Making the Move to Sunday

As a regular Saturday night attender myself for years and years, this seems like the perfect place to talk about the decision that has been made to discontinue this service on August 23rd. If you’ve been around Oak Hills for a long time, you will remember that when we moved onto our property in 1993 and changed our service times from Sunday afternoon (right during nap-time!) to Sunday morning we experienced a swell in attendance that caused us to worry about overflowing the portable space where we met (currently the Youth Auditorium). So, the Saturday Night Service was born. Committed Oak Hillians were asked to consider moving to that service to make room for the new people who would find Sunday morning more convenient.

My family made the transition to Saturday night (hey, it was still better than Sunday afternoons!) and we became firmly fixed there as different family members began volunteering in Guest Services and in the children’s Prime Time programs on Saturday night. As our children got older, we established some traditions around Saturday night, too. We began having a family movie night after the service with an easy late-night dinner that became a favorite time of ours.

But while we have enjoyed sleeping in on Sunday mornings and the relaxed feel of the Saturday night service, there has also been a sense of disconnection from the rest of the Oak Hills family. We don’t seem to have those spontaneous get-togethers with friends like we used to when we were all together on Sundays and ran into a family that had the afternoon free to go grab pizza or pull together an impromptu BBQ. We have frequently met people at retreats who have attended Oak Hills for years but who we have never even seen before. There has been a loss as well as a joy in attending church on Saturdays.

The decision to let go of our Saturday night service has not been taken lightly. In fact, the Elder Board and staff have discussed it often over the years. Since the year 2000, when we moved into our permanent building, we have not really needed the space but didn’t want to take away an opportunity from anyone whose work schedule might keep them from attending on a Sunday morning. But as attendance has dwindled over time, the cost in terms of volunteer hours and lost community feel have outweighed our desire to keep the service going. We believe that it will be a very good thing to have the church gathered together on Sundays. I know that when I let my family know that we were going to have to transition back to going to church on Sundays there was something like a sigh of relief and an expectation that we will meet up with people who we haven’t seen in a while.

For this feeling of community to take root, though, we will have to plan to linger a bit after the first service if we decide to go to that one, or come early to the second service if that is where we land. The only way to see the whole church together is to mingle between the services. So the challenge for us Saturday nighters is to relearn to wake up on Sunday mornings and to come fresh and ready to worship and delight in the people who make up Oak Hills Church…and see who sits in our seats at these other services…and be prepared to meet some new people and greet some old friends. I think it is an exciting opportunity to develop closer connections with each other – I’ll see you there!

Divine Communion

I’ve been reading some wonderful books this summer and one of the common themes that has tugged at my heart and mind is the idea of community with God that is available to us as believers. Robert Barron writes in The Strangest Way,

“Not only is God active and aggressive enough to track us down in love; God is also “flexible” enough to include us in his own being. The Father sent his Son in order to gather us into the Spirit, which is the love that binds them together – and it is in this central place that we are privileged to exist. Whenever Christians pray, they invoke the names of the Trinitarian persons, because they are praying, not so much outside of God as a petitioner, as, strangely enough, inside of God as a sharer in the divine communion.”

That is an amazing concept! Read it again: we are praying from within the holy communion of the Trinity, not as an outsider knocking at the door or someone “down here” sending prayers “up there” but we are at home in this community of the Father, Son and Spirit and our prayers are the conversation we engage in with them. Where do you “stand” in relation to God when you pray? Are you sending prayers long-distance or are you like Abraham, eating under the trees at Mamre and walking along the road to Sodom with your prayers a conversation with a present Person (Gen. 18)? In fact, we seem to have an even closer position than that of Abraham speaking with the Lord, because we don’t meet God as visitors among us, but we are inside the community of God, abiding in him as he abides in us. What a beautiful mystery!

Nowhere is this concept of community with God more apt than at the Communion Table. When we eat of the bread and drink of the cup, “Christ enters us and we him”, as Robert Webber wrote in Ancient-Future Worship. While he is ever present in this world and with us always, there is some “mystery of faith (that) embraces the reality of the incarnation and an incarnational presence in the bread and wine.” Do you think of this mystery, this union with Christ, when you take Communion? I hope you will begin to. If you combine the ideas of Webber and Barron, you may be present with Christ in a new way as you accept the Body and the Blood and can celebrate the Presence in a fuller, more meaningful way.

Barron urges us to find our center in Christ, to forsake ourselves and surrender to the power and presence and beauty and truth that are in him. He uses a delightful teaching of John of the Cross to make his point,

“John says that the inner Christ, is like a hidden wine cellar. This metaphor focuses, not on strength and safety, but on intoxication. The divine source, opened up by Christ, is an inexhaustible font of delight and elevation of consciousness. When we drink fine wine, we are lifted up out of our everyday preoccupations and become playful, imaginative, a bit daring. In the same way, when we drink of the spirit of Christ, the divine liquor, our minds are lifted up out of their obsessive concern with “the body” and opened to a higher, more joyful, dimension of experience. This inner wine cellar is buried within the souls of believers, but, says John of the Cross, most of us have lost the key.”

How wonderful that sounds! I hope that you will search for the key to this place of hidden delight. Start with prayer and the Lord’s Supper and tell me how your search goes.