Resources by Daniel Meeter

More with Less
Christian Year Lent Liturgy Penitence Worship Planning
December 1, 1999

In New York City I saw a Japanese garden made up of nothing but gravel and a solitary rock. The rock was placed off-center, the ground around it clean of everything, and the gravel raked painstakingly. That garden is a lesson in “less is more.”

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Becoming More Common: Why more and more congregations are turning to the Common Lectionary for worship planning
Christian Year Lectionary Reformed Churches Scripture Reading
December 1, 1992

How does your pastor choose next Sunday's Scripture lesson? Is he doing a series on the fruits of the Spirit? Following the Heidelberg Catechism? Preaching his way through a gospel or an epistle? The approaches that pastors in Reformed and Presbyterian churches take to planning what they will preach on from Sunday to Sunday are almost as varied as the people in the congregations they serve.

Considering the Lectionary

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Liturgical Year: The Worship of God
Christian Year Presbyterians Worship
December 1, 1992
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Supplemental Liturgical Resource 7. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. 428 pages. $14.95.

The Presbyterian Church hopes to have a new common service book ready by 1993. Meanwhile, seven "trial" books have been published since 1980 in the Supplemental Liturgical Resource series that have tested material to be included in the new service book.

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Let's Put the Communion Back into Christmas
Birth Christmas Lord's Supper Worship Planning
September 1, 1988

If your holiday liturgy is a string of special numbers and exciting extras, your congregation may be missing the true communion of Christmas.

My first congregation was a small and struggling Reformed Church in a sagging, central-Jersey factory town. Our average attendance was no more than fifty, and we didn't have a choir because we couldn't afford a choir director. But in spite of our humble circumstances, the five Christmases I worshiped there were the best Christmases of my life.

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