bible=literal. Women=submission. Marriage=one man one woman and nothing else. It was, for them, a new stylistic fad to bring in new recruits, not a sea-change in worldview.

Emerging Theory is a scientific and philosophical concept that goes something like this: when an organism forms to a certain point, characteristics come about that are not simply predicted by the building blocks of the organism. In other words, things like life, consciousness, feeling, reason, meaning start to be thought of, but simply combining the molecules in the body doesn’t predict this. It’s sort of like a leap is made where the new organism is greater, and a step above, simply the sum of its parts.

A prayer station with icons from the House For All Saints and Sinners in Denver. Note the bean bags to sit on, “juxtaposed” with the icons, candles, and christmas lights. It’s creating a sense of holiness and transcendence, along with warmth and comfort.

For church work, this became adapted to be something more like, if a bunch of Jesus followers come together to pray, explore, learn, support – that something bigger is spontaneously created (with the Holy Spirit) than just individuals in a room. But it isn’t really something you can craft, but something that emerges from the group. You create the conditions for exploration, experience, belonging, and the form of the church and the truth and the experience will emerge.

You can see how this, ultimately, didn’t work with churches that are either heavily doctrinal, as they worry about how to make sure what emerges conforms to the beliefs we already know are right. And it also tends to get squashed if it’s within an existing church that has power structures and traditions that get threatened by the “weird stuff those kids are doing in the old chapel”. Like all creative things, it had to have it’s own space, it’s own context of both freedom and faith to succeed. And, it’s hard to replicate on a mass scale. The old fashioned “charismatic pastor with good band and lots of youth programs” still worked better for that.

Now, twenty-some years later, “emerging church” isn’t much of a thing. The upstart communities struggled to maintain good order and deal with institutional realities (paying the pastor, the rent, doing stewardship – the bread and butter stuff that you can’t wait to “emerge”). But the concept of learning non-linearly, and embracing art and creativity, and making worship flexible and collaborative, and focusing on context as “setting a space for people to encounter God” are still good insights we learned from it all. I hope to keep them.

We’ve experimented with interactive prayer stations and hands-on worship at Lord of Grace, mostly in mid-week services. Here’s a prayer wall from 2021 made from chicken wire fence mounted on a wood frame. People put their prayers on paper, rolled them up, and stuck them in the holes. It’s reminiscent of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the last foundation, and all that remains of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.

Which brings me back to Lord of Grace and our two big initiatives right now: the strategic plan and the capital campaign. The strategic planning committee has been meeting, and developing a new mission statement, and will be coming around to the different ministries to ask questions about how you can help the church accomplish its goals. How can your group connect with the non-religious in our community, and change lives, and spread the Gospel? The plan is that we will ask the questions, and pray that the ideas and actions that will move us forward will, with some guidance, “emerge” from among us. It’s exciting work, once you get into it, to let the spirit speak to you and get inspired about making a difference.

The second part is the capital campaign. To date we have completed:

·        Exterior painting

·        Painting the fellowship hall

·        A mural

·        New roof underlayment

·        Livestreaming equipment

·        Two new HVAC units (sanctuary and narthex-nursery)

·        Tiling in the fellowship hall and classrooms.

It’s been amazing how much we’ve done. I have to thank everyone again for all your generosity that made it happen.

The next phase will be to look at our sanctuary. A team has been put together to make recommendations to the council for upgrading and turning our sanctuary into a worship space that will be most effective. Other than removing some pews, little is different since 2002. The carpet is original, and needs to be replaced, along with some basic maintenance things. But when the team met this month we had a good discussion about what kind of room would be best for the next 20-30 years. That required digging back into the old wisdom of emerging church, and talking about the values we want to convey, the way people experience God, what kinds of uses might be needed, and how to make the space flexible for new and creative worship experiences.

We will have forums coming up, once plans are more concretely formalized, to show everyone everything we’re looking to do. But to give you a sneak-peak at some of the values and ideas that came out initially.

Warmth

Art

Beauty

Creativity

Flexibility

Color

Nature

Freedom

Openness

Community

Multi-Generational

Christ-Based

Our sanctuary today (taken in Advent). We’re imagining what we could do with this, how make it a place for future generations to encounter God. What could bring us into the future? The room is one thing that I consistently get feedback from visitors on, particularly the rock wall with the cross. it conveys a sense of transcendence and warmth that people are drawn to.

The plan is to start with the inspiration, the values, and work down to the specifics, let the specifics emerge from the brainstorming, instead of jockeying and negotiating between personal preferences. We want to position our sanctuary to be a space to encounter God, not just today, but 30 years from now. You can’t predict what that will be, but you can create a “context” for the next generation to experiment and experience in.

Doing God’s work today is not a game of just working harder, but when you can’t predict so much of the future, and things change so quickly, you have to be in a perpetual state of openness to the Spirit and adaptability, to let God speak and let the new direction emerge from prayer, community, and worship.

Peace,

Pastor Lars

Healing for Advent - Pastor's Column December 2022

A couple years ago I decided to bring back mid-week Advent services. I don’t remember ever doing them at LOG myself, but I think one of my predecessors may have. Either way, I didn’t want to do them for years because I didn’t want to just add “one more thing to do in December” to the church calendar. We all have busy lives shopping, going to Christmas parties, end of the school year plays, and end of the year reports and such. Who needs one more thing.

But then someone referred me to a progressive Christian web site called sanctifiedart.com that offered creative and interactive ideas for services. I dug around, and found Advent healing services there. It intrigued me, what if the mid-week services could be not another thing to do, but a chance to not do: to sit, to just be, to relax, to reflect, to contemplate, to be still and let God be God and just soak in God’s presence? And what if we could broadcast these online, so people at home could follow along and find some rest and peace, and connect with Lord of Grace? I was hooked.

So we did the services last year, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Our prayer team came through with individual places to pray with prayer team members. We had some interactive art things, hands-on prayer stations, some cool videos of paintings being made to guided meditations. It took a lot of work, but I had many people tell me how it hit the spot.

It made me grateful, because I spent most of the services obsessing about getting the livestreaming technology to work, which it did most of the time.

During the last service, the Longest Night service, the one that deals with grief and loss, we got to a point where 5 minutes of meditation was planned. The old iMac computer decided to lock up at that exact time, and wouldn’t shut down or restart with any speed, so it became a 15 minute meditation time. I was freaking out, but the music kept playing, people kept praying, and we just handed out bulletins for the rest of the time.

More than one person told me they loved the long meditation. I guess I need to remember the value I had in making the service: to just be, and not do.

For this year I decided to do it all again – the exact same services, with the same liturgies. Instead of having something to rush to do in Advent, we now have four services to have no rush, but just to really be, especially at this time of year when the Christmas cheer can bring up all sorts of painful memories if you’ve lost a loved one who you won’t be celebrating with, or someone died around this time, or the holidays somehow remind you of some bad memory. With the world filled with cheer and wassailing, we’re providing space to let out, name, and be with God IN the struggle. It’s not meant to take away from the cheer, but to better experience it without it being fake.

And I won’t lie that I have a certain bias towards doing hands-on things in worship. It doesn’t always work out well, can take a lot of time and planning, and isn’t for everyone. But for those of us who learn and process in ways other than hearing words spoken and reciting words, who learn with our hands by making and creating and exploring and writing, these services can be super-powerful. And, especially if you’re distracted, stressed, have ADHD, or some difficulty sitting for long periods of time, prayer stations and interactive worship provides a way for you to put your whole self into it.

So I’m looking forward to another Advent of taking time to heal. In fact, I thought the topic was so relevant, especially coming off all the emotional damage we all suffered through with covid, covid isolation, covid fights about protocols, separation from loved ones, loss of loved ones – all of it. We need to take time to heal. And not just one year, but probably for many years to come. Because of that, I’m also doing my sermons on the topic of healing, looking at different facets of healing our whole selves. So we’ll talk about healing the body, the mind, the soul, and the family. I don’t believe you can really be at peace and healthy if these are off, and one being broken can make the others broken too. It’s time for churches to spend less time debating atheists about the predictability of miracle medical cures, and more time talking about wellness, whole-self healing, and being at peace with God.

The Schedule will be so: November 30th, 7th, 14th will be the healing services. Same liturgy each week. The 21st will be the longest night service, that will focus on grief and loss.

Then we will celebrate, as we always do, the birth of our Lord and Saviour on December 24th with our usual 6pm contemporary and 8pm traditional services. Christmas Day will be a rest day, even though it’s a Sunday, and we’ll worship again as a church on New Year’s Day (also a Sunday) with a combined service of lessons and carols at 9am.

We’ve had a good year of rebuilding in 2022. We’ve restarted many things, gotten back together, and are not looking at a new mission statement, vision, and strategic goals for our congregation. We’re leaning into the future, not letting covid stop us. But we’re also not moving forward without acknowledging the pain of the past, and providing time to work through the wounds we all go through in our lives. Our God is great, and loving, and caring, and wants us to know that love in the grief of loss and in the joy of a newborn’s birth. It’s all part of life, and all part of life with God.

Peace,

Pastor Lars