This Sunday's service had a different feel than the service last week. The music for last week's service was very boisterous and upbeat, this Sunday's music was more quiet and mellow. I think it had to do with the frame of mind of our music director, Brooke Maxwell . This is just a feeling I have as I think he was in a quieter mood today.

The same two people that led the service last week also did this week (the young adult and her grandfather). It seemed to me like there were fewer people there for the service, but I could be wrong since I don't usually pay that much attention. I guess I noticed today because I went up to speak about the upcoming Love Esquimalt / Vic. West / View Royal event. I did manage to get 4 more people to sign up for T-Shirts; which brings the total to 8 so far. Since I do have to put the order in on Monday I will order a few extra so people deciding to join late will be able to get a T-Shirt. Back to the service, I am sorry to say that I do not recall what was said in the reflection. That is most likely because I have trouble focusing on what is being said when the grandfather is speaking. Next Sunday our regular minister is back so it will be interesting to see if I have less trouble focusing (as I hope will be the case).

I was going to speak with the young adult that was supposed to do the presentation and who backed out at the last minute to let her know that it is not acceptable that I had to talk to her to find out she was not going to work on the presentation. I know that it does happen that things change and that it is no long possible to complete the job; I just want to point out that she should have let us know as soon as it became apparent that she was not going to be able to get it done. I did not get an opportunity to speak with her before or after the service, so I think I will just send her an email.

God Bless You!

Early Saturday evening I sent an Instant Message to the young adult who prepares the powerpoint presentation for the church service to let her know that if she had sent it to me I had not received it. She then told me that she had just come back a couple of hours ago from participating in the 30 hour famine and that she would not be putting the presentation together. Needless to say I was not pleased since if there was to be overheads for the church service I was going to have to do it myself.

I also finally decided on the songs for tomorrow's pre-service singing. These are the songs I have decided upon, in the order they will be sung:

"They'll Know we are Christians by Our Love " TFWS2223
"In the Quiet Curve of the Evening " VU278
"I am a C-H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N "

I am doing the VU278 song before the service as that hymn has never been sung in church before. I chose the other two songs because the theme for the reflection is "What kind of Christian.... am I..... are we?". And I thought that those songs would be fitting for the theme.

God Bless You!

I really enjoyed choir practice last night. I, and I really hope others are too, am really enjoying our new music director, Brooke Maxwell. I think he is also feeling more comfortable with us (us being the choir) as he shared with us something that had happened to him. He had not done that until yesterday.

One of the songs that will be done during the service is not known to the congregation so I will be going over it in the pre-service singing. I went and got a copy of Brooke's hymnal page as he has "embellished" some of the chords for the hymn. He was explaining to me how he was coming up with the chord (upper triad) and we had a conversation that I really enjoyed. It also made me want to start playing the piano again. Now all I have to do is find yet another hour every day to practice the piano. That should be interesting since I already feel like there aren't enough hours in the day.

God Bless You!

Tonight was the monthly Love Your City meeting. I did not really need the meeting to be reminded of all that needs to be done, and how quickly it has to be done. The title of the entry is somewhat deceiving as it is the number of days (actually 37 days and 10.5 hours) before the beginning of the actual Love Esquimalt / Vic. West / View Royal event. There are tasks that need to be done way before that. For example, the T-Shirt order is supposed to be in by next Monday - which means that I really need to get in front of the congregation on Sunday and try and get a feeling of how many people would participate; and the order for kindness cards should be in by next Wednesday - which of course means I need to figure out how many bottles of water we will be ordering.

Well it is getting late so I will go to bed and pray for guidance on all of these matters.

God Bless You!

"Then Peter began to speak: 'I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right.'" -- Acts 10:34-36 [NIV]

"We believe that God loves everyone unconditionally." -- Esquimalt United church Value statement.

One of the things I have been meaning to do is to go over the list of scriptures that were given to us to find what biblical passages were the basis for our Vision, Mission and Values statements. So when I was going over the Bible passages for next Sunday's service the passage above made me think of one of our value statements, which is why I decided to put both of them above.

One thing I am trying to get an early start on is the picking of songs for the pre-service singing for next Sunday. I do have a head start this week as I already have the powerpoint presentation for the service. So it seemed silly to not take advantage of it. I have glanced at the service, and I have read the Bible passages; this should give me something to ponder and make it easier to figure out which song will be appropriate as I will have been familiar with the service already.

God Bless You!

For the last couple of days, I have gone back to reading the daily devotional in my Bible. The interesting thing is that they seem to be exactly what I needed to read right now. It had been a few months since I had read them (the last mention of devotional in my blog was way back at the end of November) and I cannot for the life of me figure out why I stopped.

I find it coincidental that our minister goes away for her vacation and we immediately go back to asking visitors to stand up and identify themselves. I guess old habits die hard. Our music director let loose on a couple of hymns today, and I really enjoyed it; I hope it wasn't too far out of the comfort zone for some of the other people attending. The young adult granddaughter of one of the senior member of the congregation did the bulk of the service this morning. While I think she did a very good job for her experience level, I never really could get into it. She was basically just reading what was on the page, and I could not get past that. I guess the question I keep asking myself is "If I had been visiting, would I come back?" and I do not think it is fair to that young adult.

God Bless You!

This time I am not going to change the time on this entry (I usually change the time to just before Midnight so the entry shows up for the day it was intended) to illustrate how late I waited to get this pre-service singing ready. I guess the one change from previous weeks is that I have completed preparing the presentation before making this entry; previously I entered what I intended to sing in my blog before getting the presentation ready. But even so, this is later than usual.

The following songs are what I have decided on (in the order they will be sung):

"We Are Pilgrims" VU595
"Many Are The Lightbeams" VU588
"Christ Has Risen" TFWS2115

God Bless You!

I just cannot believe that it is already Friday! And it seemed to me like every evening had fewer hours in it as by the time I thought about making an entry it was too late to do so.

Well I have been thinking about doing stuff, but not really getting around to doing any of it. Since the Love Your City meeting is next Wednesday, I should really make some kind of presentation about it on Sunday at church. Also, it was not until earlier this evening that I even looked at the material for the Sunday service. The bad thing is that I received the material a week ago so I really do not have an excuse. I might as well just come out and say that I have been having trouble motivating myself for the pre-service singing lately; and I am not really sure why because I really enjoy doing the singing part. Oh well, something else to ponder in my "free time".

God Bless You!

I was surfing the web a couple of days ago and ran into some statistics about religious affiliation in the United States. I figured there should be some for Canada as well. It turns out that statistics for Canada are easier to get because we do not have the same issue with separation of church and state. There is some interesting reading on the Statistics Canada site. Here is but one example:

According to GSS data, attendance at religious services has fallen dramatically across the country over the past 15 years. Nationally, only one-fifth (20%) of individuals aged 15 and over attended religious services on a weekly basis in 2001, compared with 28% in 1986. In 2001, four in 10 adults (43%) reported that they had not attended religious services during the 12 months prior to the survey, compared with only 26% in 1986.

Another take on the same data can be found on the Religious Tolerance web site.

God Bless You!

Okay, so that is not really a news flash, we do know what has happened. But I think it never hurts to remind ourselves of the enormity of what happened so long ago. The drama at the beginning of the service did a good job to recount the bewilderment, confusion, and excitement upon finding that Jesus was no longer in the tomb.

The reflection was also very good, even though I did not get to hear most of it. I read the reflection online tonight before writing this entry. And the reason for missing the reflection is that we had some trouble with the overhead projector this morning. Well actually I should say we had trouble with the wall outlet that the projector was plugged into. It would appear one of the outlets is very touchy as to how the power cord can be plugged in and twice during the service this morning there was no power going to the projector (or mixing board). While the second time was not as disruptive since it happened while we were just projecting a blank slide, the first time happened while we were singing - which of course meant that all of a sudden there were no words for the congregation to use. Moving the extension cord to the other outlet fixed the problem.

I also had trouble - and this time it was me having finger trouble - with the Blessing Song. We repeated the song 3 times and since there were only 2 slides I decided that instead of making 6 slides I would just go back and forth between the two slides. Well the first time I went back it just did not look right so I kept pressing the back button and who knows were we ended up! Fortunately for me I write down the number of the slides so I was able to go back to the right slide fairly quickly and things went smoothly from then on.

God Bless You!

I spent most of the day relaxing as there really was nothing for me to do for the church service tomorrow until I received the powerpoint presentation for me to prepare my guide sheet; particularly since there will not be singing before the service as we are gathering were we left off on Good Friday: in the darkness waiting, longing, praying.

I say most of the day because I found out mid afternoon that the person I thought was doing the presentation thought I was doing the presentation! To make a short story even shorter, I ended up working on the presentation for tomorrow. I really was not a big imposition since as I mentioned above that I really did not have much else to do. That gave me the ability to take my time and just leisurely prepare the presentation without feeling rushed.

God Bless You!

I did not post yesterday as I was busy readying the presentation for this morning's Good Friday service. Of course, part of the reason I was working on the presentation the night before the service is that I procrastinated about working on it until then. I had been looking for the right pictures to accompany the service a couple of weeks ago, but had not looked/searched again until last night. Fortunately for me, I was able to find pictures that were nice and suitable.

Both the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services were very well done and hopefully gave everyone something to think about. I am looking forward to the Easter service.

Oh and yes, I have updated the look of this blog. I had been thinking about doing this for quite a while now, and this design really appealed to me. I hope people visiting will like it as well.

God Bless You!

Update: Immediately after writing this post, I ran into a pointer to an article about Overcoming Procrastination on one of the web sites I visit every day. Interesting, don't you think?

One of the members of the Discernment sent an email to the group with a suggestion for the one core value statement that we did not all agree on:

We value working side by side with other [Christian groups] to share Christ'’s love in our community.

The words in [italic] were the ones we were having trouble with. It was thought that maybe we were being arrogant to only value working with Christian groups. So that member suggested the following change:

We value working side by side with other churches and Christian groups in our community.

Well I guess it is my turn to have a problem with the statement. First, I should mention that I think that the problem was not with the word "Christian" rather with the word "value". Also, this may be splitting hairs, but I do not really think we would want to work with the Church of Scientology so the statement would have to be changed to "Christian churches and groups" for it to be okay with me.

I also want to mention that unless "to share Christ's love" was taken out of the statement for the sake of brevity I really want to say that I think it should be included. This would make the value statement thus:

We believe in sharing Christ's love in our community by working side by side with other Christian churches and groups.

And now that I look at the value statements more closely I would also like to change another value statement to read:

We believe that Christ's message of love is modeled through respect, acceptance and support of all of the diverse parts of God'’s family.

Okay, enough playing around for the time being.

God Bless You!

I really respect people that have the best interests of the church at heart and want to be fiscally prudent/responsible. And I am sure I have ruffled some feathers, offended some people even, by suggesting that the money they were willing to offer was inadequate. But I do believe that young, enthusiastic, talented musician do not come cheap anymore if they ever did. I also believe that what Brooke brings is worth the extra money.

Just for fun, I figured out what an equivalent offer would be for what our previous music director received when she first started at the church 5 years ago. Assuming an annual rate of inflation of 2%, her monthly rate of $750 turns out to be $828 in 2006 dollars! I just worry now that the quote we are asking of him will be out of our price range and that when we tell him what we are willing/can afford to pay him he will laugh in our faces. This is definitely something worth praying that it does not happen.

God Bless You!

For some reason tonight I felt like we were not as focused on the task at hand as we had been in previous meeting. We did get some work accomplished, but it certainly seemed to me like we were very easily led away from the subject. Could it be that working on fine tuning our Vision and Mission statements as well as our core values is not as exciting as coming up with them in the first place?

One of the things that we did get accomplished was to refine our Vision statement. The new version now reads:

Esquimalt United Church is a community of everyday people following Christ on a never ending spiritual journey.

I do not recall mentioning it here, but the previous version (which you can read here) had me wondering what kind of community we were talking about. The refinement above answers that question.

We also made some small changes (more refinements) to the Mission statements and the core values. For those, you will have to wait until the Esquimalt United church Collaboration Site is updated with the latest meeting notes.

Confession time: I must say that I was reticent at first to use some of the statements that our facilitator had brought to the meeting which had been gleaned from other church web sites. I had found it interesting that only 2 or 3 meetings ago the facilitator would not help us as we had to come up with our own statements but now it is okay to help us? Anyway, we did end up using one of the statements that we all thought fit our church particularly well.

God Bless You!

Why is it that every day before a Discernment committee meeting I always have the feeling that I am completely unprepared for the coming meeting? Granted this week we only have one week in between meetings as opposed to the usual two, but that is because the usual date would have fallen on Easter Monday. But still, there was not a whole lot do to:

• Reflect some more on the Vision, Mission statements and core values;
• Give some thought on what the church should do for Love Your City;
• Look at different Bible passages to try and identify which Bible passage best tells the world our vision.

I have to confess that I have not done any of those things - and given that the meeting is in less than 19 hours it is very unlikely that any of them will get done either. I probably was supposed to read another chapter of our book as well - yet another task I have not done. I think it is definitely time to start writing down what it is I need to do as it would appear that things get pushed down by more recent tasks and do not surface in time.

Oh well, I better get to bed - something else I am late getting to (grin).

God Bless You!

When I wrote a couple of days ago that I was going to restrict myself to the joyous part of the Sunday service as it was coming right after the pre-service singing, I did not realize how hard it was going to be to find songs that only spoke of Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Most songs seem to prefer to cover all of Holy Week in their verses. So basically what happened is that I ran out of time trying to find those songs that only touch on the joy and ended up with the following (in the order they will be sung):

Tell Me The Stories of Jesus (VU357)
We Sang Our Glad Hosannas (TFWS2111)
Lord I Lift Your Name on High (TFWS2088)

I guess I better put those into the presentation now. I am still trying to decide if I should sing all the verses of "Tell me the stories of Jesus" or if I should leave out the last verse. But then if I do that I guess I would have to leave out the 4th stanza of "We sang our glad Hosannas". Oh well, I will put them all in and decide at the last minute.

God Bless You!

I did end up going to work today. As I wrote in my other blog, I really did not feel bad enough to stay home. And then it was time to pick my older daughter at the airport. And then we went out for dinner to celebrate her return.

So now it is after midnight and I have done absolutely nothing towards the song picking for this Sunday. All I have is a feeling and no concrete ideas. I guess part of the problem is that I don't really feel like picking songs at the moment. I am sure the moment will pass, but it certainly is frustrating while it is here. I think I need to listen to some music.

God Bless You!

I have been staying home for the last couple of days as I have been sick. So I have not been feeling up to doing much of anything. So today I have done pretty much nothing today; the only "work" I did today was go to choir practice and really only because I had the music for one of the songs on Sunday.

I am hoping to feel better tomorrow and I can go back to procrastinating about stuff.

God Bless You!

I have started to look at the songs for this Sunday. Nothing specific yet, but rather just looking at the overall mood of the singing. I would seem to me that I should probably concentrate on the joy of Palm Sunday as it basically is where the service begins. I do not really want to get into the "heavy" songs of the latter part of Holy Week at the beginning of the service.

Part of the preparation for the singing is to enter some more information onto the Pre Service Singing site. I am currently just concentrating on the song titles and their location in the hymn books but at some point I would like to have the lyrics there as well. I may also link, where possible, to a web site that allows you to play the tunes of the hymns; but I think this will be something to do in the future.

I have copied all the information what was online about the different meetings of the church to the one place that I currently think is the best place. I have called it for lack of a better name Esquimalt United Church Collaboration Site. It is very possible that I am doing this for my benefit alone for the time being, but I think younger generations live online and will find more use out of that site. Just a feeling, I may be totally wrong about this.

God Bless You!

Or so you would be led to believe. I found a website (from the targeted advertisement on one of the Wikis I use) that claims to be "You complete resource for rapid and sustained growth". They have a video that introduces one of the modules that are offering. I would suggest you go listen to the video (it is about 7.5 minutes). You can find the video on the Connection Power website. Now I am not saying that their program is bad, it is just that before you can go ahead with their program you have to know who you are and what you want to accomplish - which of course we are still defining.

I did put the text of the Discernment committee meeting minutes (more like notes I guess) on the usual website: Esquimalt Discernment. Just click on the "MeetingApril03" link and you will find the notes. I have also been trying out another site. I requested an account a couple of weeks ago and it was only a couple of days ago that I received an answer. The same information can be found on the Esquimalt United Collaboration Site. I had visions of one website for all of the committees of the church so clicking on "Discernment" will take you to the Discernment committee section of the site and you can click on the date of the meeting to see the minutes. "Current events" on the left of the page in the "navigation" box will list past and future meetings for the committees and you can click the dates there as well to get to the meeting minutes. All this because I believe that anyone in the church should be able to find out what is going on and one good way to do this is to have access to the minutes of the committees of the church.

I have yet to even look at the bulletin and powerpoint for next Sunday so I can get started populating the Pre service singing web pages I am building and also start choosing songs.

Well this has gone on longer than I thought and it is quite late so I will close.

God Bless You!

Tonight's meeting was really great. It would appear that yesterday's reflection (sermon) by our minister touched a nerve and she heard from a lot of the 30-45 year old people she knows. A couple of them met with her and she took the opportunity to run our current Vision and Mission statements by them. They had a long discussion and she shared with us tonight some of the things they mentioned. I think it was just tremendous that we were able to hear how what we are doing would be received by our "target audience".

We spent most of the evening trying to simplify our Vision and Mission statements as well as our values so that they are easily understandable by people who have never been exposed to church while still staying true to the Vision we had already pretty much agreed upon. I am not going to include everything we worked on, but I will put the current version of our Vision statement below so you can comment on it.

Esquimalt United Church is a community who is following Christ on a never ending spiritual journey.

I will put a link to all the work that we did at tonight's meeting (Vision, Mission statements and values) in tomorrow's entry, as soon as I get a chance to enter it in our (new?) collaboration site (yes, I am trying yet another one).

God Bless You!

First I should mention that I enjoyed the service once again. Our music director, Brooke Maxwell, can claim some of the credit as he can modify his style of play based on the mood of the congregation which makes it much more enjoyable to sing, and somehow the experience is more meaningful. Our minister should claim the lion share of the credit as she is the one orchestrating the services.

The reflection was once again very good; it made me realize that I had been just singing "Down in the river to pray" before, and not really getting its meaning. I tried to convey some of that new found meaning in the little solo part I had at the beginning. I ended up with the solo as the first volunteer for the solo got tonsillitis, and the second volunteer we are assuming forgot to "spring forward" and woke up too late to come to church.

The reason for the title is that tomorrow night is Discernment committee meeting night. It seems just like yesterday that I was getting ready for the previous meeting two weeks ago. And I have just realized that I have not yet read chapter 4 of "A Love Worth Giving" by Max Lucado which was mentioned at the last meeting as what we should currently be reading. I wonder if I can find time tomorrow to read that chapter.

God Bless You!

"After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone," -- Matthew 14:23 [NIV]
"But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed." -- Luke 5:16 [NIV]

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, the theme for the service this Sunday is "Connecting to God through prayer". So even though there are many Bible passages being used this week, they really all have the same theme: prayer. The passage may speak about something different, like Jesus feeding the five thousand, but the part that is the focus is the first passage I have at the top of this entry.

With that in mind, I have tried to find songs that at least mention prayer, praying, or speaking to God. What I have come up with is the following:

"Take Time to Be Holy" VU672
"Come To My Heart" VU661
"Just a Little Talk With Jesus" Cleavant Derricks

All that is left to do is enter the lyrics in the powerpoint presentation.

God Bless You!