Churches
Posted by Martin Orr on Sunday, 05 February 2006 at 12:55
Well this week I had (as I think I mentioned previously) a busy Wednesday afternoon, with three supervisions, and a busy few days before that doing the work for them. David, one of the chaplains, asked me to do the prayers of intercession in the College Chapel for Candlemas on Thursday. (Candlemas is the festival of the presentation of Christ in the Temple, and involved more candles.) That meant both writing the prayers and reading them. We had a brief lesson on how to write them last Sunday. I was very nervous but it went well.
Last Sunday I went to the United Reform Church (what the Presbyterian Church in England merged to become). It was fairly similar to a progressive Presbyterian service at home; one interesting thing they did was to compose a "psalm" during the service by different people in the congregation suggesting a line of praise. There was also a fire drill following the benediction; I'm told that neither of these things happen every week.
This morning I went to a Lutheran Church. This surprised me because the liturgy were almost identical to a Catholic Mass, starting with Kyrie, Gloria, etc, and some people crossed themselves at each mention of the Trinity. However it was a very Protestant sermon, focussed tightly on the text and enthusiastically preached, and of course all the Catholic theology of the Eucharist was dropped. Also they replaced "holy catholic church" with "holy Christian church" in the creed.
-- Martin