Community of the Savior

In the summer, when the choir at the United Methodist Church is on hiatus, I try to attend a gathering of believers called the Community of the Savior. I used to play for their evening service when they were meeting downtown, but they moved the time of the service to mornings and I could no longer participate. Now they meet in the chapel at the Nazareth seminary called St Bernards School of Theology and Ministry.

Many of the attendees I know from the seminary or from Roberts Wesleyan. They began as an independent group but decided to affiliate with the Free Methodist denomination, an outreach of the Edgewood church. This group feels like family to me and their form of worship is intentional and thoughtful. Everything is a careful balance of the expected and the new so that nothing becomes so rote as to be trite or so overwhelmingly new as to be meaningless. It is a balanced meld of worship and action.

I volunteer in the summers to do whatever they need done, and today they teach me to prepare the Braille bulletin for one of the members who is blind. It just means pulling the Braille translated hymns from notebooks and putting them together in the proper order along with a translation of the liturgy so the woman can participate with everyone else. It is as community should be, making sure everyone's needs are taken care of. Treating people with respect and dignity.

The theme of the summer really has been learning about community, and now I have a chance to do something practical about it. I am happy to be able to help, especially when the person I am helping is actually helped. Even if it is such a small thing. I have missed being part of a community where people have your back, as the saying goes. But I am learning about that in so many ways and places. It would be nice to move from the cut throat incivility of the world to the shelter of community.