Skip to main content

meeting


For: The Institute of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

I am in Beaverton, Ontario at a national leadership gathering for the Vineyard Church of Canada. And doing my homework for Red Essentials. Having discussed where we are going as a church movement and sitting in a lot of meetings in the past 24 hours, I am starting to realise that the word meeting has become a bit of a misrepresented word in our world. Meeting is, at its very basic, a coming together of two or more. I meet with God. I meet with friends. I meet a stranger. I meet with colleagues to get some work done.

A church meeting is simply a coming together of two or more people who are joined to Jesus. This can happen anywhere and anytime and anyplace. This week in the online worship course I am taking, we explored the elements of time and space in regard to encountering God and our subsequent worship of him. It was amazing to read where and how and when people will find God present and near to them. There just are no limits to the experience. God is always present.
My challenge is not as much to get to a meaningful church meeting during the week, but to let a lot of them happen in my life every day. Meeting is not a proper noun. It is a verb. Let us meet with God and with each other often: in person, on the phone, via email and letters, online, in whatever way we can, let us not forget to meet.

Let's see how inventive we can be in encouraging love and helping out, not avoiding worshiping together as some do but spurring each other on, especially as we see the big Day approaching. - from Hebrews 10 The Message

This is the view of St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal. I like to go there alone or with friends.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim
Post a Comment
Read more

soul refrigerator

I went grocery shopping yesterday and came home with three bags of food. After I unpacked them all, this is what my fridge looked like: really empty. How does that happen? How can I feel so full and ready for any food emergency one moment, and after one quick glance, realise that I have nothing, really? Today is one of those days in my soul as well. I woke up with gratitude and fullness in my heart, ready to take on this day and all the wonderful opportunities that it presented. Then I caught a brief glance of some emptiness in my life and bam - my buoyancy was compromised. For the past few hours I have been treading water, trying to keep my head in a positive space, bobbing in and out of disappointment, and catching myself whining with pathetic indignity at the cement blocks of other people's stupidity that are tangled around my ankles. When I am staring at the empty refrigerator of my soul, these are my thoughts. Where do I go from here? Perhaps I should slam that refrigerator
1 comment
Read more

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go
3 comments
Read more