Preparing for Worship - Darren Dement, associate pastor. Our opening congregational hymn this morning, Brethren, We Have Met to Worship, has a bit of a murky history. The text has been variously attributed to either George Askins or George Atkins, both known to be...
Preparing for Worship - Darren DeMent, associate pastor. Our worship service this morning opens with a grand hymn of praise to God. Based on 1 Timothy 1:17, the hymn writer, Walter C. Smith, pens a strong text of praise by highlighting images of God’s glory and...
Preparing for Worship - Darren Dement, associate pastor. Have you ever wondered what makes a hymn a hymn? I poked around a bit on the internet this week to see if I could get a nice, concise answer, and, not surprisingly, I couldn’t. As you might imagine, there...
Preparing for Worship - Darren DeMent, associate pastor. Have you ever had the opportunity to observe the night sky in a dark sky preserve or registered dark sky park? I’ve been fortunate enough to have that experience a few times in my life, and it is truly...
Preparing for Worship - Darren DeMent, associate pastor. While we at Wilshire proudly promote that we have a traditional worship style, that doesn’t mean that we are rigidly locked into any one type of music. One of the things I appreciate about Wilshire’s approach...
New Zoom Class Launches July 4 - Love Your Neighbor. Love Your Neighbor is the name of a new Zoom-based Sunday School class launching July 4. The class is aimed primarily at long-distance Wilshire members, most of whom connected to the church during the pandemic. The...
Preparing for Worship - Darren DeMent, associate pastor. This Sunday in worship, we will hear a choral arrangement of the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. This well-known prayer begins with the line: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” The prayer then goes on...
Preparing for Worship - Darren DeMent, associate pastor. I have a lot of songs in my iTunes library. So many, in fact, that I often forget what songs are even in there. So, occasionally I just set the player to shuffle and enjoy the surprise that comes when some...
Preparing for Worship - August 30 - Darren DeMent, associate pastor. This Sunday morning in worship, we are singing one of my favorite hymns, “Be Thou My Vision.” Now I realize that saying “Be Thou My Vision” is one of my favorite hymns is akin to saying “I like...
Much of our life is spent in waiting. This is inescapable, because every present moment contains a future that has not yet arrived. We may fear it, or we may love it. We may hope for it, or we may try to hide from it. But we must wait for it. In his 1981 classic, "The...