July 2, 2013
Some questions to consider about “Keeping Time” in your own congregational work:
- How do worship, music, and art help your congregation move through the rhythms of time? How do they help you to mark and witness the life passages of individuals or the community?
- Time is under immense pressure in our culture. How does your congregation’s worship life take account of the fast-paced, break-neck speed of postmodern life, whether implicitly or explicitly, deliberately or by default?
- How do the various schedules and seasons that shape parishioners’ lives—school, commerce, work, sports, and so on—and the schedules and seasons received from sacred tradition—Sundays and seasons, for example—interact in the lives of your members, in the larger community, and/or in your congregation’s ministries in music, worship, and the arts?
- What does your congregation (and especially its way of engaging in worship, music, and the arts) have to negotiate, to learn, and to teach in this period of widespread cultural change in how our society orders time?
- What opportunities and challenges do leaders in worship, music, and the arts encounter as they try to help twenty-first century people negotiate significant life passages in a changing culture?
- What specific time-related concerns urgently need attention in your area and/or in your congregation (e.g. concentrations of people with too much to do or too little to do; the need for new life passage rituals; difficulties surrounding specific liturgical or ecological seasons)?