“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). This verse is familiar to many of us, serving as a reminder that we cannot escape the shifting of seasons, whether in the literal sense of changes to the natural world or in the metaphorical sense of changes to our individual or communal circumstances. Moreover, Ecclesiastes 3:1 reminds us that a shift from one season to the next is often desirable, since each new season contributes something unique and valuable to our lives. I am writing this article to describe a recent season that enriched my community of faith, The Church at Nairn. Made possible through a Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, Grand Rapids, Michigan, with funds provided by Lilly Endowment Inc., our congregation launched “Renewing Rural Worship,” a series of ecumenical workshops that identified and responded to the realities of worshiping in a rural context.
Conveniently, this season of our ecclesial life began as the literal season of spring was arriving in southwestern Ontario, where we live, which meant that the growth of new connections and ideas among those participating in the project closely resembled the new life emerging in the natural world at that time.
Starting on April 6, thirty people commuted to The Church at Nairn on a weekly basis from a range of geographical (from Bayfield to Harrington to Corunna!) and denominational (from Presbyterian to Lutheran to Baptist!) locations to learn how to sustain the worship of the rural communities that they serve.
We began our time together with a meal, enjoying brunch in the church’s fellowship hall with a small begonia plant serving as a centrepiece for each table. I bought the begonias from a local greenhouse. After all, there were very few flowers blooming in anyone’s yard at that time. There were many begonia colours available, but I chose bright yellow flowers because I thought that their boldness might inspire the people participating in the project to take a similarly bold step of connecting with a stranger. I wanted the begonias to signify that renewal, whether in the form of flowers returning each spring or churches regaining a sense of vitality, is both beautiful and attainable. Perhaps, if the begonias offered participants a glimpse of how spring renews the world in new and surprising ways, those same participants would become more receptive to new and surprising ways of worshiping in their rural communities.
By the end of our five weeks together, it seemed that the begonias worked their magic on us. I shouldn’t discount the other elements of the series, though.
After eating brunch on that first Saturday morning, we spent time discussing the vertical, horizontal, and outward dimensions of worship as described by Sarah Kathleen Johnson. Then, we met for four Thursday evenings in a row, welcoming a special speaker each time. On April 11, we discussed the significance of a sense of place for rural communities, taking time to share photos of each other’s sanctuaries and write notes of encouragement in response to them. Joel Lock joined us for this event, identifying and re-framing four common stereotypes of life in a rural setting. We continued to explore our “rural realities” on April 18, but we applied a different lens to the subject by welcoming Joretta Marshall, a retired professor and United Methodist elder. Joretta reminded us that people develop stories over time that overlap in rural communities so that when one individual experiences a crisis, it affects everyone else and solicits their support. On April 25, we learned that our stories sometimes entangle enough in rural communities to warrant the formation of “ecumenical shared ministries.” Our speaker, Sandra Beardsall, described this phenomenon as the merging of two or more congregations that retain their respective affiliations with different denominational bodies. With her encouragement, we considered how worship becomes a richer experience when multiple denominations join together for it. Our final speaker, Brad Roth, joined us on May 2 to apply our learning to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Brad invited us to reflect on who we include and exclude in our rural settings, and he suggested that the communion table is one of the sites where we negotiate what it means to belong to a community of faith.
By the time that Brad arrived in the village of Nairn to share his research with us, the effects of spring were evident all around us. Dandelions covered the ground, daffodils and tulips were blooming in clusters, and it was warm enough that one of the participants asked me when she arrived that evening, “Are we going to spend any time outside?” Our full schedule kept me from accommodating her request, but it wasn’t really such a loss, since we were witnessing the effects of spring not just in the natural world, but inside of the building as well. I became especially aware of it when I led the group in an exercise following Brad’s talk that consisted of “rehearsing” different modes of distributing communion. Rather than consecrating bread and wine for this activity, I used water and stones that I collected in the parking lot as makeshift elements. Although it took a rather unholy form, everyone was very receptive to this exercise, reflecting on each mode of distribution with much enthusiasm and awe—not in small groups, which characterized most of our other conversations, but as one large group of former strangers who now seemed to want to linger in the space for as long as I would let them. Something changed over the weeks before this moment. We experienced a season of intentional life together, and new relationships were blooming by the end of it. It wasn’t real communion, not in the sense of a sacrament, but it was real communion.
The final event of the series occurred on the following Saturday evening. The event included a time of eating together, much like how the series began. While we finished dessert, I led the group in a litany of thanksgiving for what we learned and received through this project. We also prayed together, and I invited everyone to complete the following sentence and share it with the people sitting at their table: “I believe that worship is most meaningful when…” Notably, I offered the same prompt at our first gathering and invited people to share responses to it, but only one participant was willing to do so. Again, something changed within those five weeks. We were more vulnerable with each other, and I sensed a desire to sustain the new life emerging from this project, to nurture it so that it would continue to flourish. With that in mind, I used the metaphor of a garden to shape the ecumenical worship service that we hosted after the meal that night. Following my instructions, participants used a muffin liner, a small piece of paper in the shape of a circle, and a straight pin to fasten a makeshift flower to one of three canvases on a table at the front of the room. Before doing so, though, I invited them to write a word or phrase on the circle that captured their hope for rural churches after participating in Renewing Rural Worship. Once all of the flowers found a home on the canvas, we found ourselves staring at an ecumenical garden of hopes and dreams for the future. At the beginning of the series, we needed the begonias to signify the hope of renewal that seemed to lie outside of our reach. By the end of the series, we could see and feel inspired by the hope of summer in the world around us, and we found that we could claim a similar hope within ourselves.
