August Worship Services
August 1
Celebrating Our Communion with the Earth
For the first three Sundays of August, we continue a celebration of our planet. This week, we acknowledge the earth’s bounty through our Communion service. We gather around a spiritual table remembering Jesus’s last shared meal with his disciples. Two millennia later we are still fed by and grow from these gifts of grain and the vine. Beyond this table, how do you find spiritual nourishment through each week? What represents the earth’s grain and vine in your life?
August 8
Sustaining the Gifts of the Earth
More than ever before, we are profoundly aware of the environment’s deterioration. As ice caps melt, sea and river levels rise, droughts persist, and floods overwhelm towns and cities, global warming is omnipresent and dangerous. We live in communion with the earth rather than opposition to it. How we can go beyond the action of recycling to reflect our belief in and hope for creation? Are we willing to take bold stands to advocate for our planet’s future?
August 15
Honoring Those Who Work the Land: A Service at Movement Ground Farm
This Sunday, we dedicate our worship to those who work the land through a service at Movement Ground Farm in Tiverton. For millennia, humans have nurtured the earth to produce food for families, communities, even nations. Today, many who work the land in the United States are immigrants, who cross borders to grow food for us! How can we recognize and support the connection between human labor and the food we eat?
August 29
Pride Sunday: Blessing our LGBTQQ+ Family
The LGBTQQ+ community is an essential part of the United Church of Christ membership. Through the UCC’s recognizing marriage covenants among Queer people and the establishment of Open and Affirming Churches, doors to our shared life in Christ have been opened more widely for some time. Yet, it is important to recognize the sacrifices Queer members have made to take their place in our pews. Rev. Nancy Soukup and the Rev. Leslie Simonson will offer a dialogue message to recall and recognize our church’s recent Queer history.