From the Associate for Music and Liturgy...

What are you praying for right now with all of our lives being so disrupted?

One distinctive thing about our Anglican way of being Christian is that what we believe flows from how we worship and pray together. 

As we move into a time that seems filled with anxiety, I believe that more than ever we are called to be the church - to be the witness of God's love in Jesus Christ to people filled with worry and fear. 

Over the next two Sundays when we offer our Facebook Livestream worship, we will be singing songs and hymns that, I hope, get us to this core: trust in the faithfulness of God through even the darkest times, and how that trust forms us to be people of hope and love in the midst of it.

This Sunday, our first song will be one familiar to many of us: "Take Us as We Are." All of the stanzas are especially meaningful, but this one perhaps the most for us now:

Give us to the world you love as light and salt and yeast.

That we may nourish in your name the last, the lost, the least.

Until at length you call us all to your unending feast.

What might it mean for you to be light that drives away darkness, that shines a light on how things need to be different? What might it mean for you to be the salt of the earth - something that cleanses, something that enlivens, even if it hurts a little? What does it look like for me and you to be yeast - people who do small things to transform our communities into something large and nourishing?

I hope that you will join us - virtually - for worship this Sunday at 10 a.m. Even as we are absent in the body, we may yet be present in the Spirit, as the writer of the Letter to the Colossians says. I pray that me and you will be changed by our experience of praying together that we might be agents of God's change that we pray for.

Martin