Baccalaureate

I vaguely remember my high school offering a baccalaureate service when I graduated, but I didn't go. I didn't know what it was all about - I knew it was a religious service and I knew it was voluntary. That was enough for me. And (to my memory) that was the last I'd heard of a Baccalaureate service.

But our community offers such a service, as 15 years ago it was revived after a 10-15 year absence. So a few months ago, I started looking over the notes left for me about what was supposed to happen for the service to take place.

After many calls between me and Pastor Steve Bush (who is pastor of the Millersport Covenant Church) and some others, we had the vision fully in place:

This service should be a real gathering of the community, which all of the local churches having a stake in it. It should celebrate what God is doing - the One God who is God of all of our churches.

One of the ways we attempted to reach that goal was to have a combined musical group to lead worship. The band members came together on Tuesday, four of us from four different churches (I met one of them last winter and another last week, and the last one I met on Tuesday). We worked on the songs and got them prepared for the service. On Wednesday evening, our two singers (representing two more churches) were able to be with us (I had never met either of them before)... and they blended wonderfully.

It was a fantastic service. We invited Pastor Tom Keene, who was instrumental in restarting the service 15 years ago (and was pastor here at Millersport UMC then), to come and be our guest speaker, and he delivered a powerful message about asking the right kind of questions (as opposed to the wrong kind). I'll blog about those later, because I left my notes elsewhere.

As far as I could tell, the music went wonderfully. The two singers (who hadn't been able to make it to the rehearsal) had fantastic voices and blended well. I didn't really notice how the congregation participated in the worship because I was mostly just worshiping and playing my bass!

It was a really neat service, and I was glad to be a part of it!