Wow, nothing will make you feel more self-conscious than typing on a laptop in a church coffee shop right after you’ve just heard a sermon on not allowing social media to replace real social interaction. Still, Church of the Resurrection has free wifi, and I have a little downtime before my final service this evening, so I figure I might as well get started.
I’ve attended three Resurrection worship services so far in the past 24 hours, and while the Saturday evening service presented some challenges for me, the Sunday morning services were both highly enjoyable and enabled me to worship on both a personal and a communal level. The reasons behind this variation in worship are complex, and I’ll be spilling a lot of ink over the next several hours --well, actually pixels, but you get what I mean-- trying to explore them. Obviously, this is going to take me a while, but I wanted to throw something on the blog in the meantime, even if just to say that things are going well here.
One of the main questions I’ve been thinking about this summer is what happens when you combine megachurch resources, membership, and evangelism with the sorts of social outreach programs that I’ve seen at churches like New Song, Lawndale, and LaSalle. Right now, it sort of seems like such a mixture would yield a church like Resurrection. In the three worship services I’ve attended so far, which were pretty different in terms of style, the focus on local missions was always present, particularly in the sermon and during Communion.
Well, that’s the hyper-condensed version based on the local outreach question that’s governing my whole summer. As to the specifics of worship here at Resurrection, I’ll be putting up a series of posts over the next 48 hours that will explore the church’s various approaches to worship and how to incorporate local missions into a worship context. I also hope to sleep at some point in that time span though, and there’s also a good probability that I’ll have a story or two to tell following a stop in Topeka tomorrow afternoon, so in other words, I’m going to let my self-imposed deadlines remain a little flexible.
More to come . . .
Peace and Blessings,
Tom
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