Deepen your prayer practices during this weekend of reflection and meditation. This year’s workshops include praying with icons, meditative movement, Lectio Divina, Anglican Prayer beads, and more! Come learn a new spiritual practice or deepen your existing prayer life in community with folks from all around the Dioceses of Maryland and Washington.
Join the Rev. Billy Kluttz and church musician Abby Madden for a demonstration of Common Threads: An Intergenerational Worship Series, now available as an on-demand course through the School for Christian Faith and Leadership. This hands-on workshop will introduce stations worship, paperless music and liturgy, and accessible worship design. It will also show how music, storytelling, and the arts fit together in this age-friendly worship series. Attend for a rare opportunity to learn directly from the creators of Common Threads!
Can worship be playful and prayerful? Rowdy but righteous? Full of faith and fun?
Doubting Thomases, meet Common Threads: An Intergenerational Worship Series. Radically inclusive and highly participatory, Common Threads uses a stations model of worship and focus on storytelling to connect congregations across generations and abilities. Over four services – themed on joy, sorrow, hope, and change – participants engage in creativity, conversation, and worship, considering their own experience in light of Scripture. Each one-hour service culminates in Holy Communion.
Common Threads uses a worship format known as traditioned innovation. Each service follows a traditional four-fold worship pattern of gather, read the Word, respond to the Word, and celebrate Eucharist together. But much of the action takes place at worship stations designed to promote accessibility, choice, and interconnectedness in what planners describe as “parallel worship/play.” Tables (“stations”) for art making, drumming, guided storytelling, and discussion of short reflections surround a Communion table set in the middle. Services open with song and liturgy, and close with communion and a song, but in between, in lieu of a sermon, worshipers engage the day’s Scripture and theme by rotating among the stations.
During an evening devoted to the theme “Change,” a young man listens intently as an older man recounts his faith journey. In the drum circle, two young boys and two older men take turns changing up the beat. Drumming increasingly faster, they dissolve into peals of laughter. In the far corner, a table full of older women reflect on a passage from Frederick Buechner’s Listening to Your Life about the March on Washington in 1963–then share their own remembrances of attending that event. Pens, crayons, beads, and pencils are shared about the art station along with Scripture reflections and life stories.
The paperless music and paperless liturgy of Common Threads promote inclusive worship: Dispensing with the heavy hymnals and prayer books that can prove challenging for younger and older people alike, worshipers engage eye to eye. Stations allow younger and older participants to share their thoughts about the Scripture and theme, without any shame or trepidation about not being able to sit still through a long service The traditioned innovation extends to the Eucharist, too, with built-in moments for participant responses.
Common Threads is available as an on-demand course through the School for Christian Faith and Leadership. It includes a downloadable Common Threads guidebook containing four original liturgies and original music, plus six short instructional videos. On March 16th, the creators of the series will demonstrate how to conduct Common Threads at a live Zoom workshop. Register here.
Common Threads was developed by Seabury Resources for Aging®. Funding came from Vital Worship Grants from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, Grand Rapids, Michigan, with funds provided by Lilly Endowment, Inc. Seabury partnered with area Episcopal and United Church of Christ congregations in piloting the series at Seabury at Friendship Terrace and Seabury at Springvale Terrace, senior living communities in Metro DC.
Tell Me the Truth About Racism is a story that frames racism through the lens of Christian faith for children aged 5-12. Leaders Will Bouvel and Jen Holt Enriquez, first built the foundation of this work in Lent 2021 to teach to children at churches in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. Soon thereafter they began training other Christian formation leaders to do this work in their own churches.
Tell Me the Truth About Racism is respected throughout the church and received a Becoming the Beloved Community grant from the Episcopal Church. The entire training is 7 sessions. This 2-hour workshop, sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington is an opportunity to learn more about the training and to discern if it is a good fit for your community.
The workshop takes place at Diocesan Church House on Tuesday, January 17, 2023 from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM. Lunch will be provided. The event is free and open to all. Registration is required. You can register on the learning hub here or at learn.edow.org.
Join men from across the Dioceses of Maryland and Washington for a weekend of music, fellowship, recreation, and worship. One of Claggett’s longest-running retreats, find community and deepen your faith this winter.