Sunday #2

Sunday number one was at Disney World and we visited the church of the Magic Kingdom. Today is Sunday number two and I visited my local Catholic parish for mass. There are a few things I noticed for reflection:

• The Scriptures are held in high esteem – literally! The priest this morning paraded an ornate Bible around the front, holding it above his head as he made his way to the lectern where he read the Scripture lesson. Now, I don’t think we need to walk around in our daily life with the Bible raised above our heads, but in our church, most don’t even bring a Bible. Do we really value the Scriptures like we should? Do we have the respect for God’s Word that we should? Is it a living, breathing, life-giving book, or just another book on our shelf? Maybe we should hold it up more often.
• The parishioners stand for specific reasons. It seems in the protestant evangelical church we stand for musical worship and that’s about it. Why don’t we stand in reverence when the Scriptures are read? Why don’t we stand when we pray? Why don’t we stand in respect at other times in our services?
• The people kneel for certain prayers. Now, I don’t really know why they kneel for some prayer and why they stand for others (I’ll ask a catholic friend this week), but what I know is we don’t ever kneel for prayer in our church. As a staff, we kneel in our weekly prayer time, but why don’t we encourage our congregation to kneel when we pray? This simple act of submission can be powerful.

I am looking forward to visiting a lot of churches over the weeks to come. At each church, I will be taking notes and asking questions about what is done and why it’s done. I hope I can learn a few things along the way that may help our ministry grow in richness.