Worship is my passion!
The first thing I did as a Lay Leader in Unitarian Universalism was to be on the 'Program', aka Worship Committee, in my home congregation in New Jersey. I got recruited after I said I wanted to have more 'spiritual' worship services in the summer, instead of the very 'secular' programs that were the practice of my home congregation.
The first worship service I helped to plan featured Rev. Bill Sinkford. The next weekend I spoke from the pulpit for the first time, and I loved it. The first worship service I created was for Mother's Day the year after 9-11 happened, with one speaker who'd had a very fraught relationship with her mother, and the other speaker was a social justice warrior, and had just been to Afghanistan to try to make peace with families who had lost loved ones from the war that followed. Within a year I has elected Vice-President of 'Program', serving on a 22 member Board. At my first Board meeting, the Director of Religious Education resigned. I knew my next career path was a Religious Professional in Unitarian Universalism.
As DRE, I loved creating multigenerational worship with the minister, and we did some amazing things together. We had worked together when I was on the 'Program' Committee, and knew we had similar ideas about what worship could be, especially the aesthetics of worship. That collaboration set the stage for my path to ministry, and my desire and now practice to have worship be participatory, aesthetically pleasing, and not be the same style every single week.
The first worship service I helped to plan featured Rev. Bill Sinkford. The next weekend I spoke from the pulpit for the first time, and I loved it. The first worship service I created was for Mother's Day the year after 9-11 happened, with one speaker who'd had a very fraught relationship with her mother, and the other speaker was a social justice warrior, and had just been to Afghanistan to try to make peace with families who had lost loved ones from the war that followed. Within a year I has elected Vice-President of 'Program', serving on a 22 member Board. At my first Board meeting, the Director of Religious Education resigned. I knew my next career path was a Religious Professional in Unitarian Universalism.
As DRE, I loved creating multigenerational worship with the minister, and we did some amazing things together. We had worked together when I was on the 'Program' Committee, and knew we had similar ideas about what worship could be, especially the aesthetics of worship. That collaboration set the stage for my path to ministry, and my desire and now practice to have worship be participatory, aesthetically pleasing, and not be the same style every single week.