From The Deacon's Bench

CHURCH I would venture to guess, that for most people who are playing a word association game and the word church comes up they would give clues about a church building.   When we say, “I’m going to church”, most of us will picture in our mind a particular building.   However, for the first 250 years Christians did not gather for worship in buildings called churches or buildings built only for the purpose of worship.   They met in small groups in homes.   It would be almost 1,000 years before buildings resembling what we think of as churches would begin to be built. Fast forward another 1,000 years and we are once again gathering in small groups in houses for the purpose of worship.   However, there is a new twist to these small group worship experiences.   The members of these small groups are staying in their own homes and are using electronic devices to gather together.   In addition, those who are gathering are coordinating telephone or written contact with other church m

Psalms and Palms…Social Distancing…Trying to Cope…Holy Week 2020 As I sit down to write this, I can’t remember any time in my life when I was not in a church building celebrating Palm Sunday.   In addition, I also came to realize that I never fully connected with what the palms represented. Every year we were handed or picked up a semi-dried-up brownish palm frond.   Some would sit in the pews making crosses out of that palm, some would put it in their prayer book like a bookmark.   Most would take palm fronds home and place them on a shelf or fireplace mantel and save them until the Priest would announce that last year’s palms should be brought in to be burned to make ashes for the Ash Wednesday services. Fast forward to the year 2020.   We did not gather in church buildings this Palm Sunday.   Those of us who are on the internet were able to “view” or in some cases participate in virtual worship.   Instead of palms, some of us followed this request made by Fr. Terry O’C