Responding at midday instead of 7am in the hustle of trying to get out the door...
I know that one of the things that is upsetting is the way that I take conversations like this very personally: take criticisms of how I view things as criticisms of who I am. This is clearly *my* problem, not anyone else's, but having been aware of this for a good five years now, it still hasn't changed much. ~sigh~
I think that maybe this is one of those times when you actually *can't* include everyone. The language that you're talking about would be great for some people - not great, and in fact downright offputting - for others. As long as we can all find somewhere to worship where we feel welcomed, included, and encouraged to feel worshipful (one of my big concerns is that as the UCA gets more and more "contemporary" in their worship (which to me generally means slipshod in their liturgies, dubious in their theology, and downright neglectful of decent music), there will be no where left for me. That terrifies me. (Which again has something to do with how personally I may be taking all this.) Something that also annoys me is a tendency to frame our services for people who aren't there, instead of those who are - "if we change our music, suddenly people will come back to church" etc. I *know* I've got way too much baggage with this stuff that you couldn't possibly know, but my filters have been missing on these things for years now, and I'm sorry.
I've only spent thirty years with "Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer": that's enough for me to be jarred by "receive our prayer". (It's the rhythm as much as anything else: just doesn't sound right.) Trying to change entire congregations of over-70s to whom a lot of this language is intensely important - we're only *just* at a point in the UCA where the changeover in language for the Our Father is beginning to stick, and that came in close to twenty years ago now.
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Date: 2009-09-10 02:26 am (UTC)I know that one of the things that is upsetting is the way that I take conversations like this very personally: take criticisms of how I view things as criticisms of who I am. This is clearly *my* problem, not anyone else's, but having been aware of this for a good five years now, it still hasn't changed much. ~sigh~
I think that maybe this is one of those times when you actually *can't* include everyone. The language that you're talking about would be great for some people - not great, and in fact downright offputting - for others. As long as we can all find somewhere to worship where we feel welcomed, included, and encouraged to feel worshipful (one of my big concerns is that as the UCA gets more and more "contemporary" in their worship (which to me generally means slipshod in their liturgies, dubious in their theology, and downright neglectful of decent music), there will be no where left for me. That terrifies me. (Which again has something to do with how personally I may be taking all this.) Something that also annoys me is a tendency to frame our services for people who aren't there, instead of those who are - "if we change our music, suddenly people will come back to church" etc. I *know* I've got way too much baggage with this stuff that you couldn't possibly know, but my filters have been missing on these things for years now, and I'm sorry.
I've only spent thirty years with "Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer": that's enough for me to be jarred by "receive our prayer". (It's the rhythm as much as anything else: just doesn't sound right.) Trying to change entire congregations of over-70s to whom a lot of this language is intensely important - we're only *just* at a point in the UCA where the changeover in language for the Our Father is beginning to stick, and that came in close to twenty years ago now.