About Urban Abbey
Inclusive Worship & Communion
Why we worship
We practice our faith in community with one another. We have different gifts, hopes and dreams and in worship we draw our differences into community and we open our hearts to the stories of the past. In worship, we connect with God and one another through prayer, scripture, communion and words spoken or sung in a song. In worship, we pause from the work of the everyday to be still and centered.
All are welcome at God’s Table
Urban Abbey is an open table in worship and everyone is welcome. The Abbey hosts communion every week at every service, which is not typical of all Methodist congregations. We don't expect worshippers to be members of our coffeeshop-bookstore-church in order to participate in communion. We say, "All you have to be is hungry." Communion is a thin place. It connects us to Christians past, present and future. It is a ritual shared by those down the street and those gathering at tables around the globe. When we lift the cup and break the bread, we claim and celebrate the presence of the sacred. God is present in the bread, the cup and the people gathered. Real PRESENCE is transformative, dynamic and challenging. Our open table invites all and calls us to take part in what Rev. McKnight describes as "putting the leaf in the table" and throwing the doors of welcome open wide. Our open table means we are challenged to invite, include and connect. We are called to send the invitations, set the table and add more chairs. Because when we practice each week at this simple meal, we pause to see God present at our table. We remember that we are called to see God twinkling in the eyes of our fellow humans, across the city and around the globe.
How do we Worship at Urban Abbey?
Timely and Traditional: We prepare and plan, guided by an anchor image for each season. We listen and dream, think and wait for a spark to inspire our plans for each week and for the year. That might mean a series of sermons organized around a cultural phenomenon such as the musical Hamilton or a book of spiritual poetry by a respected writer like Mary Oliver. It's relevant, but draws from a deep spiritual well and tied to Christian traditions.
Intimate and relational: We prepare in a team. Our services are intentional and prepared with deep care but we are not "produced." We will host three, four or ten services with 60 people in each service before we meet in a Gym-a-cafa-torium and host 600 people at a single service. We sit at tables, not tidy rows. Within the service itself, we pause to be mindful of life-giving spaces and we create space for connection and conversation. This gives people both permission and a challenge to reach out to one another, fortify existing relationships and forge new ones.
Ritual: It seeps into the bone and at its best ritual is empowering. Every week we celebrate communion, sing the same refrains, name the Lord’s prayer and sing the Beatles' classic, "Let It Be." The hope is that when someone is in a crisis and in need of peace these spaces of memory that we build each week can offer a comforting presence.
Music Ministry: Our music leaders seek to include people in worship, inviting them to use their gifts, setting them up for the best experience and challenging them to grow in their gifts. The emphasis is on participation and the giving of time and talent rather than production values.We blend music; mixing the secular and the sacred. We reach into various styles of worship music including music one might hear on the radio. The Abbey is all about naming God in the ordinary, so we blur the boundaries of what music belongs in church.
Storytelling: Key elements and rituals are repeated every week, but we also push the practice with new songs, themes or ways into the sacred stories of the past. This is a way of opening those stories for our future. They are a mirror and a challenge. This is where we can spark something new, perhaps sharing the narratives around Jesus’s last week with the musical theater tune “Can you hear the people sing/Singing the songs of angry men…” echoing under the scripture. We share the Magnificat with Dorothea Lang’s image of a Depression era mother cradling her windblown children and we weave the Dixie Chick’s Lullaby through the words of Mary’s great courage, resilience and determination. We draw from the world around us to give body and flesh and connection to stories that have been shared generation after generation.
Laughter: We take humor seriously, as a way into people's hearts and as a way to not take ourselves too seriously. We laugh sometimes on purpose and often at mistakes and missteps because…well, there is no other way.
Seasons: We make space to name pain, grief, stress, struggle and brokenness each week. In key seasons we extend this space; naming the fear of mortality with Ashes, the Saints we miss and our sadness even in the season of Christmas, when everything else is wrapped in twinkle lights. We bless oil for healing, not because we believe oil and prayer offers a cure as much as we believe in the mystery of connection and grace we can together honor the hope for wholeness and healing of the body, mind and spirit. We connect to the whole of our tradition through the liturgical calendar, following the seasons that take us outside of the seasons of our culture; seasons that name pause and rest, reflection and growth, change and renewal.
Baptism: We celebrate baptism in worship. Like communion, it is a sacrament in our United Methodist tradition. Baptism is not about being unclean or going to hell, it is an outward sign of God’s inward presence. In baptism we celebrate God’s presence already vivid and alive in each of us. It is an act of becoming family. We do not re-baptize people that were baptized in another community, because it is about God and not us. It is not dependent on who did it and how much water was used. We baptize adults and children in a style that the person or parents seeking baptism feel is most meaningful.