December 24 Valley Community Presbyterian Church

This year my whole immediate family worshiped together for Christmas Eve, the past couple of years we have attended different services. I liked the way that children, youth and families all took part in the readings for this service. In addition to being the early family service it was also a Wellspring led service. Wellspring is the praise band at Valley, while I normally enjoy wellspring's music, I was disapointed that they did not do tradtional Christmas hymns for this serivce. This notion was also expressed by others who attended the serivce, I think sometimes we tend to desire familar things, and Christmas hymns is one of those. One thing they did at this service I really liked was instead of passing the plates for the offering, everyone was invited to come to the "manger" to leave gifts and to pick up a candle for each family. This led me to think that isn't it strange that we exchange gifts in celebration of Jesus's birthday, what would it be like if we exchanged gifts for other birthdays than our own. If I were working in a church I would like to do a sermon or message ( Sunday school, etc...) around this idea, we get so caught up in gifts we get for others or receive ourselves, what gifts do we give to Jesus for his birthday? I also wonder if Christmas eve worship serivce sometimes is more about who we will see or talk to than about truly preparing to celebrate Jesus's birthday?

December 23 Andrew Riverside Presbyterian Church

This Sunday before Christmas, I felt I needed another coming home church worship experience. After I left Valley during my college years, I ended up at Andrew Riverside because of Harry and Judy Maghikian, I was even employed by AR for a summer to work on building their youth ministry. I had not seen Harry and Judy in a long time and so this was a driving factor for me to visit AR this Sunday.

Since the AR church building was knocked down five years ago following the wall colapse , they have been worshiping at the YMCA on the U Campus. They have a small dedicated congregation and are looking forward to being back in their own building in the near future as the latest development (Senior housing with worship/fellowship and office space for the church) on the land where the AR Church was is progressing through the hurdles towards being built.

While worship does not need to take place in a church building, it is a little different to worship in rented space like the Y. They do a nice job decorating the space and setting it up to function well as worship space. It has Judy's creative touch to it.

The worship service does not follow the traditional PCUSA templet for worship, it seemed like there was more special music than needed and while scripture from the book of John was referenced in the sermon, there was not actual reading of scripture prior to the sermon. In traditional Harry and Judy fashion the sermon used visuals from the LCD projector and was given by more than one person. While I grew up with Harry and Judy's worship services, it seems very foreign to me some of the changes they have been during their time at AR and is not a worship experience that feeds me spiritaly as I need to be.