Preparing for Christ’s birth
April 22, 2024
St. Nicholas
April 22, 2024
Dear friends,
As Advent approaches, your communications team at the Cathedral is busy moving into a new liturgical year. And in this new year, we will find ourselves with a new kind of worship bulletin. Actually, we will find ourselves with two kinds.
It is our job as your church to guide you and give you choices when it comes to your relationship with technology. We cannot control the fact that technology is with us to will continue to expand in function and reach, but we can control how and when we choose to use technology. As people of faith, we have seen firsthand how technology enabled us to worship together during the pandemic. Because of technology, I am able to meditate on Scripture and pray with about 600 souls every single morning! And yet, we also know that technology can create noise in our lives and distract us from silence and from awareness.
So how do we contend with this new reality? The only way forward is to educate you, strengthen you and give you choices. The antidote to technology running out of control is not to do away with it, it is to learn how to control it. So we are going to give you a couple of different ways to worship.
- Virtual Bulletin – We will now offer your bulletin on your cellphone. It will appear on the St. John’s Cathedral app or can be accessed with a QR code. It will have all the readings, the words to the hymns, and the entire liturgy at your fingertips. However, if you use your cellphone or tablet in worship, we strongly suggest that you place it on airplane mode, so you are not distracted by notifications, texts, and social media.
- Paper Bulletin – We will also now provide a paper bulletin with everything in it. This paper bulletin will be easier to read and use. For those of you who want to, you can simply shut off your phone entirely and use the paper. I believe it is still important to give you this choice during this transition to technology. But I do hope that we can produce fewer of these paper bulletins as time goes by.
Why?
- We want to be free of using paper and cutting down more trees.
- We want our virtual worshippers to have a bulletin and to feel fully included.
- We know that this is how the future will look, and we want to help you acclimate to it.
Why not use the Book of Common Prayer?
The BCP is one of the greatest tools of worship and prayer in the Episcopal Tradition. I will be teaching a course on all its magic in the new year. However, it is not friendly to newcomers. It begins on page 355 and skips all over the place in worship. Also, we frequently use Eucharistic prayers from other countries or other authorized liturgies. So much of what we do now is not even in the prayer book.
Questions?
Remember that all of this is a prayerful process. We are eager to hear your feedback. I know that, for many of you, this also is something to mourn. Just like we miss paper menus, some of you just don’t want to use a bulletin on your phone or you may feel that it is just too distracting. We are a community, and we are trying something new.
