When I survey the wondrous cross...

Leader: When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died,

People: my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.

Leader: God be praised for the wondrous cross, the tree of life,

People: which bears upon itself the scars and wounds of the world,

Leader: yet heals the sick, brings hope to the desperate and comforts the oppressed.

People: God be praised for the cross, which guides the lost, feeds the hungry, and shelters the poor;

Leader: inspires the anxious, illumines the wise, and challenges the fearless;

People: saves the condemned, and meets the need of every age and every land.

Everyone: God forbid that we should glory, except in the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Here I Am, Lord.

Leader: Who will feed the starving mouths of your neighbors around the world?

People: Here I am, Lord. Send me.

Leader: Who will comfort the daughter who lost her father and the mother who lost her son?

People: Here I am, Lord. Use me.

Leader: Who will guide the lonely and the empty into a rich life of wholeness?

People: Here I am, Lord. Guide me.

Leader: For even now, God is calling you by name, calling you to come, follow Jesus.

People: Here we are, Lord. We will follow you.

A Clean Heart

Leader: Create in us a clean heart, O God.

People: O God you know that we are prone to wander.

Leader: And renew a right spirit within us.

People: We turn our backs on you, O God of all love.

Leader: Restore unto us the joy of your salvation.

People: We are here today to give our hearts again to you.

Leader: Let us dwell in your presence every hour of every day.

People: Take our lives and keep us with you for all eternity.

Welcome to the Calls to Worship Blog

I am a minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and I find myself scrambling to come up with an appropriate Call to Worship every week. I don't always follow the Lectionary so there aren't always as many resources for me to match it up with the scripture.

So I'm really putting together this blog for my own purposes, as a way to archive and organize all the Calls to Worship I have used and will use. Will I recycle them? Maybe, if enough time has passed.

I've been writing calls to worship for nearly 3 years now and my wife was doing it for about a year before that, so we've amassed quite the collection.

Sources

I probably end up writing most of my own Calls to Worship. If I don't, I typically get them from two main sources:

Worship Connection - a great free resource provided by Cokesbury and the UMC. Follows the lectionary.

Chalice Worship - this is the worship resource book put out by my denomination; a copy sits under my computer at all times. The responsive calls to worship it has are good, but it's not really viable to use every week because the list is so short.

I also get a bunch from scripture, and I often use Eugene Peterson's Message translation so that we actually think about the words we're saying.

You'll also see a bunch that use the words from hymns - another invaluable resource.

Tags

This is probably the biggest reason I wanted to do this in blog format. I can tag each post with a source, scripture, occasion, theme, etc. This will make it much easier for me and maybe someone out there to find just the right one on a given week.