Use the old communion set as part of baptisim. Use the chalace (sp?) for the water pourer - how much more literal can we get with washing away the sin with Christ’ blood??

There can be the mix of mom and dad and grandma and grandpa with Greeday and The Donnas. You just do it. Don’t think about it.

Beth

I did visit a church that had this really, really cool display in its fellowship hall. It was a display of crosses—I guess it started after a renovation and there was a sanctuary cross with sentimental value. Anyway, that cross was there, but also handcrafted crosses from every region where they’d done a mission trip, Sunday School crafts…it was beautiful.

But on the home front, remember those little children of yours will be big children someday, and the dining room table won’t seem so out of scale for your family’s needs. There is nothing I like better than sitting at my mother’s old table in our dining room, with all the people I love most. Yes, like a house church, they will outgrow the space, psycho-spiritual if not physical, and form their own homes in time. But for now, we are all nurtured around that table.

We had a worship service a couple weeks ago that was entirely old texts to new tunes, and i LOVED it. I love the Hampton “There’s a Wideness” and there’s a gorgeous new tune for “Love Divine.”

What surpises me is that my college students are the same way. They don’t want to tear the pews out of the chapel (though the liturgist does). They just want to re-arrange them. They don’t want to get rid of the organ. They just want to pair it with piano. They’re sort of cutting down mama’s wedding dress to make a new veil. Well, they would be if people let them.

Great article.

Several years later, after conversations and education, we re-designed our worship space to be almost in the round, incorporating tradition and contemporary. Big learning point for me: what most people think is tradition is really socially constructed understanding of worship—we create worship to fit a norm, power and comfort zone. Once we got to the point of connecting what should be based on early church, biblical understandings of worship, we have this sanctuary based on the principals of welcome, intimacy, community and equality. We don’t use the sterling communion set anymore. Nobody misses it.