Looking for Submissions!

Hey, are ya still reading this here blog?

Has it helped you in planning for Lent at all?

If so, GREAT!

If not, boy do we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance for you! We are taking submissions for Holy Week and Easter services! You can get your great idea published in a blogpost to help out your fellow clergy, lay-leaders, and worship planners! Let’s resource our ideas and share!

So what has worked in the past? A Palm Sunday Luncheon? A children’s pageant? An Eastern Morning Sunrise service where part of the service is held outside and your praise band drummer floats above the congregation for a solo?! Okay, maybe not the last part… but we’d love to hear your ideas. Please email Luke at luke AT sylvaniaucc DOT org your ideas for worship.

Help us form the faith and make disciples! God bless!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and a happy new year from your friends on the Northwest Ohio Association's Faith Formation Team!

The Worship Format

A helpful visual, like this one, will
accompany each post (witty caption
is optional).

Each of the worship liturgies presented here will follow this format:

Hook: An exercise, art, or decoration that will serve to "hook" your worshipers and establish your theme.

Theme: Our themes will follow the 8 themes set here. These are:
Giving and Receiving
Fasting and Feasting
Sounds and Silence
Giving Up and Taking On
Saving and Sharing
Old and New
Sabbath and Service
Nature and Nurture

Scripture: Each worship will have at least one scripture that is chosen based on the theme.

Experience: An additional worship experience or liturgy will be set after the scripture. This could be a brief meditation or sermonette, an exercise, or time for contemplation or conversation.

Sending: A prayer and benediction will close out each worship experience.

A Quick Tour of the Blog

Your tour guide...?

The next two posts are orientation posts. This post will give you an over all tour of the blog and the next one will deal with the format of the worship posts.

^Above^ the post you will see the different pages of the blog. They are:

• Home: what you're currently viewing, where all the blog posts will be
• Faith Formation Team: The description of the team and it's purpose as found in the NWOA By-Laws
• Team Members: Those who make up this year's Faith Formation Team AKA those you can thank and/or blame for this blog
• Imagine What's Possible: The theme of the blog and our first post. This describes the whole plan and theme.
• Table of Contents: As the posts start rolling out, you will be able to quickly access them here.

----->Right Side: Under the UCC logo you will find:

• Links: to the national, Ohio Conference, association websites
• Follow by Email: Sign up to receive email notifications of each and every post
• Follow by Google: for those of you with blogs or Google accounts, you can sign up to follow this way.
• Search: search function for the blog, if you're looking for a particular theme or post.
• Blog Archive: see each and every post, sorted by month and title.

↓↓Under Each Post: Is where you can give feedback in one of two ways (or both if you're feeling industrious!):

• Reactions: Click on one of the buttons to give a quick response to each post and/or
• Comments: sign in and give us feeback. We crave any feedback: good, bad, and indifferent. We would love to hear your thoughts, reviews, and how your congregation experienced our ideas.
• Sharing Features: quick buttons that will allow you to email or post to various social media sites. 
• The Labels are helpful as well as they will link to all posts with the same label. If you're looking for everything posted with a certain theme like Old and New for example, clicking on the links will bring up every post with that label.

Hope you have enjoyed the tour, Wednesday's post will be about the worship format. Stay tuned!

Imagine What's Possible... Lenten Style

The Faith Formation Team has embarked on a project based on the National Synod's theme of Imagine What's Possible.

Our team, in keeping with this theme, have come up with Imagine What's Possible.... Lenten Style.

The purpose is to provide not only busy pastors and Christian educators in our association with easy to follow guide to programs, but also with lay members. Imagine the possibility of a lay-lead Lenten program! The possibilities are endless here.

The programs are be broken down into the following categories: Mission/Outreach, Worship/Music, and Lection/Educational References. Each of these, once they are posted, can be accessed through searching the site or by checking the table of contents.

There will be a new post every Wednesday.