Worship leadership is an important responsibility for parish ministers. Transformative worship is central to the spiritual and community life of most congregations, as well as the identity of most ministries. Indeed, worship matters.
I strive to offer high quality professional leadership in worship, so to create services and rituals that are well-planned, creative, and transformative. In a spirit of shared ministry, I also take seriously my role to mentor lay worship leaders in the same professional standards I aim for, in order to build consistency into the worship program. I am proud of the positive changes I have brought to the worship programs in the interim and developmental congregations I have served to date.
The printed materials,images, and A-V files included here offer some record of my worship leadership. While these cannot provide a full experience of my worship and preaching, I hope they offer some impression of my approach to important aspects of worship leadership.
-Texts of Sermons illustrate my approach to preaching in the context of interim and transitioning ministry. While I firmly believe that a transformative worship service is not only about the preacher and the sermon --- the power of worship includes music, lay leadership, participation of the congregation, and more. I also realize the importance of carefully prepared and engagingly delivered sermons. I take sermon preparation "seriously" in the sense of intentional, while I aim to be not serious but joyful in the pulpit .
-Orders of Service illustrate my integral approach to planning a service for corporate worship. In each service I offer a variety of elements that relate to and reinforce the service theme, elements intended to touch both emotions and intellect, to include music, spoken words, silence, and community building as critical elements of a worship experience.
-Rites of Passage such as weddings, memorial services, and child dedications are represented by Orders of Service and images which illustrate these personalized services which are equally central to the professional worship responsibilities of a parish ministry to serve individuals and the community.
- Rituals, Healing Services, and Dedications illustrate events of different scale and in different setting from corporate Sunday morning worship.
This house is a cradle for our dreams,
the workshop of our common endeavors.”--- Kenneth L. Patton