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This sermon explores how God's care for us is so generous that it runs over us like the abundance of anointing oil runs over the head and down on the shoulders of the one being anointed.

To foster imagination about worship spaces that can help to draw people into a deeper relationship with their natural environment, experience that environment as sacred and sacramental, form them spiritually as agents of ecological justice and recovery, and help them to process and respond faithfully to increasing ecological disasters.

A service plan in an Advent series in preparation for Christmas focused on the hope and assurance we have in Christ.

A certified lay minister, hesitant to preach, finds her voice with the support of a preaching peer group.

These case studies of worship in other times and places will give your congregation the freedom and framework to deepen your discussion of worship.

To design a worship gathering contextual to the cultural context, focusing on contemplative, creation-grounded worship that emphasizes the connectedness of all of life and engages in quiet reflection, art, and music to encounter God.

The theme of worship is very prominent in the Scriptures. Many of the references are calls to worship in which God's children are told that worship is their joy and their privilege. But many other passages indicate that the worship life of the church requires constant assessment. It can get off course and need to be redirected; it can face new opportunities and need new forms; and it can benefit from new insights and experiences.

Unless we are very ill or old, many of us avoid thinking about our deaths. J. Todd Billings’s new book, The End of the Christian Life, explains that remembering our mortality and learning to die well will give us a more profound view of true Christian resurrection hope.

Worship that shapes us and helps us articulate our actual relationship with God needs to be as real as possible: true to the impossible ideals of the Gospel that both judge our present and promise us a glorious future, and true to the actual needs, opportunities, failures and successes of our life between worship services.

Congregations often want to get information from members and neighbors. They can learn how to do so pastorally by considering how scholars do academic research using human subjects. Scholars follow ethical standards to gain data while doing no harm.