It’s something that we say often here at St John’s, and we say it because it’s true: Everything in the Church works together; everything in the Church is connected, because the Church is an organic unity.
That’s also reflected in the way we organize our life together.
For example, during the Triodion and Great Lent, it’s helpful to select a book and do some spiritual reading. This year, at our Pascha Book Study, we will be reading The New Media Epidemic by Jean Claude Larchet. That book is now available at Christ the Lightgiver Bookstore; it’s an easy and soul-profiting read, so why not go ahead and pick up a copy, and, that way, you will be ready to join the Pascha Book Study when it gets off during Bright Week?
The Pascha Book Study will meet on Wednesday evenings at 7pm from April 22 through May 20. We will have groups meeting in Georgetown and Killeen, but, this year, the group that will meet at the parish house, will be led by Father Deacon Andrew Wilson and Father Deacon Michael Coleman. During the Paschal Season, I will be preaching a series of homilies about Technology and the Church, but the deacons and several other members of our parish will be doing the week to week work during the discussion groups.
And all of this talk about technology will lead into our first Open House Weekend for 2020. Hopefully, you will remember how these weekends work: We make a commitment to attend all of the services and all of the events on a particular Saturday and Sunday. That means we show up at St Thomas School and Great Vespers on the Saturday, as well as Orthros, the Divine Liturgy, and Fellowship Hour on the Sunday. But we also bring a guest—or several guests with us—to one of those services or one of those events.
This Open House Weekend will be on Saturday, May 23, and Sunday, May 24. Our speaker during St Thomas School on that Saturday will be Dr. Mark Tarpley. Dr. Tarpley is the head master of a private school in Ft Worth; he is a frequent—and popular--speaker at Orthodox Educational conferences, and he is currently writing a book on the subject of technology. Since the technology of the internet and social media is rapidly changing our world, this subject should be of genuine interest to a lot of folks.
But, of course, we don’t have to wait until Saturday, May 23, and Sunday, May 24, to invite our friends and neighbors and co-workers and family members to join us. If these folks are curious about the Church and Technology, they can learn more about that subject at any time throughout the Paschal Season—both at the Divine Liturgy and at the different locations for the Paschal Book Study.
And we can prepare for our conversations with those people by not only buying Jean Claude Larchet’s book, but also by investing ourselves in the Triodion and Great Lent. We can dedicate our fasting to the folks with whom we intend to talk; we can attend a weekday Lenten service on behalf of these people; we can write the names of all these folks in the St Raphael Book up at the front of the nave so that everyone in the parish can join us in our intercessions.
So our spiritual striving feeds into our educational work, and all of those activities energize our outreach and our hospitality. It’s all an organic unity. And it is a great blessing to become a full participant in this life that we call the Church.