All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

We run a pretty loose ship at our church. On Sundays I assist, I enter the church with not too many assumptions about how the service is going to go.

On Sundays when we have baptisms, it gets real loose; my pastor says he gauges the degree to which he follows the long baptismal liturgy to how restless the kids, both front and center and in the pews, are getting.

So today I didn't have a lot to do. I used an Introit cribbed from the Lutheran Church of Austalia (ironic that, considering their attitudes toward women clergy and gay folks) because the LBW prayer for this Sunday was so lame and apropos of nothing going on. My Prayers of the Church wound up stuck in the hymnal. So after the first 15 minutes of worship I pretty much just did church aerobics with the rest of the assembled.

"We need to figure out a better way to use you AMs on baptismal Sundays," observed my pastor afterward.