Worship at Skyline Retrospective

I'm reading Colossians 1:15-18 this morning and thinking about how grateful I am to have been a part of the worshiping community at Skyline for the past year. Our theme has been sharing the generous treasure of God, and I have witnessed much sharing in our worship experience. So many people have gathered in the spirit of 1 Corinthians 14:26 and shared generously of themselves that our time of community worship has spilled out in many ways into the rest of our week. Musicians, actors, technical support persons, artists and designers, guests with an invitation or appeal to serve, dancers, preachers, ushers and greeters, persons dedicating themselves to God, caring prayer ministers, and all who gathered faithfully every Sunday at Skyline - each of us has brought our needs and our abundance to God and to the rest of this community to give God glory and honor in our worship.

I remember the special dance on Christmas Eve, when we watched a celebration of Mary's fearfulness and faithfulness unfold before our eyes that special night. I remember the many opportunities we had to hear an impassioned invitation from a representative of a ministry beyond the walls of our community (Urban Promise, Perpetual Prosperity Pumps, Delaware Foster Care, Friendship House, Habitat for Humanity, Juvenile Diabetes Reasearch Fund, among others) and the many people who responded with their feet as our worship continued in our foyer and beyond. I think of the special times of dedication of ministers, when we reached out our hands and hearts for a blessing, baptisms, communion and anointing into membership - high holy moments when we enacted the scripture promises around which we gathered every week.

I remember and give thanks to God for the spontaneous eruption into applause (some churches call it hand praise) when we weren't quite ready to finish singing to God's glory. Over this past year, the bands led us into the throneroom where we danced and acted out the drama of God's grace - singing and proclaiming by our words and by our actions the abundant life of Jesus the Messiah in our midst. We participated in a living sanctuary, where all people are truly welcomed and invited to live fully into the Kingdom of God. We came to be filled, and discovered the bounty that God had already provided in our lives as we shared with God and with each other.

There were times last Fall when I wondered whether we had not asked too much of this congregation as leaders. Yet even through the struggle of the past couple of years to determine who God is calling us to be as a community, we have gathered for worship in spite of our fear and inability to know how this journey will turn out. Jesus Christ has gathered us. And even when we have not been able to see eye to eye, we have always been able to join our hearts in praise of an awesome God. And with the Spring, Skyline seems to be experiencing a new awakening of spiritual vitality in worship. This vitality has arisen out of a diverse (but not divisive) community gathered at the gentle invitation of Jesus - in whom all things truly hold together.

My prayer for the coming year, as we celebrate especially God's plans to give us hope and a future, is that we will discover fresh ways to unite our worship together with our worship in daily life. I pray that we will be able to open ourselves to God's leading in worship, creating space for spontenaety, improvisation, the leading of the Spirit, communal discernment, interaction and moments of response, and all of this in a way that invites but does not compel participation. I pray we will learn to be at peace in silence, waiting together on God. And I pray that we will integrate conscious, intentional practices of waiting on God's Spirit together, and together following the promptings of our awesome God.