Worship
Sunday services are held at 9:00 am and 11:00 am from September 10 through May 10, and at 10:00 am during the summer months. Our minister, Rev. Kent Hemmen Saleska, preaches most Sundays, but from time to time, a guest speaker or member or Worship Associate is featured. Services typically include music, hymns, readings, a time for all ages, and a collection. After the service, there is a fellowship time with refreshments in the adjoining North Room.
Approximately once a month there is also an intentional multigenerational worship service for all ages at both 9 and 11 am, as designated on the church calendar.
Worship? To Whom? For What?
The word "worship" - at least in the way we use it today - is over 1000 years old. The original meaning comes from two Middle English words that mean "worth-ship" - or most simply, giving worth to something. So ideally, we gather together each Sunday to rest in awe and wonder as we give worth to that which we value. As a pluralist religious faith, we do not come together around a single theology, but around common values and beliefs. We spend one hour in unison each week to give worth to our values of interdependence, inherent worth, compassion and love.
In worship, we come together as a group to mimic those feelings I know so many of you have had, of canoeing across a pristine lake, of cultivating a graden, of dancing at a rock concert, of listening to Thelonious Monk or Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", of sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, of being filled with the holy spirit. By nature, our weekly gathering is contrived, and ultimately this contrivance often fails because it is only an approximation of some other experience. Yet we come back again and again because we know, either consciously or unconsciously, that even though our weekly practice is a metaphor, it is also an honest and sincere weekly attempt to channel awe and wonder as we attempt to name the unnameable.
Each week we sit on a preciprice, clinging to the edge of the known world, yet connected and entranced by all that is revealed before us - the vast unknown closeness between one human heart and another, echoing the vast unknown closeness between us and our nearest star, all of which existed long before we existed, and will continue to exist long after we are gone, and which we had no hand in creating.
Excerpt from sermon by Rev. Kent Hemmen Saleska, delivered at UUCM February 20, 2011