Gathering Online Today!
Sunday, March 15th, 2019

Gathering Online Today, or ... "Be Where, the Ides of March?"

Well, the short answer to "Be Where?" (pardon the Shakespeare pun!) is that you can be ANYWHERE with an internet connection! We won't be gathering at the church, in keeping with Bishop Barker's instruction that our public worship be suspended right now, but I'll be streaming the service of Morning Prayer over Facebook Live.

The service will be at 10:30 this morning , and will use our Morning Prayer Rite II service from the Book of Common Prayer (see below for more details!).

If you have Facebook, it will be easy to connect: you just click on our page at: https://www.facebook.com/pg/st.augustine.omaha/

If you do not have a Facebook account, you should still be able to view the live video using the link above, as we have a public Facebook page.

Morning Prayer Instructions:
There's a bit of a trick here: the Book of Common Prayer is written from the priest's perspective (this is a loooong holdover from the foundation of the Anglican tradition, when prayer books were printed on printing presses and you might have only one for the whole church!).

That means that there are a lot of extra instructions, and lists of options! If you haven't prayed from a prayer book before, it takes some getting used-to, as the leader will often be skipping pages or moving back-and-forth to readings from the Bible or Psalms (which are in the back of the Prayer Book).

If you have a Book of Common Prayer at home, you can follow along beginning on page 82 , or you're welcome to simply sit "with" us online this morning. There IS an online Book of Common Prayer at bcponline.org, but it is a little difficult to navigate:
  • Along the yellow left-hand sidebar, select "Daily Office" about fourth down in the list
  • Then, in the list that appears in the main white page area, select Daily Morning Prayer Rite Two, about fifth down in the list
  • You will now have the pages of the Book of Common Prayer scanned and available to view, and you'll need to be doing some scrolling as we move through the prayers and responses. Remember that the service often calls for choosing one of several, so we'll be moving right past many things as we go!



Morning Prayer History:
The service of Morning Prayer is part of something called the Liturgy of the Hours, which was the monastic cycle of prayer: monks would regularly pray at different "hours" throughout the day. Morning Prayer, often called "Lauds" from the Latin word meaning praise, began the day with an orientation towards God.

More recently, Morning Prayer was actually the primary Sunday worship in the Episcopal Church until as recently as 1979! In the same practice that monks had undertaken to begin their day, Episcopalians and others would begin our week with this prayer service of worship to God, gathered together. The rhythm of this was that individuals could use their prayer book to complete the remainder of the Hours personally, but that the whole church would gather to begin the week. Communion was celebrated on particularly holy days, and maybe once a month besides. It wasn't until the 1979 "new" prayer book that communion became the primary weekly worship! My own sponsoring parish for ordination still holds Morning Prayer once a month to keep that old tradition.




Activities, Meetings & Worship Plans
We will be adapting our activities to practice "Social Distancing" guidelines for the time being, with a default expectation that groups will be suspended unless they can meet online. Fr Ben and Kate will be communicating with our ministries (some of which have a lot of experience connecting electronically!) over the coming weeks, and we'll be keeping things updated.

The staff will continue to hold regular office hours and manage various projects and concerns, and we will be updating the parish regularly about our schedule and activities.
St. Augustine of Canterbury Episcopal Church
285 S 208th Street
Elkhorn, NE 68022
402-289-4058
Church Communication and Announcements
Those of you who need to share information with the parish, please be sure to send it to  parish@sainta.net  as well as  ministries@sainta.net   Jay and Kate will need to have this information by Wednesday at 10:00 am to be included in that week's communication for bulletin and newsletter. We appreciate your support.
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