The Importance of Worshiip

Kazimierz Bem has written an thought-provoking essay titled “Christianity Cannot Survive the Decline in Worship.” The essay argues for the primacy of worship and the need to resist pressures to scale it back—particularly to make it briefer—and to emphasize good works in the community to the detriment of worship.

When I was on the Worship Commission, I think that St. Paul’s considered splendid worship as its special mission. Even then, I worried that worship needed to be balanced with God’s work in the world.

Read the Bem essay and see what message you see for our parish.

More on Our New Sign

After a number of complaints—mine was probably the least of them—St. Paul’s revised its sign message about being a welcoming church to a message a bit less arrogant. The original message was

The Most
WELCOMING
Church
for All

The current message is below.(When I wrote down the message, I failed to note line breaks and capitalization. Thus, the formatting shown may not be exactly what is on the sign.)

A Most
WELCOMING
Church
for All

Not really a big revision, is it? We have toned down the suggestion of our unique virtue, though we have retained “for all,” suggesting that other churches are more selective in their hospitality.

My personal preference would be to stick with the tried and true:

The
EPISCOPAL
CHURCH
Welcomes You

This message is more personal and doesn’t besmirch the competition. If we do want to emphasize that all are welcome, we could use a message that Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh has used on buttons:

The
EPISCOPAL
CHURCH
Welcomes All

PEP even has buttons with this message I suspect it would be willing to donate.

In any case, I don’t know exactly how to fit messages on our sign. We still have not figured out how to display reasonably legible letters. For example, “8,” as in “8:45,” is pretty much an unreadable blob. How much money did we pay for this? I suspect the problem here is with the software, rather than the hardware. Either we don’t know how to use it, or it simply sucks. There ought to be a fix, and we ought to be insistent on finding it.