Skip to content

Barn Geese Worship

Honk if you love Jesus.

Menu + × expanded collapsed

Home
Ask: Lent 2023
Past Series
Our Story
Contact
The Market Stall

Black background website header

Full size507 × 244

Post navigation

Published in
Black background website header

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Instagram

This season, we’ve built many questions into our Sunday Liturgy. If you explore the words traditionally used for worship in your tradition, you might not find many questions at all. It can feel challenging and uncertain to ask questions during worship, especially if you’re not used to doing it! Our Gathering Words acknowledge the vulnerability of the experience by grounding worship in God’s love. God can even use the haze of our uncertainty to foster wisdom, connection, and love.

Planning for NEXT WEEK'S Midweek service? We gotcha. In its final installment before Holy Week, our Midweek Worship invites participants to consider the deep, challenging, intense questions exchanged between Jesus and Martha as they grieve the death of Lazarus. Jesus brings Martha and her sister Mary to consider the most painful questions about God and their relationship to Jesus. What question do you face that you lack the courage to face alone?

Looking for some last-minute hymn suggestions for this Sunday? Look no further: these three hymns are chosen with Ask's themes and this week's texts in mind.

Preaching this Sunday? This week, the lectionary brings us to the threshold of Lazarus’ tomb and Jesus’ conversation with Lazarus’ sister Martha. As Martha grieves for her brother, Jesus asks her limit questions, which metaphorically kick her to the very edges of her faith. In the midst of her uncertainty, not waiting for Martha to be absolutely sure, Jesus raises Lazarus. Our faith is not as self-sufficient as we imagine it to be, and that’s good news for us all.

For some denominations, reciting an affirmation of faith, such as the Apostles’ Creed, is an important part of worship. Others are more comfortable exploring alternate statements of belief beyond the three ecumenical creeds. Still others find the idea of speaking an affirmation of faith together in worship to be challenging or problematic. In our Affirmation of Faith, the traditional words of the Apostles’ Creed form the assembly’s statement of belief, but we imagine each article of the creed as a response to a faithful question. We’d love to know how this helps your worshipers think differently about such familiar words. (If you’re from a non-creedal tradition, try them out in Bible study or devotional reflection instead!)

Are you prepping for next week's Midweek Worship service? Following the fourth Sunday in Lent, Midweek Worship offers three different ways to approach the story about the man born blind. In one of them, worshipers are invited to consider when their questions might have led them down the wrong path. When was a time that God defied your expectations? What do you think we obsess about at church, and what better question would you like us to ask?

Facebook
Instagram
WordPress

Barn Geese Worship,