🌟✨ United in Gratitude: A Multi-Church Thanksgiving Celebration November 19 at 6:00 pm ✨🌟
As the holiday season approaches, let’s gather in a spirit of unity and thankfulness with our friends from Christ Presbyterian, King of Kings Lutheran, Ox Hill Baptist, and Pender United Methodist Churches.
Join us for an inspiring service filled with joyous music, heartfelt reflection, and an opportunity to count our blessings in the warm company of our community. This year, we’re honored to have Pastor Bruce Johnson from Pender deliver a message that promises to uplift and resonate with the spirit of Thanksgiving.
After the service, we invite you to linger a little longer and enjoy a delightful reception. It’s a time for laughter, fellowship, and creating memories with both old friends and new.
Let’s come together to express our gratitude and celebrate the abundance of life’s gifts. We can’t wait to welcome you into this circle of thankfulness!
Purple, representing both royalty and penitence, is traditionally used during Advent and Lent.
Blue symbolizes hope and may also be used during Advent.
White and gold are used at Christmas and Easter to symbolize joy and festivities.
Red symbolizes the color of fire to represent the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost and times when the work of the Holy Spirit is emphasized. During Holy Week it represents the blood of Christ. Red is also used for ordinations, church anniversaries and civil observances such as Memorial Day and Thanksgiving.
Green represents growth and is used during Ordinary Time (the season after Epiphany and the season after Pentecost.)
Let’s start with a word about liturgical colors. You can see listed here that the official color of the long season of Ordinary Time is green. This makes sense for lots of reasons: Ordinary Time is about growing in our faith, about accepting the gifts that we’ve been given, and producing the fruit not just as individual Christians but as the body of Christ. Green is the color of growth and of fruitfulness. There are other reasons why the season claims the color green. Perhaps you and your team can come up with some more and use them to inform the congregation who may never have given thought to why the green paraments are used throughout this season.
We started here, however, because there are those who get bored with a single color in this long season that runs from Pentecost through Reign of Christ/Christ the King Sunday at the end of November. There are so many colors, so much beauty in worship art and God’s creation, why use only one color for this long season? Isn’t this the season after Pentecost? Why can’t we use red for at least a part of the season?
The season of Ordinary Time (or the Sundays after Pentecost—there is no “Pentecost Season”) calls for creativity and artistry. Even if you are using green as a foundational color, there is no reason why you can’t bring in a host of other colors over the season. Green represents life, and life is colorful. So, use more colors; use both/and; use a whole palette of colors to bring to life the worship in Ordinary Time. Think ahead for changing series or themes and find ways to enhance the liturgy with visual expressions of color, not just in paraments, but in banners, worship centers, projected or posted images, and colors. There are ways to move beyond the plain green altar or pulpit fall. Call on artists of all sorts to enhance the space.
Chuck Knows Church — Episode 1 – LITURGICAL COLORS. Ever walk into your Sunday morning worship service and realize the colors have changed around the sanctuary? That’s why Chuck is talking about Liturgical Colors on his FIRST SHOW!
This simple mandate for cultivating gratitude and thanksgiving is the opening line in the catchy chorus of “Count Your Blessings,” a church music staple first published more than a century ago.
All these years later, the four verses and chorus can be summed up this way: Counting your blessings may be the antidote to feeling disheartened.
The remaining line of the chorus implores you to, after counting and naming the blessings, to “see what God has done.”
The faithful act of assessing blessings and acknowledging what God has provided in your life may give perspective when challenges and conflicts occur, as the four verses detail (see sidebar).
The author of these song lyrics acknowledges that you can feel burdened and life can seem unfair. So can counting your blessings really help when turmoil swirls around you and discouragement weighs heavy on your mind?
Such was the case for Jacob, who, in Genesis 28, is fleeing from his angry brother, Esau. When Jacob stopped for the night at a place he would later name “Bethel,” Jacob was in the midst of a bad situation. He was alone, scared and had nowhere to go. He also had no idea about how his circumstances might turn out. That night in a dream, God reassured Jacob that He was with him, that He had a plan for Jacob’s life and that He would not leave him. Jacob awoke the next morning with a change of heart and life didn’t seem so bad. “Surely the Lord is in this place,” Jacob said, “and I did not know it.” (Genesis 28:16)
Numerous stories in the Bible remind you to look beyond your circumstances to see you are not alone, that “the Lord is in this place,” providing anecdotal evidence of the importance of gratitude.
In addition to the anecdotal proof, the virtues of gratitude have been proven by science.
In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the test group was asked to daily write down five things for which they were thankful. After doing this every day for one week, the test group reported better sleep patterns and a more positive emotional outlook than the control group.
Members from Perryville United Methodist Church in Perryville, Kentucky, perform “Count Your Blessings.”
Whether the song’s author was battling tough times when he wrote the lyrics is unknown. What we do know is that Johnson Oatman Jr., the lyricist, was a Methodist Episcopal minister who had a penchant for songwriting. “Count Your Blessings,” intended as a song for youth, first appeared in “Songs for Young People,” which was published in 1897 by the Methodist Book Concern, a precursor to The United Methodist Publishing House. Over Oatman’s life, he penned more than 5,000 songs, including the classic hymn “No, Not One.”
For “Count Your Blessings,” Oatman partnered with E.O. Excell, who put Oatman’s words to music. Excell operated a Chicago-based publishing business specializing in Sunday School materials and collaborated with the Methodists for numerous projects. Fun fact about Excell is that he is the same person who wrote the arrangement of “Amazing Grace” that is most often sung throughout the world today.
But back to “Count Your Blessings.”
Once “Songs for Young People” was published, “Count Your Blessings” became a favorite, quickly gaining popularity throughout the world.
One account from a London daily newspaper says that when the famous British evangelist Gipsy Smith presided over a meeting, he announced a hymn, saying, “Let us sing ‘Count Your Blessings.’ Down in South London, the men sing it, the boys whistle to it, and the women rock their babies to sleep to the tune.”
In addition to the upbeat, simple tune that people have found easy to remember, its message has been uplifting folks for generations.
“Like a beam of sunlight,” wrote J.H. Hall, Oatman’s biographer, in “Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers, “(’Count Your Blessings’) has brightened up the dark places of the earth.”
Crystal Caviness works for UMC.org at United Methodist Communications. Contact her by email or at 615-742-5138.
THE COMMUNITY THANKSGIVING SERVICE will be held on Wednesday, November 24, at 7pm. This is a “virtual only” worship experience that will be hosted by OX Hill Baptist Church. Rev. White and members of our music ministry will be participating.
