by Kay Ahmed | Jan 4, 2019 | Featured Article, Ritual Reboot
Our church has three regular worship services a week. Two of them are in our smaller chapel space, have minimalist bulletins in lower case letters, pastors on barstools using iPads, Communion bread from the pop-up gluten-free bakery down the street, guitars and...
by social@thebtscenter.org | Apr 6, 2018 | Uncategorized
On a recent Saturday around sunset, a group of 40 people gathered in the chapel of our suburban Connecticut “tall steeple church” for “Evensong,” a weekly contemporary Christian service we have offered since September. Imagined and led by our associate pastor, it is...
by social@thebtscenter.org | Sep 23, 2016 | 21stCenturyMinistry
Toward the end of Coffee Hour on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend—a light day, as they go—I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was our usually unflappable church Music Director, looking, well, flapped. “Got a minute?” he said in the “up tone” that in church staff speak...
by social@thebtscenter.org | May 6, 2016 | 21stCenturyMinistry, Bearings Review 2016
Three years ago, one of the saints of our congregation decided it was time to move into a local senior living facility. Her husband had died the previous year. She liked the idea of her son and his family filling the house—which felt too big for one—with the coming...
by social@thebtscenter.org | Jun 4, 2015 | 21stCenturyMinistry, Bearings Review 2015
Elizabeth Drescher’s recent piece on “Bearings” asks the question: “What if we had the next great awakening . . . and everybody slept in?” As a church pastor, I’m beginning to wonder that, myself. There are times when being a mainline church pastor feels like being...
