Our inclusive language liturgies generally set the structure and theme of Sunday morning worship. Since announcements are an integral part of our life together, we offer some guidelines for those who make announcements towards the end of worship.
2016 Epiphany – Transforming Tradition
GATHERING
ENTRANCE
REFLECTION
Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving—born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way.
Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island, p 151
2015 Christmastide
GATHERING
![](https://www.seekerschurch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Cover_Christmastide.jpg)
ENTRANCE
REFLECTION
Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, Love divine;
Love was born at Christmas; star and angels gave the sign.
Worship we the Godhead, love incarnate, love divine;
Worship we our Jesus, but wherewith for sacred sign?
Love shall be our token; love be yours and love be mine,
Love to God and neighbor, love for plea and gift and sign.
Christina Rossetti
2015 Advent – Getting Ready
GATHERING
ENTRANCE
CANDLE LIGHTING
REFLECTION
Perhaps the hardest thing to remember about Christmas is this. It celebrates the incarnation, not just the nativity. The incarnation is an on-going process of salvation, while the nativity is the once-for-all-historical event of Bethlehem. We do not really celebrate Christ’s ‘birthday,’ remembering something that happened long ago. We celebrate the stupendous fact of the incarnation, God entering our world so thoroughly that nothing has been the same since.
Sourcebook, 1996, Liturgy Training Publication
2015 Jubilee – Shining Through Us
GATHERING
ENTRANCE
REFLECTION
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Let Your Soul Light Shine Bright,
http://www.wanttoknow.info/070825soullightshinebright
2015 Recommitment – Taking It Seriously
GATHERING
ENTRANCE
REFLECTION
If I make of my life an offering and a dedication to God, then this dedication will include all my entanglements and involvements. There follows, then, a radical change over my entire landscape and miraculously I am free at my center. It is for this reason that it is well, again and again, to reestablish my dedication, to make repeatedly an offering of my life. I must keep my dedication up to date with my experiencing.
Howard Thurman, “Life, an Offering to God”in The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations, pg 71