Emergent Cathedral Service at College Wesleyan

I was asked a few weeks ago to coordinate a liturgical service at College Wesleyan Church every Sunday morning. It's a fun idea, although after our first Sunday, I'm pretty tired.

The nature of the situation instantaneously created some different dynamics. So the sermon is piped in from the main sanctuary at exactly (or so I thought) 9:30. "Ready or not, here I come!" And since a service follows at 10:30, I ended up planning to have the "table" before the "word," a quite unorthodox way of going about it.

Then there is my theology and personality, which plays "God fearer" to the circumcised Jew--in other words, I strongly appreciate the high church tradition but don't share its theology entirely. I also don't like it when "personalities" are up front in a worship service. I prefer choirs, special music, and praise bands to be in the back or balcony--out of sight so we can focus on God.

The result was a brain child that would be 1) morning prayer (20 min) + 2) a Eucharistic service (10 min) + 3) just in time for Steve Deneff (30+ min). Readers and officiant would lead from the back so that the only time a person was forward was during the Eucharist. Even then, I (at least this week) followed the Anglo-catholic practice of turning toward God during the consecration of the elements--not to emphasize me as priest but God as the focus in distinction from me. In a retroactive theology, I have decided to have the candles lit ahead of time to symbolize the idea that Christ was there before we even arrived (quite unorthodox, but I don't want an acolyte and you can, after all, figure out some significance that works for just about anything if you try hard enough :).

I spent yesterday fine tuning some old morning prayer material I had and then did the folding and stapling this morning (with a last minute dash to Marsh for the wrong kind of bread--I thought the bread would already be there :)

I think it went pretty well, and I'll put the liturgy as it turned out on my website later today (www.kenschenck.com). But unbeknownst to me, Deneff altered his format to try to accommodate us. He started about 4 minutes early to try to give us 6 or 7 minutes after the service for communion. Then when you factor in the 9-11 video tribute at the beginning and an introduction to the service I felt like I needed to make since it was the first Sunday... we barely finished prayers before Deneff started. So we ended up celebrating the Eucharist afterwards anyway, and I think we'll continue on in that fashion.

All in all, a good day. The Lord's Prayer, the Eucharist, The Apostle's Creed (for today, we'll do the Nicene Creed the first Sunday of every month), a prayer of Chrysostom... a good day.

But Drury thinks what we have here is really an emergent service more than a timeless liturgical one. Oh well. I can live with it.