We had the last church service on Parables this morning. It was based on the Parable of the Mustard Seed. This also coincides with our minister's last Sunday service before going on vacation for a month. While she is away, the church services will be based on Miracles:

August 7: Luke 17:12-19 (Jesus heals the Lepers)
August 14: Mark 2:1-12 (Jesus heals the paralyzed man)
August 21: Luke 13:10-17 (Jesus heals the bent over woman)
August 28: Matthew 20:29-34 (Jesus heals the blind men)

(You can use the links on the right to get to BibleGateway or Crosswalk if you want to read those passages)

These are also the readings I will be using to pick out songs for the weekly singsong. It is interesting that even though we were using the Lectionary before - which meant that I knew what the readings were going to be - I never took much interest in it before. I would just use the readings the night before to pick out songs, but I would not usually even read the passage. Nowadays, I am taking the time to read the passages which I would like to think gives me a better insight into which songs to use.

While our minister is away, the services will be taking for the most part by one of our previous ministers. He was the one who was ministering to the congregation when I first started going to this church. And one of the services will be taken by one of the youths of the congregation. She has been doing the Prayers of the people for the last few weeks so she does have a little bit of experience. I am looking forward to the Sundays in August.

God bless you!

I spent a good part of today working on the PowerPoint presentations for tomorrow's church service. We usually run two presentations: one for the singsong and announcements before the service and one for the service proper. I don't mind spending the time getting those ready as they seem to be very well received by the congregation. All that remains to be done is for me to actually practice the songs for the singsong tomorrow.

I was disappointed to find out last night that it had been three days since I had read the devotional in the morning. I thought I had fit reading the devotional into my morning routine but it was all too easy to forget about doing it. As a matter of fact I don't recall even thinking about reading it and that is what bothers me the most. I guess I will have to start over trying to make it a part of my routine.

God bless all of you!

I am sorry to say that I did nothing today that is worth mentioning in this blog. As a matter of fact, I do not even remember reading today's Devotional entry which I normally read after taking my shower and getting dressed but before I go downstairs to start my day. I have been good at reading it every morning so I am a little disappointed in having forgotten. Oh well, I guess I will read it tonight before going to sleep.

Today was a day were I needed a green dot on my monitor at work (those who have read "Power Surge" will know what I am talking about). Someone sent an email at the office that made me lose my temper and we had a talk in a meeting room about what I thought of his idea. Maybe having that green dot on the monitor would have reminded me to calm myself down before talking with the person in question. I guess I will just have to track one down.

For those who did not read the book: at the author's church, they encourage the use of green dots to remind the people about prayer. You put a green dot where you think you would most be in need of prayer; that way you always have a reminder about God and the help He can offer if you open yourself to Him in prayer.

God Bless You!

Tonight was the 2nd meeting of Love [your city] that I've had the pleasure to attend. We went over a lot of the same things we covered in the last meeting, but this time with an eye on trying to figure out exactly which areas of Esquimalt, Vic West, and View Royal will be having activities taking place. This of course with the purpose of making sure we get to the greatest number of people in the two hours on September 24th we will be doing the "kindness explosion". To read more about it, you can point your browser to www.loveyourcity.com (or just click on that link).

We got a sample T-shirt to show the congregation as well as some cards to distribute so that the congregation knows what is happening and whom to contact if they are interested in taking part. There have been quite a few people interested already. I would dare to say that more are getting involved that I would have thought, which is just great! Of course conversely that does not say much as to how well I know the members of the congregation.

I am continuing to read "Power Surge". I am still in chapter 6, and currently I am reading about the importance of a vision and mission statement. I sure hope we do a better job of coming with a vision and mission statement than my place of work did. The executive and managers got together and came up with the vision and mission statement and I must confess that I never connected with those. As a matter of fact, I am not too sure where I would go to get a copy of my work's vision and mission statement. Let's hope that the one we come up with will resonate with the people that will be coming to the church.

God bless you!

I think I have my songs picked out for the singsong next Sunday. This will be the order (at least for the moment):

For the Fruit of All Creation (VU 227) tune ARHYDYNOS
Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth (VU 320, TFWS 2050) tune MARYTON
You Are the Seed (UMH 583)

Click on the hymn title to see the lyrics. For "You Are the Seed" all I could find was a PowerPoint Presentation; the hymn is on slides 18-20. For the hymns where I have put a tune name, you can listen to the tune in the MIDI section of ChristianTeens.net. For "You Are the Seed", click here to hear the tune.

And by the way, the Bible readings for this Sunday are as follows: Mark 4:26-29, Matthew 13:31-32, and Matthew 17:20a. For those of us who don't know the Bible by heart and don't have a Bible next to their computer you can read them on line at BibleGateway.com (just one of many sites on the web where you can read the Bible - another is Crosswalk.com).

Actually, I think I will put some of those links in my list of links on the right.

God bless all of you!

I guess it is not so much picking when there has already been an agreement to sing a particular song during the singsong. Technically the picking was 3 weeks ago when it was decided we would do the hymn You Are The Seed (UMH 583) for this week as the theme is the Parable of the mustard seed. You can click on the hymn title to hear the melody. The hymn is actually being sung at the end of the service, but I usually go over hymns that the congregation does not know during the singsong so that they will be familiar with it when the time comes.

Which of course leaves me in a quandary: I do not like to sing more than one song that the congregation does not know during the singsong. So since I will be using "You Are The Seed" I should probably keep "Dare to be a Daniel" for another week. This leaves me with most likely just one more song to pick for the singsong.

I have started reading chapter 6 of "Power Surge". It is interesting to read that the aim is not to try to keep everyone; the aim is to remain true to the vision that is being put forth. We know that we will not be able to please everyone but you do not want to be making concessions just to keep the number of members up. This is of course what I remember after quickly reading part of the chapter on the bus while on my way to work this morning. I am looking forward to reading the chapter in depth.

God bless you all!

Since I have already received an outline of next Sunday's service, I can get started on selecting the songs for the singsong. As had been discussed before, one of the Songs we will be doing on Sunday will be Mothering God, You gave me birth (VU 320, TFWS 2050). The only thing I really have to decide is which tune to use as each hymnal uses a different tune. The two tunes used are HESPERUS and MARITON. You can listen to what the tunes sound like by going to ChristianTeens.net, selecting the right section and then clicking on the tune you want to hear.

During the singsong, I ask the congregation if they have a particular hymn that they would like to hear. I got such a request a while ago and I unfortunately had lost the music. I just recently found it and the person that had requested it has repeated her request. The song is called Dare to be a Daniel. You can click on the title to read the lyrics and click on the midi link at the bottom of that page to hear the tune. I will not go as far as to say that I would have chosen the hymn, but what is the point of asking for requests if you do not honour them?

Well it is getting late so I better go to sleep. I will continue this tomorrow.

God bless you!

We are being blessed in that one of the members of the church has volunteered to buy a projection screen to use in the sanctuary for the PowerPoint presentations. This would replace the current temporary arrangement of using a white bed sheet over a steel frame. From what I have been able to gather, the screen that is most likely to suit us is the Elite Screens M113NWS1. He has pointed me to the web site (TigerDirect.ca) for me to look at and I do think that this screen will be the best one in the budget that we have. He has asked me to let him know what I thought and I do think that this will be good enough for us.

I really enjoyed the service this morning. We once again showed, this time to the whole congregation, the Love [your city] promotional video as well as a touching testimonial and I hope that many more people were touched by what they saw and heard. Our minister equated the leaven (that is the theme Parable for today's service) to the acts of kindness done by the participants of Love [your city] and that, under the right conditions, it would cause the faith of the people at the receiving end of the acts of kindness to grow.

God bless you all!

I have spent most of the evening trying to pick out the songs to be sung during the singsong Sunday morning. Tomorrow's service is based on the Parable of the Leaven as well as being communion. So I have picked two songs that fit with tomorrow being communion, one that is suggested for the bible reading, and one that is based on a Psalm reading that was included in the chapter of "Power Surge" we have been reading for the Discernment committee. What I ended up is (in the order they will be sung):

Seek Ye First the Kingdom - Karen Lafferty (VU #356)
Step by Step - Rich Mullins
We Bring the Sacrifice of Praise - Kirk Dearman (TFWS #2031)
Come, Share the Lord - Bryan Jeffery Leech (TFWS #2269 - VU #469)

Where VU stands for Voices United, the United Church of Canada hymnal and TWFS stands for The Faith We Sing, the United Methodist Church hymnal supplement.

God Bless You!

My good mood was tempered yesterday when I found out that my mother-in-law has liver cancer. It was a reminder that our time on this earth is limited. While we know what awaits us in the hereafter it is still hard to deal with the fact that a loved one time on this earth is now much shorter than we thought it would be.

The meeting yesterday was a little more unruly than I am used to. I seemed to me that we did not get as much accomplished this time around as we did last meeting. There was a lot of chatting and it did not look to me as if people were really paying attention. Hopefully appearances are deceiving in this case. I think the point that was trying to be put across is that our church is not very inviting from the outside and that we should pray for ideas on how to remedy that situation.

God bless all of you!

Somehow I should have known that we would not be left without something to do over the month of August. I mentioned yesterday that today was going to be the last meeting of the committee before the fall and that we would pick up again then after recharging our batteries. Well the battery recharging will have to be done while we visit other churches to see what it is that they do right and what could be applied to our church. While this is a very good idea, I felt for a moment there as if I was back in my first year at the university when I found out that "Reading Break" had very little to do about break, but a lot to do about reading. At least I have 6 weeks or so to read the next two chapters of the book.

Don't get me wrong; I am still excited about the process that we're going through to make our church come even more alive and how to bring the Good News to more people.

God Bless All!

I have managed to get through chapter 5 of "Power Surge" a second time. I am hoping to read it one more time before Thursday's discernment committee meeting. This is our last meeting before the fall and we will pick up where we left off after recharging our batteries.

I am still wrestling with the two weblog issue. I like being able to concentrate on worship here without having to worry about what goes on in the rest of my life. But I am still worried that I might not be true to myself by separating the two. I obviously have some more thinking and praying to do on this subject.

God Bless You!

I was kind of lazy today and instead of rewriting my thoughts about the Love [your city] video I pointed our minister to my blog entry of yesterday. Which of course caused me to take a step back and consider how people would react to me having two weblogs: one where I put worship related stuff and one where everything else goes.

I don't want people to think that my Christian life is different than my secular one. It is really all one and the same. My Christian beliefs are an integral part of who I am and they affect all my decisions and/or actions I take in my every day life. But faced with the fact that I had created two weblogs and not wanting to waste one of them I decided to split them along religious/secular lines. Maybe this was not the best way to make use of the two weblogs.

But it will probably end up that most everything of note will be taking place in this weblog and the other one will probably be just a place where I vent about stuff at work. Anyway, I will prayerfully consider how best to deal with this issue.

God bless you!

I have mentioned Love [your city] in my blog before. There is a promotional video that I have been showing at church (at the discernment committee meeting as well as last Sunday during the celebration time). Our minister is thinking about incorporating the video into the Sunday service. The original idea was to show the video during the service on July 31st where the theme is the parable of the mustard seed. After some prayerful thinking, our minister now thinks that it may be better to include the video as part of next Sunday's service which is about the parable of the leaven (as well as being communion). She has asked my daughter's and my opinion on the matter. Well I have been thinking about it most of the evening, and I think that it can fit in either service. The acts of kindness that are part of Love [your city] can be thought of as either seeds planted in the people receiving those acts of kindness or as the leaven that could cause their faith to grow.

Well now that I have written it down, I still think that it makes sense. So I will be sending an email back to our minister telling her just that. All I need to do now is come up with songs for the singsong and figure out exactly how we will intertwine the video and the powerpoint presentation.

God Bless you!

First I should say that the singsong seemed to go over well: at least people were singing out. I started late though and ended up finishing the singsong close to 11am. I usually end at 10:55 so that our organist/choir director has time to play her prelude. I guess today I managed to cut her prelude short. Don't really know why I was late starting as we got to church earlier than usual.

There will be communion at church next week. Time to start thinking about what to sing for that service. I was in error in yesterday's entry when I mentioned that the parable of the mustard seed would be used next week; it is actually the following week. Next week will be the parable of the leaven. So I will have to come up with more songs than I thought as I already have some songs picked out for the mustard seed week. Communion is usually fairly easy to pick songs for. I will keep you posted.

God Bless You!

I did not really want to sing "Jesu, Joy..." for this week's singsong and "Your are the seed" should really be sung next week when the Bible reading will be about the parable of the mustard seed. So I have finally settled on "Grace Alone" which can be found in "The Faith We Sing". I thought it a fitting hymn to sing as it is basically about the fact that everything we do is due to the grace of God. Hopefully people will enjoy it.

I will be making a short presentation about Love [Your city] tomorrow at church; actually more like me saying a couple of words and then showing the promotional video and one testimonial about Love [Your city]. I really think people will get behind this project when they see the impact it can have on those touched by it. Go have a look at the web site and see.

God Bless You!

No, I am not having doubts about my faith (at least not at the moment), but rather I am having doubts about using "Jesu, Joy of Our Desiring" in the SingSong. There is an other song I think I would like to do, "You Are The Seed" that I think would go over well during the SingSong. However, I have yet to check last week's emails to refresh my memory as to where and/or when our minister and I had decided to put the song. Checking the email(s) in the morning will be priority #1. I will have to make a decision quickly as I still have to get the PowerPoint slides ready for the church service on Sunday.

I have taken the "Power Surge" book with me to work and I have been reading on the bus. This makes for a very interesting way of reading the book, this reading between stops. Sometimes I am surprised that I do not tune out the world so much that I would be unable to realize that my bus stop is coming up.

God Bless You!

Well maybe three out of three. But it depends on whether or not I can find guitar chords for "Jesu, Joy or our desiring". The other two songs will be: "Praise the Source of Faith and Learning" (you can read the lyrics here), and O God Beyond All Praising (those lyrics are here). The tunes I will be using are HYFRYDOL and THAXTED respectively.

I have started re-reading chapter 5 of the "Power Surge" book as we are supposed to do before the next meeting of the discernment committee. This time I plan to read the chapter over and over so I have a very good grasp of the material. As a matter of fact, I better go read some of it right now...

God Bless You!

Tonight I think I will just write about something that I have been wondering about. I have read that you should give people "ongoing learning opportunities in both the personal and corporate use of Scripture" [Power Surge, p.98]. I am wondering where one can find these learning opportunities. I would like to be able to start reading the Bible in a meaningful way, but I am at a loss how to do it. I will just have to try and find out how it is done.

Still researching songs for this Sunday, will let you know how it turns out.

God bless you all!

Another week, another chance to pick songs for the singsong and the service. Please do not think that I pick the hymns for the service, I merely make suggestions to our minister and she picks songs based on those suggestions and also the choices she thinks will best fit the topic of the bible passage. This week's bible passage is Matthew 13:24-30, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. The suggested hymns this week that I think would fit well in the singsong are few and far between so I might have to search some more to see if I can find more suggestions.

As I have mentioned in a couple of previous entries, the last chapter we read in "Power Surge", chapter 5, is quite a dense chapter so it has been decided that we will spend the next week and a half re-reading the chapter so we can get really familiar with it. It is really the heart of the book as it delves in depth in the marks of discipleship. I must confess that I do not remember much of the details of the chapter, so it will be good to re-read it. Maybe it will answer some of the questions I have about how to go about including the marks of discipleship into my daily life.

I forgot my notebook at work, which means I cannot send the email I was going to send about what we received at yesterday's meeting. I think I will drive by the office so I don't put off sending the information out.

God bless you!

I have talked about reading the "Power Surge" book as part of getting ready for the Discernment committee. Well tonight was the next meeting of the committee. I cannot put it all into words yet, but I think that we are starting to gel as a committee and we are beginning to see a vision of what being a discipleship type of church is. I think that there are still significant challenges ahead of us, but I would like to think that we will, with God's help, find a way to meet those challenges head on. As for myself, I am ready to go ahead with it. I just don't really have any idea as of yet on how to go about it. I guess that is why I am not the only member of the committee.

Not much else to say for now; except that I need to start to study the marks of discipleship more deeply and more importantly make them a part of my life.

God bless you all!

The discernment committee meeting is tomorrow night (Monday, July 11th) and, even though I have read all the material, I cannot help but feel that I did not really do enough to prepare for the meeting. How can you discuss intelligently something that you have only read once? The material made a lot of sense when I read it, but it feels to me like it is slipping away.

I guess the question is: "Should I not put the same effort in getting ready for the meeting as I would have if this were an exam?" I must confess that I think that the answer to that question is "Yes". And, on that level, I certainly do not think like I have done enough to get ready. I will try reading the last chapter one last time before the meeting tomorrow. At least that way the material will be fresh in my mind.

I enjoyed church this morning. And I must say that having the singsong ready days before made that part of the service much more enjoyable for me. It's not that I don't enjoy leading the singing, I do, but there is certainly a lot less stress when you are not running around at the last minute figuring out what to sing, when to sing it, do I need an overhead, and so on and so on.

God bless you!

Well for a change I have been able to stick to my plan. I have managed to read the 3 chapters of the Power Surge book as per the last plan I announced. I realize that doing what you say you are going to do should not be something great to celebrate, but when you are used to putting things off again and again, the fact that I was able to follow through is something to celebrate this time around. Hopefully there will come a time when there will not need to be even a mention of having followed through.

Chapter 5 goes into detail into the Marks of Discipleship I mentioned in my previous entry. I can see why our minister said that this chapter was really dense reading. But it was very informative reading. I will be looking forward to reading it again and discussing it at the next discernment committee meeting.

God Bless You!

Well here I am sitting at the keyboard, not having read the 4th chapter as I said I would. It's not like I haven't been doing anything all evening - I moved the PowerPoint presentation for this Sunday's church service to the laptop and proofread it one more time. That just leaves the announcements and the SingSong presentations to complete. No pressure.

Well the book is coming up to bed with me and I will be reading the chapter before going to sleep. I guess I better get going if I don't want to be up until all hours of the night.

God bless you (yes, you!!)!

PS: Which reminds me of this bumper sticker that has to be my very favourite:

God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it!

Isn't it just great to know that?

I wanted somewhere easy to get to where I could easily review the marks of discipleship and I came up with this blog. Let see if that works.

Marks of discipleship

• Pray daily
• Worship weekly
• Read the Bible
• Server others both at and beyond your home church
• Encourage spiritual growth in others through their relationships
• Give freely of their time, talents and resources.

The above is taken for the book Power Surge by Michael, W. Foss. I will put up a link to a review of the book so you can get a feel of what the book is about.

God bless you!

Okay. When I mentioned the United Church of Canada and United Methodist Church web sites, I did not point you directly to the pages where I get hymn suggestions. So I would like to remedy that oversight tonight.

First, I should say that the two main places I get my suggestions are the back of the Voices United hymnal and the weekly Lectionary hymn list from the United Methodist Church General Board of Discipleship. Another web page where you can get a few suggestions is the Gathering page of the United Church of Canada. All you have to do once you are on that page is select the current edition and then select the Sunday you want. This gives you a pretty big list of hymns to choose from.

I am in the middle of reading Chapter 3 of the Power Surge book. It looks like I will only get that one chapter read tonight. I guess that means reading Chapter 4 on Friday and Chapter 5 on Saturday.

Chapter 3 is about the Six Critical Marks of Leadership. I was about to put them up here, but I guess that would be a breach of the book copyright.

Well I guess I better wrap this up so I can finish reading the chapter.

God bless you!

I had planned to expand on yesterday's topic tonight, but unfortunately I waited too long to get started with tonight's entry and I am no longer on the computer that has all the URLs I was going to use here. I guess I will just have to wait until tomorrow to point to the actual web pages where I go to get my song selections.

Another thing I was going to do tonight which I never got around to do was read a chapter of the book we are reading as part of the Church discernment committee. The book we are reading is "Power Surge". The goal is to read chapters 3 through 5 before next Monday's meeting. I had planned to read chapter 3 tonight, chapter 4 tomorrow and chapter 5 Friday which would have left the whole weekend for my daughter to get to read those chapters as she is also part of the committee. I guess now I will have to double up one of the nights (I'm guessing tomorrow night as apparently chapter 5 is very dense reading).

As you can tell, procrastination is something I am very good at (or bad at depending on your point of view). Maybe by publicly embarrassing myself I will motivate myself to procrastinate less. Somehow I don't think that will help much.

I will let everyone know how things go tomorrow. Until then...

God bless you!

My older daughter had mentioned last week that the minister at our church had been wanting us to help in picking music for the church service. I have been doing a little SingSong before church on Sunday and have been trying to pick songs that fit with the Sunday theme.

This used to be quite easy: the minister would follow the Revised Common Lectionary and it would be fairly easy to find songs. The United Church of Canada hymnal, Voices United, has a section in the back that has suggested hymns for each Sunday. I was also able to use the United Methodist Church web site which also has suggested hymns. I went to that site mainly to get suggestion for their new hymnal supplement "The Faith We Sing". This changed however when our new minister did not follow the Lectionary. It did make my job harder since I only had a Bible reading to go by, but I have been able to find songs even though it involved more work.

Anyway, this week was the first week that I tried giving our minister suggested hymns. Mostly because the reading used is the same as the Lectionary for this next Sunday I was able to list quite a few hymns. There are even some left over for the SingSong. It was very heartening to find out that the little bit I did helped in choosing the hymns for this Sunday and I am looking forward to continue to try to help with service music.

This does not make picking songs for the SingSong any harder; if anything it will make it much easier as I have a better idea of where the minister is going with the service. As a matter of fact, I think I have a very good idea as to which songs I will be using for this Sunday's SingSong. I will list them here later in the week.

God bless you!

Reading the Blogger Help page gave me the answer to one of my questions:

Number of Blogs: You can have as many blogs as you like on one account.

So I guess two is perfectly okay :)

Still working on the other questions....

I guess I logged in to Blogger at some point and created this blog and then forgot all about it. Hmmmmm. And now I created another one - so which one will I use? I am even allowed to have two? Should I keep one for home and one for work? So many questions - so few answers. Oh well - I will have to ponder this....