A series of articles on why we do what we do here at St. John’s.
An elder recently asked: “Why are we going to have communion each Saturday evening for six weeks in a row?” Our worship schedule can be a bit mysterious to some, especially because there are so many individual factors that determine how we worship on a particular day or time.
When Pastor Albers became pastor at the end of 2021, he also brought a basic idea for organizing our worship life together: let a series of otherwise independent factors determine the schedule for what we do and when.
For example:
- Ordinarily we celebrate communion at 8am (and the night before) on the 1st, 3rd and 5th Sundays of the month, then celebrate communion at the Connect service (9:30am) on the 2nd, 4th and 5th Sundays of the month.
- We also celebrate communion at each Festival service, including some “lesser” festivals, especially festivals that celebrate our Lord’s life and ministry (e.g. Christmas, Baptism of Our Lord, Passion Sunday, Easter, Day of Pentecost, etc.)
- We celebrate communion at least once each weekend. Some Sunday morning events (like National Lutheran Schools Sunday) will naturally draw in a large number of visitors who would otherwise not join us for communion. In that case we move the communion service to Saturday evening.
So, for the Saturdays in the month of January …
- December 28 … the next day is a “5th Sunday”
- January 4 … the first weekend of the month
- January 11 … the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord
- January 18 … the third weekend of the month
- January 25 … the next day is National Lutheran Schools Sunday
- February 1 … the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord
Next month: Why do we charge tuition for our school’s ministry?
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This is interesting. As a member of Our Shepherd Lutheran Church, we used to have communiion similarly many years ago.
However, we changed to having communtion in every service, every week. I think that helped us with attendance.
I’m curious, why not have communion at every service?
We just saw your comment … apologies for not responding sooner! Why? Mostly because we’ve “always” done it this way. Now, that being said, there are some more practical benefits of not celebrating the Divine Service (with communion) each service. St. John’s folks know well the liturgies of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, since we are regularly (about 9 times a year) are using those liturgies in our regular weekend worship schedule. We do make a commitment to celebrate the Lord’s Supper at least once each weekend so that a regular worshipper can each weekend find a celebration of Holy Communion to attend. It may not be at his/her preferred time or worship style … but … THANKS for reading!