Accretion:

• the process of growth or increase, typically by the gradual accumulation of additional layers or matter.

“the accretion of sediments in coastal mangroves”

• a thing formed or added by gradual growth or increase.

 

Jesus replied, “It’s written, People won’t live only by bread but by every word spoken by God.”.   Matthew 4: 4

 

This past week I had a ‘Clergy Day of Rest’; a time away with other Ministry Personnel in the Region to talk about all things church.  It was a good day.  Ministry is a very solitary profession; most of us work alone and work enough of a distance from each other that its not easy to connect.  I’m such an extrovert that I really crave times that I can sit and chat about life with my colleagues.  So, this day away was a perfect antidote to everything that is Eastern Ontario in February.

 

One of the things that we talked about briefly was our collective disappointment that our Christmas Eve Services, for the most part, had to be canceled.  The only Churches that had services were urban churches that people could walk to (including their ministers) and even they had far fewer people in the pews than they expected.

 

And this is where the conversation got interesting.

 

One of the clergy, a long time minister in the area, whose father was also in ministry in the area told us all that the United Church never had Christmas Eve service until relatively recently.  Christmas Eve services were seen as too ‘Catholic’, and congregations, instead, held their Christmas Service on the Sunday before Christmas Day.  In fact, this minister’s father held THE FIRST Christmas Eve worship service in the Ottawa Valley in 1969.  Interesting, eh.  Yet somehow, having a Christmas Eve worship service is now etched in stone in all Christian Churches in the area, and clergy wear, as a badge of honour, the number of Christmas Eve services that they hold.  Frankly, my Anglican Colleagues will always win; they can have as many as 6 worship services on Christmas Eve!  I was reluctant to point out that Bethel had one, at a very civilized time.  I some how felt like I was losing an important Ministry competition.

 

Kathleen will like this; she had a big discussion with me about Christmas Eve falling on my day off and how I should have the time with my family.  I was the one who insisted that we go ahead.  (And then, apparently, the weather had other ideas, lol).

 

This week is also the beginning of Lent and Ash Wednesday.  We didn’t have worship on Ash Wednesday.  We did have our normal Bible Study, but it there was not a bowl of ashes in sight.  I noticed that many of our church neighbours did have special worship services, and that even more United Churches included the marking of a cross on people’s foreheads.  I don’t know when this all happened; I do know that when I was in high school that the Catholic kids who came back at lunch with a cross on their forehead were looked at with some suspicion, and most of them had it wiped off before they went to class.  The United Church doesn’t usually mark days like Ash Wednesday; again, it hasn’t been part of our tradition, well, until recently.

 

At the clergy retreat, all of us sat together in a circle.  We worshiped together, prayed together, and in general chatted about what its like to be in the ‘business’ these days.  It was a deep, meaningful time, and several people commented that they think that what we were doing; this casual ‘circle’, is the direction that the church is going in, and that it needs to go in.

 

Which is interesting, eh!  Because the slow movement towards more ritual and more formalized services seems to point out that the church is going in a different direction.

 

Or maybe not.

 

Maybe, instead, it’s a response to our increasing secularization and declining church adherence.  Maybe its an attempt to grab on to legitimacy:  “Look, we have 150 Christmas Eve Services and we will put 49 crosses on your forehead on Ash Wednesday.  We are important.  We are busy.  We are just like everyone else”.

 

I don’t really know that.  But what I do know, is that the little circle of friends sharing their lives and their walk with Jesus, with each other last Tuesday was what I needed to feel as if I had worship.  And when I come to Bethel on a Sunday morning and see your faces smiling God’s love out to me, I know that I have encountered the Holy Spirit.  I know that we don’t need to be busy to be Christian.  I know that its not honoring to God and to how we are created if we are running around like chickens and burning ourselves out.    And I know, that in God’s eyes, we are not only legitimate, but important.

 

Blessings today my friends, and remember you are Loved.

~Rev. Lynne