Dear Ones,

Happy Easter! I know, you’ve put away your Easter bonnets and eaten all the chocolate bunnies that were hiding in the “grass” in your Easter basket. And, yes, everything Easter is marked down to 70% off. But we have eight Sundays in the Season of Easter, including Resurrection Sunday, before we get to the Day of Pentecost. So, I insist:

Blessings on you in this season of New Life and Possibility!

In worship on last Sunday—”the Second Sunday of Easter”—Rev. Thomas took us back to the earliest congregations we would call “Christian” today to remind us that they had very different practices when they met for Communion. He reminded me that we have not always done it this way, even though it may seem like it. Because there was no tradition, they were free to use their imaginations and find their way into what honored the experiences they’d had and their intentions to embody The Way of Jesus. Underline free.

To my surprise and as though summoned forth, a little book by Diana Butler Bass jumped off my bookshelf and opened before my eyes to this page. In The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), Bass urges mainline congregations to develop “the emerging congregational style” that she outlines, and to cultivate the

imaginative power of congregations to move beyond normative patterns and programmatic fixes into a place of doing and being church that embodies the enchantment of the Christian story in the practices of faith.

What? Embody the enchantment of the Christian story? So, that’s what the first followers were doing! I’m in. What Bass says next, I take as an invitation:

The lack of imaginative and fluid retraditioning in a new cultural world “caused” mainline decline. After all, imaginatively fiddling around with tradition is one of the things congregations do.

OK. Let’s do it. Come to worship on Sunday, the Third Sunday Easter, for a slightly “fiddled” Service of Word and Table in a way that opens us to what we do and why. You will notice that the order of worship is shifted a bit for Communion Sunday.

Attention Streamers—all of you will be with us online—please prepare the “bread and wine” of your choice to be consecrated so you can share in the meal. If there are other “elements” needed, we’ll be sure to give you time to be prepared.

Love and hugs, and grace upon grace.

Rev. Liz

(This feels risky. Do you suppose it felt that way for those first followers? We didn’t get the liturgies most Protestants use until the Reformation. What did they do before that?)