Guess Who's Coming to the Pulpit!

After leaving Kay in Austin with her pom-poms and yells, which played a huge roll in the success of Landon’s volleyball team at the USVBA Men’s Nationals, I flew back to Virginia on Saturday, June 2. This time, due to the generous gift of a friend, I’m staying in Williamsburg at a resort called Ford’s Colony. It’s a beautiful, secluded community of residents and vacationers, just a few miles from Colonial Williamsburg. Kay joined me on Monday.

My goal for the two weeks here is to work on a writing project that, in part, has already been written. I’m attempting to collect, refine, sometimes re-write, and often complete the writing of more than 100 “calls to worship” that I’ve used in the last 30 years in churches I’ve served.

My friend Harry Wooten, who was Minister of Music at Judson Baptist in Nashville while I was there in the late 70’s, was the first to encourage me to develop this form of worship invitation or set-up, using a theme or an idea to help congregants focus on the purpose of the worship service. We tried to come up with a new name for it, and the best we could do was “opening sentences.” At UBC, we just call them “calls to worship”, or preparation of the Word, or we call them nothing at all.

So far, after two days in Williamsburg, I’ve written only blogs. But I’m still hopeful.

Although I wasn’t happy to leave the volleyball tournament before its completion, I was thrilled when I found out that the Logie Bear, smarter than the average seminarian, would be preaching at New Journey Church the morning after I arrived in Virginia. I made my way to New Journey last Sunday, where Logan serves as youth minister, in Midlothian, Virginia.

Though he’s preached at least one other time in his church here, I knew that Logan would be nervous (who wasn’t, and isn’t, still today?), but he assured me that it wouldn’t bother him for me to be there. He took a preaching class at BTSR not too long ago, and he took a class called Narrative Preaching in May term, last month. (While I was at BTSR, he was preaching in the class, but he suggested, very nicely, that I not sit in on that one. After all he was being graded.)

I can’t adequately communicate how impressed I was with what Logan did last Sunday. He was well-prepared, obviously having spent a lot of time in exegesis of the passage and in thoughtful writing. He spoke on Jesus’ parable of the man who invited his friends to a party, and when they came up with lame excuses for not attending, he invited the outcasts of society. Logan called the sermon, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, and he concluded with a great application of the passage to the mission of this church plant that’s now meeting in an elementary school.

Logan and Christy have been in Richmond now for two and a half years, and he will graduate from BTSR in May, 2008. God has obviously used this time, and Logan has worked hard to learn. He is becoming a pastor/minister, and he’s working with God to surprise us all—again! Wow! Way to go, Logue!

Care-full-y,
Rick