Worship Weblog

Toronto Book Group – Second Meeting

Posted by cicw

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Book Groups

We invited 34 book groups across the U.S. and Canada to meet and discuss The Church of All Ages and its implications for their worship, and to share their notes here.
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Common Ground: what defines a community? What shapes its faith?

The issue of how our congregational purposes play out in congregational strategies was still a big question. It led us to discuss what common practices we hold that shape us as communities in the first place. This yielded some deep-rooted differences not only between generations, but also members of the same generational cohort; not only between denominations, but also between churches in the same denominations in the different regions of Canada; and not only between congregations but also between faith communities and the wider world.

To begin with the last-named differences: Rev. Kristine O’Brien (who, you might remember, is my colleague at Trafalgar Presbyterian Church, Oakville) performs funerals as part of her ministry. We have often talked of the struggle to find common ground when people without a background in a community of faith try to give communal shape to a funeral service. She
finds that people don’t know Psalm 23, or the Lord’s Prayer; many people stop singing after the first line of ‘Amazing Grace,’ since that’s as far as their memory takes them. What do you say in these situations? What do you pray? What do you sing?

What do we all know by heart that can connect us when we need to be part of a community? It’s not only during times of passage and transition that people look for common ground. David said that, even though his own congregation within the Christian Reformed denomination might be less liturgical than others, still people have commented that it would be good to say a creed ‘once in awhile,’ and that his own goal as music and worship co-ordinator is to have a spoken creed once a month. Kristine said that Trafalgar Presbyterian we have been learning a body of songs – global songs, short choruses, songs from the Taizé and Iona communities – that are part of
our communal life. We have taken care to teach various versions of the Lord’s Prayer, so that members of all ages can experience this prayer in their own way. Karin Schemeit described attending Martin Luther’s church in Wittenberg, German, and being struck by the fact that the liturgy was identical to her family’s German Lutheran Church in downtown Toronto. She said that it presented her with a struggle: she found the familiarity welcoming and grounding, but also wanted to be fed by something new as well.

The tug-of-war between old and new, and how that is reflected in the generations, occupied much of our discussion. Modes of dress, acceptable behaviour, what you should or should not bring into the sanctuary (coffee cups?), how people react to something new (or something old), what is acceptable as a topic for sermons (sex? money?), who should read scripture or be in leadership positions – all these are expressions of differing values in any one congregation.

Karen Pozios – and several others – said that bringing children to church was partly a generational choice. She went with her family: that’s what you did when she was growing up. Some commented that now we find that it’s the grandparents who are bringing the grandchildren.

Several things struck me that perhaps shouldn’t have been surprising. The first was how similar all our struggles were, in spite of different denominational backgrounds. The second was how often people react differently from what we might expect. Karin said that she and her sister,
even though they are very close in age, hear and understand bible stories very differently from each other.

This led me to ask a seed question for our next meeting: how do our congregations tell our important stories? How do we hear and experience stories differently?

Tags: bgtoronto, Book Groups 2009, intergenerational