Archive Entry #15: August 25, 1985

A handful of weeks into my FCCEM ministry back in 1985, the chairperson of our worship committee asked me whether there was anything I wanted to change in our worship. Since I had never experienced communion served in two separate distributions as we still serve it today, and I believed that I as pastor was best positioned not behind the table with the elders who offered the prayers as the pastor had been before I arrived, I told the worship chairperson that I hoped we could talk about the way we serve communion.

The result, reported in today’s entry, was a conference of worship leaders, and a two month trial period during which I no longer served from behind the table and we served the bread and cup in the same pass.

After the two month trial it was clear that a majority of the congregation preferred the two pass element distribution (I seem to remember their being something in the neighborhood of a 65-35 split), and an even larger majority supported my desire to exit from behind the communion table. That outcome still describes the core structure of our communion experience today.

I offer the following column to the archive because it presents a very early indication of how I would approach change and handle conflict through the years [Church Rule #1: If you change, you will have conflict!] Embrace change. Endorse experimentation. Request and respect all points of view.

In my 29 years here we have made or tried to make several big changes: the latest being the creation of a congregational website and the digitizing the distribution of our church newsletter; the most controversial being a failed congregational constitution rewrite in 2006. The following archive entry suggests that if nothing else, my heart has been in the right place along the way.

A Reader’s Advisory: The “Horizons” Sunday school class reported in the column’s opening paragraphs was the Sunday group precursor to our current Generations groups.

COMING NEXT: On the ninth anniversary of the catastrophic arrival of Hurricane Katrina to our Gulf Coast, a column originally published 17 days after the storm that reflects on the utter hopelessness created by that event. Find it HERE.