Why do we take up the offering after the sermon?

Good morning Trinity Tribe!

Things are going well in our house this morning. I hope they are going well in yours!

Last call for Christmas at Camp!

Why offering in the place you put it in the service?

I had a great question posed to me last week. Why had I moved the time of offering from where it had always been to following the sermon? I don’t do anything related to worship lightly or without good reason. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to share with you the “why” behind the tweaking of the worship order.

When John Wesley sent the first Bishops to the United States, he sent them with an order of worship called the Sunday Service. The worship service, then and now, was to be focused on Holy Communion. However, that service could not be fully utilized in the young United States. There were not enough ordained clergy to officiate at Holy Communion at the Methodist Episcopal Churches. Instead, the ordained clergy would ride a circuit, often on a horse, and serve communion quarterly. Therefore, the tradition of having communion quarterly began. Because of the lack of ordained clergy, the service of worship focused towards the sermon because that happened every week.

That is where the discussion of where to put the offering comes in. During the communion service, the time of offering was not just a time to “pass the plate” so to speak. Instead of being placed on the Lord’s Table before the beginning of the service, the bread and the juice were actually brought in by lay people as an offering to God. Therefore, the offering time included the communion elements as well as monetary gifts. Both were brought forward after the sermon and just prior to Holy Communion. In the preaching services of the 18th and 19th centuries, there would be no time of Communion, so the offering began to be collected prior to the sermon. As time progressed, the clergy shortage ended. Seminaries were available in all parts of the United States. Therefore, an ordained elder served most congregations. Now, congregations could celebrate communion every week. However, as you know, when a tradition is engrained in a congregation, it takes time to change. At Trinity, I believe it was Peter Belec who changed communion from being quarterly to being on the first Sunday of the month.

If you turn to the front of our hymnal, you will notice John Wesley’s Sunday Service included. We gather. We hear God’s word. We respond to God’s word by an expression of faith and confession of sin. We offer of ourselves and our gifts to God. We lift up prayers of thanksgiving. We dine at the Lord’s Table. We are dismissed to love God and neighbor. Our worship order is based on century after century of Christian practice. In fact, the Early Church always included communion as well as preaching and discussion of God’s Word. However, our church and many others have kept part of the frontier style of worship for our worship order. If you compare our bulletin to that of the service in the front of the hymnal, you will notice that we do not celebrate communion every week as is suggested. And until the last couple of weeks, we collected the offering after the sermon. (I have to videotape a sermon and a worship service with communion to send to the Conference as part of my ordination process. So, I have moved the time of offering so that we are “by the book.”) I have enjoyed having the offering following the sermon. To me, it feels as if we are able to respond to God’s Word for us for the day. I would like to include elements of response to God’s Word in addition to our collecting of God’s tithes and our offerings that are linked to the scripture of the day. One day, I would like for us to carry the bread and the juice into the worship service during the offering as part of our response. I like that symbolism of us bringing God the ordinary things that God makes holy. It would be meaningful to have someone bring the water in when we baptize new members as well. I would love to know what you think. How do you best respond to God’s word? How else could we as a congregation respond to God’s word? What parts of the worship service are meaningful to you?