One Offs
Rev. Joshua Patty
Regional Minister and President
Summer has arrived. With it comes the most exciting part of worship planning - vacation season!
Perhaps you’re looking forward to a vacation yourself, but mostly I refer to the challenge of planning worship knowing that other worship leaders and regular worshipers will likely be gone for a few Sundays over the next three months.
It’s a challenge to create worship over the summer that ties together with people coming and going. In my planning, I always approached this as a season of “one offs” – individual sermons that could stand on their own without hearing others before or after. But I also wanted for there to be consistent themes for a season or month.
My solution eventually was to find light-hearted series where pieces could stand on their own, but which fit together across several weeks. My most successful was an annual series of theological themes in popular movies (sometimes new movies, sometimes films from previous years). Each week could stand alone, but I usually offered 4 or 5 of them on successive Sundays. It became something that many of us – myself included – looked forward to in the summer. But it’s challenging to find the right series of “one offs” that will engage and be memorable. Have you found any successful summer series?
Thank you for the ways you lead – and invite us all to experience the presence of God – these months!
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