Feedback

Sometimes in a committee meeting someone will venture the idea that we need new ways to give feedback as a congregation.

Today was a pretty usual Sunday. I got feedback about my worship service (8 for 1 against), about my choice of announcements (1 strongly against), about the way I wear my hair (1 strongly against) and about the way I wasn't clear who was to bring snacks for the children in childcare (1 against).

How do I begin to explain that from my point of view lack of feedback is not the problem here?

Intergen

It turns out Intergenerational worship is hard. I've been working on it for 7 years now, and the thing is you are really trying to make worship that is accessible and inspiring for every generations. That means 2 year olds who need to wiggle and move, and 80 year olds who have trouble hearing. It means 5 year olds who want big fun stories, and 14 year olds who think stories are uncool. Really, it means that if everything works perfectly, everyone compromises a little and everyone gets some little thing out of the service. But mostly what people are hopefully getting is each other.

The Machine

Sometimes, on a morning like this, I feel like a locomotive, or backhoe. I feel like I'm responsible for driving things forward

And I think about those old locomotives, and I wonder what kind of cloud of smog I leave in my wake. I wonder how a person finds a source of cleaner burning energy...

Form

For those of you playing at home, this week's sermon was in the general form:
Why?
What?
How?

But here's the thing that bothers me about form. In music, form can be so precise:
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Chorus
Bridge
Chorus

I mean, when we were studying sonata form or fugue forms in school, they always map out so elegantly. Your Theme is always the same number of measures, and each time it repeats it's the exact same length. But unless you are writing sonnets, it's really hard to use words to create these elegant symmetrical forms that always balance mathematically. One of my heroes who was a musician before she was a preacher says that's exactly how she writes, in Sonata form or Rondo form or whatever all else, but I just can't see it. This week "what" had 3 parts and "how" had a set of 2 and then a set of 3. Maybe this is why I like knitting so much, the beautifully repeating geometric forms.

Catalogues

So since I started thinking about the relationship between catalogues and old growth forests in Canada, I decided to call or write all the catalogues I get and ask them to cease and desist. Since then I've gotten 4-5 catalogues a day! I can't keep up and it's not even the peak catalogue season yet. Aargh.

Seeds like Lifeboats

I preached about lifeboats lately, and since then I imagine the lifeboats shrinking smaller and smaller until they are seeds, until they are the strands of DNA in the seeds that we are leaving as we pass this way. A seed provides not only the information about how to grow, say, a maple tree, but also food that the seed will need while it establishes its first roots and grows its first leaves. A seed has a hard coat that protects and contains the food and the genetic material while it waits for conditions to be right, and a seed has a plan for getting to a good place to live and grow- like the little wings on the maple seed.