Joyce Borger

Are you looking for resources for Advent and Christmas? You are sure to find something at ReformedWorship.org with hundreds of resources from series that provide services for each week, to lessons and carols, Longest Night or Blue Christmas services, children’s pageants, to advent candle lighting—we have it covered. All of these resources are a gift to you and available for free.

When considering how worship connects with mission, history and experience has taught us that the church has had the greatest missional impact when it combines the gospel message with lives of service that emulate Christ. The concept of service fits well with the traditional Lenten themes of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving so it seemed natural to create a Lent series. (It turns out that the theme of service also correlates with the Lent texts from the Revised Common Lectionary texts for Year C.) As we continued thinking about this theme, we found Richard J. Foster’s classic work Celebration of Discipline particularly helpful.Because this series was a collaboration between several people, we drafted a broad outline to keep each worship service for the Sundays in Lent focused on worship’s dialogue between God and those gathered (see "Full Order of Worship" below). Not all of the worship elements appear every week, but the outline may be a helpful reference if you adapt this series for your context. To help anchor the theme and create some continuity, the ending of each Sunday service is the same. During Lent there also are weekday services, including those for Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday. Each of these services has its own rhythm and does not closely follow the outline for Sunday services. We have provided background notes on the theme for each service that could also serve as sermon notes and help you see the thread tying the worship elements together. Following the Ash Wednesday and Sunday services are suggestions for how individuals and households might respond.The graphic found at the top of the page is available for worshiping communities to use with the right attribution. You can find links giving you the copyright information as well as a downloadable graphic under "Resources" at the bottom of this page. Here are links to each of the service. Ash Wednesday: Coworkers in ChristLent 1: The Call to ServiceLent 2: Commitment to ServiceLent 3: The Heart of ServiceLent 4: Service as Radical HospitalityLent 5: The Ministry of Self-GivingLent 6: (Palm/Passion Sunday): The Servant King Maundy Thursday: The Sign of ServiceGood Friday: The Suffering ServantEaster: The Servant’s MessageFull Order of Worship for the Sundays of LentEach service contains some of the following elements while retaining the flow of God’s actions and our response. GOD GATHERS US Call to WorshipGreetingWE RESPONDOpening ResponsesCall to ConfessionPrayers of Confession or LamentAssurance of PardonThe PeaceThanksgivingDedication to Holy Living / The LawGOD SPEAKS TO USChildren’s MessagePrayers for Illumination Scripture ReadingSermonWE RESPONDResponse to the Sermon Profession of Our Church’s FaithPrayers of the PeopleOfferingBaptismProfession of Faith and Remembrance of BaptismGOD MEETS US AT THE TABLEThe Lord’s SupperDeclaration of God’s Invitation and PromisesGreat Prayer of ThanksgivingPreparing the Bread and CupCommunionWE RESPONDResponse of Praise and PrayerGOD SENDS US OUT TO SERVESendingBlessing / BenedictionFollowing the pattern we’ve established the question we should be posing to those gathered for worship is: Having encountered our God in worship, how are we going to respond in our daily living? The sending doesn’t end our worship but begins our life of worship. First Service 

Have you ever been driving somewhere so familiar that you get lost in your own thoughts, and then suddenly—as if waking up from a dream—you look around and wonder for a moment where you are? I sometimes have the same reaction to Scripture and the church calendar. It becomes so routine—another Lent, another Holy Week—that I drive through on autopilot, going through the motions without really taking anything in.But sometimes when I drive I have the opposite experience. I may be driving a familiar route, but something catches my eye that likely has always been there, yet it’s as if I’m seeing it for the first time. What a delight to discover something new and beautiful in the familiar!I may be driving a familiar route, but something catches my eye that likely has always been there, yet it’s as if I’m seeing it for the first time. What a delight to discover something new and beautiful in the familiar!My prayer for all of us is that we might journey through this season of Lent with fresh eyes. Instead of driving through on autopilot, we might take time to stop, get out of the car, walk around, and experience Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem as if it were our very first Lent and Easter. I pray that we might linger in Scripture and find ourselves in the story. Would we be selfish like Judas or, like Mary, willing to give everything to Jesus? Would we be like Peter, who denies knowing Jesus, or like John, who comforts Jesus’ mother at the foot of the cross? Would we be found among the Palm Sunday people shouting “Hosanna!” or in the Good Friday crowd demanding that Jesus be crucified?I pray that the Holy Spirit might fill you with curiosity and wonder as you open Scripture so that you find meaning in the details we sometimes skip over. I pray that as you plan worship you may find ways to encourage that same curiosity and wonder in your communities. May you see the familiar in new and meaningful ways, and may those new insights blossom into new ways of doing and being that bring honor and glory to God.This Lent, we invite you to journey through the familiar with the particular lens of servanthood and mission. You will find sample services from a series that puts servanthood at the heart of the gospel and at the nexus of our mission as Christ’s disciples. (The entire series can be found by searching by the title at ReformedWorship.org.) We also have included several other planning resources for Transfiguration Sunday, Lent, and Holy Week, plus articles to help us see and think anew.This journey to Jerusalem is not an easy one. There are moments of delight, but also times of deep sorrow and intense pain. But if we go slowly enough, following the Spirit’s lead, we are sure to encounter the holy.

 A prayer for the Sunday after the presidential election in the United States but could be adapted for other contexts. “Creator of the universe, Lord of this time and  place…”

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to do one of my favorite things: serve communion. There are many things I treasure about the honor of hosting this holy meal, but on this occasion what struck me most were the children. The act of bending down to their level, looking them full in the face, speaking to them, and serving them ministers to my soul. Here these children come without fully comprehending the words or what this sacrament is all about, yet with fitting solemnity they dip their bread in the cup. Some come with a little trepidation and a supportive parental hand at their back, while others come eagerly, like the young man who decided to immerse the bread and most of his fingers in the juice. Thankfully, he quickly placed the soggy bread in his mouth before it dripped onto his clothes. The young girl with the beautiful white dress who so nicely dipped the bread wasn’t quite so quick. Maybe we all should wear white for communion, collecting stains as a remembrance of all our sinful imperfections for which God bent down to earth and gave his life as a redemption. Because we are humans serving humans, our call isn’t to bend down, but to recognize our equality with others, crossing barriers so we too can meet people as they are, wherever they are, and share the good news about our Bending-Down God. The image of God bending down, breaking the God/human barrier by being both God and human, is one of the most important themes of Advent. God bent down to become like us, to meet us as we are, where we are. Advent is a missional message. God’s first mission was to bend across a barrier and establish a covenant relationship with God’s people. Then, in the fullness of time, the incarnate Christ bridged barrier after barrier, bending to look people full in the face, serving humanity—the fearful, the eager, and the stained—equally. Advent is a missional message as we are called by the Holy Spirit to be Christ’s disciples, to emulate Christ. Because we are humans serving humans, our call isn’t to bend down, but to recognize our equality with others, crossing barriers so we too can meet people as they are, wherever they are, and share the good news about our Bending-Down God.  Those are the themes that can be heard throughout this issue—a barrier breaking, missional ostinato. We hear the theme in the worship series that speaks of the reckless love of God for the women in Christ’s genealogy—reckless only from a human perspective that placed little value on these women. It comes through clearly in the articles on “Advent and Mission” and “The Christmas Mission”. This Bending-Down God is the foundation of the bridge-building mission of the music group Sela, evident in the songs featured in this Songs for the Season. Bridging divides can also occur through the correcting of historical narratives as we expand our understanding of church history, learning from the 15th century church of Ethiopia and Eritrea. While the theme may not be as pronounced in other articles and resources, if you listen carefully you will hear it there as well. Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to build bridges. The work of crossing barriers and looking at the other full in the face with the same love that Christ has for them can sometimes seem impossible. In this issue we provide helpful suggestions for being bridge-builders and peacemakers that were learned by Christians in Ireland during their “Troubles”. During difficult times it is important to name those challenges and divisions and to lament, so we have also included a litany to use either with a Blue Christmas/Longest Night service in Advent or on other occasions where the church is called to lament. This Advent, as you engage the familiar nativity story again, may you encounter this Bending-Down God anew, and may the missional theme of Advent permeate not just your worship, but also the hearts, minds, and actions of those you lead.  

Whether or not you mark this coming Sunday as Trinity Sunday in your church, given the significance of the Trinity to our Christian faith it ought to receive attention in our worship. Here is a beginning list of songs to consider for use with such a service as well as an outline for the beginning of worship. 

So often in the telling of the gospel story we forget the role of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost Sunday is an opportunity for us to offer a healthy corrective as we acknowledge the role the Spirit played in creation, in the renewing of all living things, in our prayers, our salvation, and our resurrection hope.

As you plan for Ascension Day and Pentecost services, consider adapting one of these resources for your own context.

The following service was written for a devotional time before a church meeting, but it could easily be adapted for congregational worship. It is centered around Psalm 103 and the petition “give us this day our daily bread,” which would be fitting for Thanksgiving Day or any other service with gratitude as its central theme.

In my circle of Reformed folk, we like to talk about our “world and life view,” or a way of looking at life through the lens of faith—a faith that believes that the Holy Spirit is at work in this world, claiming it for Christ and building God’s kingdom on earth. As Abraham Kuyper famously said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’” (From Kuyper’s inaugural address at the dedication of the Free University, in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Eerdmans, 1998), 461). This is a faith that sings, “Every inch of this universe belongs to you, O Christ. For through you and for you it was made. Your creation endures by the order of your hand. So you must have in all things the first place” (Matthew Westerholm, “The First Place,” © 1999 Matthew Westerholm, Lift Up Your Hearts #15). Yet so often our professed faith and our lived faith don’t align. Instead of seeing our daily life as an expression of our faith and as part of the larger mission of building God’s kingdom on earth, we relegate our faith to an hour of corporate worship, a small group or Bible study, and maybe a few moments of daily prayer or personal devotions. But that’s not the way it’s supposed to be—nor does it need to be. One way to help our congregants understand that all of life is under the lordship of Christ and should be lived for his glory is to teach and show how our corporate worship should affect the rest of our living—and that our daily lives should affect our corporate worship. As Ron Man says, “Worship as a church and worship as a lifestyle are in a mutually enriching relationship” (“Living Worship,” p. 3). “Every inch of this universe belongs to you, O Christ. For through you and for you it was made. Your creation endures by the order of your hand. So you must have in all things the first place.”—Matthew WesterholmThat relationship between corporate worship and all of life is what we’ll be exploring in the next few issues of Reformed Worship. This certainly isn’t the first time we have addressed this topic, but now we will be doing so in a more focused way. In this issue we are paying particular attention to the relationship between corporate worship and our daily vocations, as seen in the worship series “Work and Worship” (p. 7), a reflection on “Daily Worship and Vocation” (p. 15), and “Songs for Work and Worship” (p. 19). Future issues of Reformed Worship will explore the connection between worship and mission. As always, we encourage you to submit your own resources related to these topics or related to the liturgical seasons. To learn more, visit reformedworship.org/how-submit-article. As we think about the connection between our worship, our work, and our faith, I can think of few people who have exemplified it as well as Laura Meyering. Laura recently retired after ten years as the subscription manager for Reformed Worship. She may not have written for the journal, but her servant’s heart and wisdom have profoundly affected our ministry, and we are grateful for her. To fill the gap that Laura leaves, and as part of the ongoing transition of Reformed Worship to our new home within the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, I invite you to join me in warmly welcoming members of CICW’s central office to the Reformed Worship team. With their help our rhythm of work and worship continues.