The Most Recent Soul Cafe

Two days in a row! Watch out! This posting thing could become a habit!

Three Sunday's ago we held another Soul Cafe worship experience at Argyle UMC. This time around the choir led the congregation in a choral evensong. My lecture notes are below. If you'd like to see the ordo, leave a comment and I'll send it to you!

Soul Café
A Choral Evensong
January 25th, 2009

I. Prayer and Worship
• “(worship is) the glorification of God and the sanctification of humanity.”
--Pope Pius X, 1903
• “setting forth of God’s honor or glory and to the reducing of the people to a most perfect and Godly living.”
--Archbishop Thomas Cranmer

II. Two Traditions of Corporate Worship
a. Lord’s Day Services (from the earliest days of the Jesus movement we find examples of Christians meeting on Sundays. We see Paul in both Acts and 1st Corinthians participating in and encouraging services on Sunday.)
b. Benedict’s Daily Office (also used in a modified form for personal devotion time and is a complement to the Sunday service)

III. St. Benedict and the Daily Office
St. Benedict’s Daily Office
(circa early 500’s—Vatican II)
• Vespers-end of the workday
• Compline—before sleep
• Nocturnes (Vigils, Matins)—middle of the night (midnight and three a.m., respectively)
• Lauds—sunrise
• Prime—early morning
• Terce—mid-morning
• Sext—noon
• None—mid-afternoon
• In the Benedictin model, the entire Psalter was read once a week. Post-Vatican II is was read once a month

IV. The Liturgy of the Hours
• Morning and Evening Prayer are primary!
• In addition to its use in monasticism and in certain denominational services, the Liturgy of the Hours is often used as a private devotional time now.



V. Thoughts and Practices from John and Charles Wesley
• As Anglican Priests, John and Charles Wesley were very familiar (and both practiced) morning and evening prayer, as Thomas Cranmer had combined matins, lauds and prime in Matins as well as putting vespers and compline into Evensong in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.
• John Wesley believed that daily prayer was such an important spiritual discipline that in 1733 he complied his “A Collection of Forms of Prayer for Every Day of the Week.”
• This text has been updated to modern English by David A. deSilva and is available at Cokesbury.

VI. How do we organize our daily prayer life?

• The daily office?
• The Psalms?
• The Upper Room? (founded at Travis Park UMC)
• One hour a day as well as writing down our confession?
• John Wesley’s and the Church of England’s indications?
• The Didache (and early Church manual, circa 100, that contains orders of worship and instructions by baptism, communion, and the Christian lifestyle) tells us to pray the Lord’s Prayer Three times a day.

VII. Tonight’s Worship Experience

VIII. Song Practice

IX. Web resource
• The daily office online: www.apostleschurch.org/spirituality_daily.php
• Daily Lectionary www.pcusa.org/lectionary/