Last week, on May 1st, I was blessed, alongside my husband, Hilary Marckx, pastor of the Geyserville Christian Church, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of our wedding. It is still somewhat overwhelming to type that number - it seems very unreal. On Saturday, the 2nd, we had a wing-ding of a party -- with so many good friends and tons of food and great music -- to celebrate.
The up-shot of this celebrating was that I arrived at church Sunday morning with no proper sermon-message and only a bare outline of how the service would proceed. Luckily for me, the folks of The Church of the Open Door are flexible and willing to cut an occasionally unprepared pastor a little slack.
I can always talk. I think most pastors -- especially those who have been doing this awhile -- are capable of giving a fairly cohesive message off the cuff -- but we decided to do something different. We rounded up three different translations of the Bible that we had present that day -- the NRSV, the New American Standard, and The Message. A congregational member then chose a scripture at random (something in 1st Corinthians, I think) and we spent the next ten minutes reading the different translations and discovering the differences and similarities to be found in the three. That turned out to be so interesting that we read out the rest of the chapter and discussed it as well.
One member remarked that she didn't remember ever reading or hearing those particular words before, even though it was a relatively commonly read scripture. I believe we are so used to hearing scripture read in church that we often do not truly "hear" what is being shared unless we are ourselves involved in reading and unpacking the words.
Our extemporaneous 'message' was such a success that I am seriously considering doing it more often -- perhaps once a month?
The up-shot of this celebrating was that I arrived at church Sunday morning with no proper sermon-message and only a bare outline of how the service would proceed. Luckily for me, the folks of The Church of the Open Door are flexible and willing to cut an occasionally unprepared pastor a little slack.
I can always talk. I think most pastors -- especially those who have been doing this awhile -- are capable of giving a fairly cohesive message off the cuff -- but we decided to do something different. We rounded up three different translations of the Bible that we had present that day -- the NRSV, the New American Standard, and The Message. A congregational member then chose a scripture at random (something in 1st Corinthians, I think) and we spent the next ten minutes reading the different translations and discovering the differences and similarities to be found in the three. That turned out to be so interesting that we read out the rest of the chapter and discussed it as well.
One member remarked that she didn't remember ever reading or hearing those particular words before, even though it was a relatively commonly read scripture. I believe we are so used to hearing scripture read in church that we often do not truly "hear" what is being shared unless we are ourselves involved in reading and unpacking the words.
Our extemporaneous 'message' was such a success that I am seriously considering doing it more often -- perhaps once a month?
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