The start of weekly worship at Chain of Lakes

This past Tuesday night the Steering Committee of Chain of Lakes voted on a proposal for the start of worship for our New Church Development. The proposal that was approved on Tuesday was developed by the worship team at Chain of Lakes. That proposal had been changed from an original idea that the worship team had about starting worship.

The process was healthy. Our worship team developed a proposal, circumstances caused the first proposal to be changed, the final proposal that the Steering Committee approved was modified some more.

The bottom line is we at Chain of Lakes will soon be worshipping together.

At 10:30 a.m. on the first three Sundays in December we are going to have three “Seasonal Celebration” services. These services (and all our future services) will be at our new worship site—the Senior Center in Lino Lakes, 1189 Main Street. These services in December will be planned so that families can worship together. Infant and toddler care will be available, but we want children and youth to worship with their families.

On Thursday, December 24th we will celebrate Christmas Eve by worshipping at 5:30 p.m.

We will continue to worship on Sundays in January. The formats of those services have not been determined yet.

Our Grand Opening worship service will be Sunday, January 31. To use New Church Development language this service will be our launch. We will be doing heavy advertising and marketing for this service. We have a six-week publicity plan that will start soon after the Christmas holidays are finished.

I can’t wait to start weekly worship at Chain of Lakes.

As a pastor I am trained to design, lead, and plan worship. It certainly has been a switch for me to be pastor of a community that doesn’t worship. We had good reasons to wait to start worship until we did—and I encouraged us to wait. I wanted us at Chain of Lakes to first develop some significant parts of our congregational culture before we started weekly worship. But the wait has been challenging. For the past ten weeks I’ve preached or spoke almost every week at a Presbyterian congregation in the area. I’ve enjoyed doing this, but I look forward to designing worship and preaching for the people at Chain of Lakes.

These decisions by our Steering Committee are significant. It’s exciting to take another step towards living out our Purpose Statement at Chain of Lakes Church!