News from St. Nicholas with the Holy Innocents

Regular schedule begins today.

• Worship at 9 – the more formal liturgy
• 10 Education hour for children, youth, and adults
• Worship at 11 – the more informal liturgy

Bring a non-perishable food item to church.

Our food pantry will benefit greatly if we all remember to do this each Sunday. Place it on or beneath the grey table just inside the worship space.

Make yourself a name tag whenever you worship.

It will help us get to know one another faster, and it’s a great way to make guests feel welcome.

Lift every voice and sing…

Thanks to all who joined the choir this past Sunday and produced such a wonderful sound. If you’ve ever thought about joining the choir, now is a great time. Mary will be starting on February 11 as music director, and will be delighted to have you. In the weeks before Mary begins, Kris Abels (principal guest organist of the former Holy Innocents) and Amy Dolan (former music director at the former St. Nicholas) are filling in on piano to take some of the load off Betsy Swanson’s shoulders – although I currently
do not have an accompanist for January 28. Since this is such a hectic period, it will be helpful if choir members could arrive at 9 to run through the music. Betsy also has been holding choir practice on Wednesdays at 7 and will continue to do so until Mary arrives.

Visit to Buddhist Temple on February 3rd

A discussion during a recent Team Awesome teen education class revealed a desire by many to learn more about Buddhism and, in particular, to visit a Buddhist temple. On Saturday, February 3rd at 11 a.m., St. Nicholas with the Holy Innocents will be visiting the Shinnyo-en Japanese Buddhist Temple in Elk Grove Village for a service to celebrate the coming of spring. We will be throwing beans around the temple, but you’ll have to come to find out why! The service at will be followed by a tour of the temple, during
which visitors are invited to ask questions. The temple is located at 120 E. Devon Avenue in Elk Grove. For more information on Shinnyo-en Buddhism, and the religion in general, you are encouraged to visit http://www.shinnyo-en.org. Anyone wishing to attend should contact Ethan Jewett at jewett_ethan@yahoo.com, so that he can give the temple a final count of participants. Adults and children, as well as teens, are more than welcome to attend.

onebreadonebody.org

Be sure to check out our new combined and simplified web site – and to thank Ethan and Mike for a superb job on it.

Help needed to transport a family of 4 from Hoffman Estates to St. Nicholas with the Holy Innocents.

The Bollyn family – two adults, two children — does not have a car and will need a ride to get to the new building. They live just a couple of blocks from the Holy Innocents building. Let me know by email ASAP if you can help — onebreadonebody@sbcglobal.net.

Please join me for adult education at 10

We are going to spend the next several weeks discussing Growing Our New Church. Some of the discussion will be on the challenges of bringing our two previous congregations together as one new one. Even more of it will be on doing those things we need to be doing to grow. I will value greatly the participation of each of you. As I said Sunday, we have a great opportunity before us and, although I have many ideas on how to take advantage of this moment, the most important ideas are yours, because we can only do
this together, from the ground up. Children and youth who would like to share ideas are welcome to attend this session in lieu of their regular church school programs, which will also begin this week.

Our two liturgies…

Today we begin our regular schedule and I encourage you to try both the 9 and the 11 liturgies – maybe even in the same day. It’ll provide a chance to connect with different people, and give you a chance to feel your way into the two distinct styles of liturgy. As I said Sunday, they will be different, with the aim of meeting different needs in our new congregation, but even more importantly of reaching out to more new members. Rather than me trying to capture the differences in words, come and see…. …and a note
on contemplative quiet. One thing I hope will unite both liturgies is a warm, sacramental feel. Especially after Mary arrives, there will be preludes and postludes and I would be grateful if our conversations could be moved into the next room so that those who wish to enter or exit worship gradually and more contemplatively can do so. I realize especially for the social, extroverted St. Nicholas people that this will be a shift, and it will be made easier with a building addition. In the meantime, thanks for
trying. Finally, one bread, one body.

1. I was so proud of all of you on Sunday. What a great beginning to our new life together. It was a wonderful liturgy, with everyone letting go of some customary ways of doing things and opening their hands to accept the new things God is doing. The ice cream (thanks Karen, Mary Anne, and Ethan and Mike) and cake (thanks Manny and Douglas) and coffee (thanks Paul) were great afterwards. What made me proudest of all was that I heard absolutely no grumbling, grousing, or complaining about having to let go. What
an incredible and mature group of people you are!

2. This week we will move a little closer to establishing the norms and practices of each liturgy. With our space limitations and the chaos of coming together, it will be a few more weeks before everything is where I want it to be with each liturgy. Thank you for being so patient with the bedlam.

3. Finally, thanks to everyone who helped with the moving on Sunday. We have now moved everything from the Holy Innocents building that we want to come to this building. There remain items we intend to move to storage, but we will ask an Episcopal Charities agency to do that moving for us. Now we focus on the future, and what a bright future it can be.

— Steve

As we at St Nicholas with the Holy Innocents begin our life together as one bread, one body and one community, we will be learning some new ways, and letting go of some old ways. We’ll also have to learn to overcome the traditional Episcopalian reluctance to invite people to church! We be continuing to offer a radical welcome to all as well

, which makes the following column from Episcopal Life magazine from our Presiding Bishop Katharine particularly timely.

To Reach The Unchurched, We Must Learn New Words and Ways to Tell Our Story

By Katharine Jefferts Schori in this months’ Episcopal Life

One of the significant challenges in our life as a church has to do with reaching out to the unchurched. I come from a part of the country where few people are active in religious communities, and the culture is quite clearly non-Christian.

That makes evangelism a rather different proposition than it is in communities where most people know the basic shape of the Christian story. If we are going to be effective in reaching out to those beyond our walls, we are going to have to learn new language and ways of telling our story.

I taught a World Religions course in a secular university for several years. The course required students to attend several worship services in traditions outside their own (if they had one).

They had to find the house of worship, join in as much as was possible and reasonable, and later write a reflection paper on their experiences. The students often told about their surprise when they were welcomed as human beings and their chagrin when they felt they only were being received as potential converts and/or possible monetary additions.

I know I certainly have heard vestries and others say, “We have to grow, if we’re going to balance our budget.” But when these students were welcomed with curiosity and a genuine interest in knowing them as persons and individuals, they responded with warmth, even if they had no intention of joining the community.

Part of our evangelical task is making our worshiping communities welcoming in a deep, human, relational sense. The gospel is about radical hospitality, after all, and that is what we are meant to model.

The other side of this challenge is how we might speak good news in language and forms that people uneducated in Christianity can understand and welcome. If our language engenders fear, it is likely to drive people away. If it welcomes and invites, the possibility can be quite different.

This may not be seen in many places in the Episcopal Church, but consider your own reaction to “If you don’t believe the way we do, you’re going to hell.” Not only does hell not have much reality for the unchurched, there is an arrogance in that approach that many find repellent.

There are more subtle forms of that message, however, that are rampant in this church. We use language that is understandable only by insiders – and not just the arcane terms of our liturgy and polity (and those words themselves won’t be understood by many!).

There is an underlying message in many faith communities that says, “The way we worship (or hold Sunday school or run our vestry meetings or …) is the only right way.” And the implication that is heard is, “There is no welcome here for you if you can’t do it our way.” There is an aspect of that message that is quite un-Anglican, if we really want to live up to our value of comprehensiveness.

But even more deeply, we have to figure out how to tell our story in language that a person who doesn’t know anything about Christianity can begin to understand. I’m going to suggest that our telling of that great story has to begin in listening. Not only does it say to the other person, “Your story is of great importance, and I recognize your equal dignity by listening,” but it also gives us an opportunity to discern where to help connect that story with the larger story of God’s love known in Jesus Christ.

Frederick Buechner famously said that ministry happens when a person’s great joys meet the deep hungers of the world. We cannot engage in ministry until we recognize where the hunger is.

I have had the remarkable gift and opportunity in recent months to speak to people who don’t know much at all about the Episcopal Church or Christianity. Those opportunities have come through the secular media. Those interviews intentionally have avoided the language of Christian insiders for the reasons above.

The unfortunate result in some places has been anger when Episcopalians don’t recognize their own familiar language. Let me suggest a challenging exercise: How would you tell the great truths of our faith without using overtly theological language? How would you tell a new neighbor that God loves him or her without measure, and invite him or her to learn more? If we are going to hear that person’s story with grace, we have to leave the door open for a while.

— The presiding bishop invites your response to her comments this month. Write to us at Episcopal Life, 815 Second Ave., New York, NY 10017 or e-mail us at PBcolumn@episcopal-life.org

Via the daily episcopalian, the blog of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington DC.

Church, Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori