Starting from Scratch: What Church Panting Looked Like for St. Lydia's is a new Open article now online. Click the image above to read the article by Emily Scott.
Emily Scott tells of the first months of founding St. Lydia’s, her new effort at liturgical evangelism and community building with young adults in New York City. The congregation that she began and that’s now taking steps to shape its own life is still, as she says, ‘hot off the press,’ and she tells the beginning of a story that invites us to ask for more.
Here as St. Lydia’s is just begun and while the thinking and experience are in formative stages she writes about what prompted this beginning, how she made initial choices, what church and organizational thinking she drew on to shape a new start-up. With the unguarded voice of those moments of beginnings, she’s asking what the work of starting something really is. That question of how to begin something new can speak to any church leader and any congregation. It’s always going to be specific and local, anyone risking the spiritual and practical work of first steps will welcome hear not just of the progress St. Lydia’s has made, but how that progress was made, and what they learned along the way.
1 comment:
Don, thank you for opening this discussion. When I was archdeacon of Louisiana, I tried unsuccessfully to get the diocese to focus on chrism, with candidates for baptism present from throughout the diocese as a way of preparing for their baptism at the Easter Vigil. The trouble with the present liturgy is that it it has several competing rites: renewal of vows, blessing of oils (both chrism and sick), distribution of fermentum, and of course eucharist, with chrism as the proper. Renewal of vows always wins the contest. With your proposal, I wonder what happens to the rest. Maybe we should drop them or move them to another time and place.
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