November 23rd, 2008 – Christ the King Sunday: Last Sunday of the Church Year

Lisa started the service with her Our Journey Story. As a five year member at Creator she outlined what stewardship means to her:

Present – Lisa considers a fundamental piece of stewardship being present for Sunday worship.

Participating – There are many ministries going on at Creator. Lisa encourages us to “go with the Holy Spirit when it tugs at us.”

Giving – The easiest and the hardest piece of stewardship. Lisa detailed how moving comfortably through by upping your percentage giving each year is one way to plan increases. This is also where faith and trust in God figures in the calculus we use to determine our giving. Will God provide for our needs or do we need to keep back what we could give for ourselves because we might need it?

Being this is the last Sunday of the Church year, Pastor Dayle reflected on the past year at Creator in her sermon. We celebrated the 20th anniversary of Creator’s first worship service through Pastor Mark’s unexpected resignation through putting into place the Spiritwork teams and the other changes that we have experienced at Creator.

In preaching on the Gospel reading Pastor Dayle asked "What does the reign of Christ look like and how can we bring it to come? In talking about the sheep and goats both do not know that both ask the same questions about what they did to help when the king was hungry, thirsty, naked or in prison.

Pastor Dayle observed we are both sheep and goat. We are challenged to bring about God's kingdom and sometimes we rise to that challenge and at other times we do not. This, however, is the time to put away the old and think about the new.

The Hymn of the Day, I Will Sing, I Will Sing became a joyful noise and it did feel like the old was being put away and we were thinking about the new as we were singing it. Then the children sang Mercy is Falling as special music for offering. The congregation appreciated their performance.

What Feast of Love had a simple majesty and mystery the way it was sung on Sunday during communion and Beautiful Savior continued with a feeling of reverence and beauty. Worship ended with Soon and Very Soon. Another clapping, joyful noise, end to the service.

The Adult Forum was on Asset Mapping. Pastor Dayle led a revealing Adult Forum this Sunday. She directed us to write on down three spiritual gifts we personally felt we had, three things we do for fun, and two things other people would say were our gifts. We then posted these, looked for similarities in the group, and broke into two smaller groups of people based on those similarities. The common interests (or gifts) among this particular group were music and compassion. We discussed ideas and ministries for those two groups.

This felt like a very concrete way to start to promote the participation Lisa talked about at the beginning of the service.