I've been pastoring since May and I've discovered a dilemma that I hadn't expected.
We've had three new members by profession of faith, aged variously 73, 86, and 88. All three members were nominal Christians who were raised in the faith, but had spent decades out of the Church and had no membership with any local church.
When I sat down to read the liturgy for admitting new members, I couldn't find one appropriate. There are liturgies for baptizing and welcoming adult members, liturgies for baptizing infants, and liturgies for admitting teenagers after they have been confirmed in the faith.
It appears that one of the operating assumptions of these various liturgies is that once a person is baptized, that person will
certainly be nurtured in the faith to full and
continuous membership in local churches. The liturgy, or lack thereof, suggests implicitly that the prevenient grace of baptism is irresistible.
What we have here are people who were at some point baptized, and at some point openly professed faith in Christ, but later point drifted (but not apostatized) from local church membership.
So I cobbled together a liturgy from official UMC sources. Working from the Hymnal on p.40, I asked the first three questions under section 4. Then flipping back to p.38, I asked sections 14 through 16. This covers all of the theological bases for membership.
Does anyone else have suggestions for how to use UMC liturgy in a more straightforward manner to accommodate the admission of new members like this? I find it rather odd that the UMC does not have a clear liturgy for this situation, which strikes me as one that would occur frequently.
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cross-posted]
For All Saints' Sunday, I constructed a liturgy from The Book of Worship. It consisted of an invocation and then the reading of the names while the bell was chimed. I asked if there were any other saints to remember, and there were several. I then asked if anyone would like to speak about the impact that these saints made on their lives. We closed with a prayer, again directly lifted from The Book of Worship -- which I have found, as a student pastor, to be an incredibly useful book.
