by Tom Pappas For my sophomore year of college I moved out of the dorm and lived with families I had met at church. Fall semester I stayed with the Dick family and then moved in with the Josts. Here’s what I learned (duh): Families do things differently. Neither the Dick’s nor the Josts’ were anything like my family or each other. About five years ago I visited a remarkable church in Minneapolis. The Church of All Nations has no ethnic majority. The bigger groups are Korean and Latin American. This was a church like no other in my experience but it’s the communion process that I will describe. When the time for communion was at hand, we were told that there were two stations for intinction on each side of the chancel. The inner stations were grape juice and on the outside we would find wine. Grape juice OR wine! That ...
by Angier Brock Those who follow the Christian liturgical calendar will know that we recently entered “Ordinary Time,” that longest of liturgical seasons, beginning after Pentecost and lasting until Advent. I confess that I have sometimes referred to “Ordinary Time” (with its twenty-some-week run that is unbroken by any major liturgical feast or fast) disparagingly, calling it “the long green season” (green being the color used for altar hangings and priestly vestments during Ordinary Time). “Not so fast,” someone recently challenged me when I told her that. She went on to point out that Ordinary Time is anything but ordinary if by “ordinary” we mean “uneventful” or “insignificant.” She suggested that a quick perusal of national news headlines, or the obituary pages and wedding sections of our local newspaper papers, are proof enough of that. Or we can simply turn to our own engagement calendars. This week, for example, I will take ...
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