Theological Fragments

 Last year, we had to completely scrap our plans for our Good Friday Service at Turner Christian Church and develop something that could be done entirely online. The result of that pivot was a Good Friday Service that focuses on personal confession by observing the role of human sin in each stage of the Crucifixion story.  I was actually surprised at how east it was for me to identify all of the Seven Deadly Sins at play in the story. I have embedded the video of our Good Friday Service for you to watch, and pasted the text below. Feel free to adapt and use this liturgy. Hope it's helpful! Good Friday Confession Service Good evening, and welcome to Turner Christian Church’s online Good Friday Service. We are gathered today, across space and time, to meditate on the journey of Jesus Christ from Gethsemane up to the cross, and down to the tomb. In this story we see Jesus Christ confront the power of sin and destruction in the world—our sin, and our destructive acts. In order t...

What is a Blue Christmas Service? Blue Christmas services are a growing trend in the Church. Also known as "Longest-Night," these services are intended for people who are not feeling particularly jolly as the Christmas Season approaches. Some services are targeted specifically at those who are mourning a death. The service I put together (from various sources across the internet, and some of my own ideas) is intended to be open to anyone who is mourning, whether it's a death or a broken relationship, lost job, etc. This can be an incredibly powerful service, with tons of opportunity to minister to people.  What you need for this service The leader book This service is mostly read, so use this document in a binder to lead. The booklet Rather than using a projector, we used a booklet with all of the words in it. This allowed people to follow along without being forced to look up if they are not comfortable doing so. A pianist This service requires backgrou...

Hey everyone! I haven't posted in a while, and boy has a lot happened in the last 10 months! I am now the Senior Minister at Turner Christian Church in the Willamette Valley, and, more importantly, I'm the dad of an adorable 7-month-old boy named James!  Needless to say, I haven't had much time to write posts. However, over the past year I have had the opportunity to write some services for use at our church--for Christmas Eve, Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and baptisms. Some of them might even be worth sharing!  I'm aware that there is a growing interest in liturgy among churches that are part of the "free-church" tradition--that is, churches that don't use prayer books or set liturgies like Catholic, Episcopalian, and some other churches do. If you're in that boat, it can be really difficult to find liturgies for those kids of services. So, since these services are just taking up room on my hard drive, I thought I would pos...