Calendar Notes

The color from now until All Saints Day or All Saints Sunday (November 1 or 4) is green. Consider using different shades or patterns of green throughout the coming months, if you have means available to do so. On All Saints, the color is white or gold.

For Your Planning Team

Planning for This Service

Today, things are very different. This is on purpose. Many annual conferences meet over the first weekend in June, and so many congregations are either without their pastor entirely, or their pastor may not have had the kind of time to prepare for a regular service because of the demands of being at conference this week. So this service is designed to be lay led. It does not require a pastor at all.

As we move through this series on Transitions, we will be experiencing a transition through time of the development of our patterns of worship as Methodist people in the United States.

As we think about early American Methodist worship spaces, they were largely “blank” halls designed not for Sunday morning worship, but for Sunday evening meetings of the Methodist Society. There were not Communion tables, lecterns, or baptismal fonts, because for the sacraments Methodists would attend Sunday morning worship with the Anglicans. If there was a pulpit, it was minimal. We recommend removing as much of the “regular furniture” from the front as you can for today’s service, and if any of it cannot be moved, simply do not use it.

What we’re wanting to convey by this is the sense that the space is “under construction,” that we’re in a time of transition where things aren’t like what they were, nor yet what they will be.

Today’s service is in the form of morning prayer, which lay at the basis of the early Methodist preaching services common when the travelling elder was not in town (eleven weekends out of twelve for many early American Methodist Episcopal churches). We use our current form for Morning Prayer (see UMH 876-877) as the basic outline for this service order.

Today’s service may not take a full hour. It may not even take much more than half an hour. Don’t make the sermon longer or stretch elements to fill the time. Take the time you need to take, no more. Extend your time for fellowship afterward if you like, and then go home!

Additional Resources for this Service

This is the first time this set of readings has appeared in the Season after Pentecost since Discipleship Ministries started its website in 1997 because it is the earliest Easter has appeared in Year B since that time.

Ecumenical Prayer Cycle: (Click link to find countries for this week when they are posted)