Preparing for Worship - Mary Kay Jackman. Jesus liked to eat. He liked to eat with all sorts of people: tax collectors, Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, sinners, disciples, strangers, brothers and sisters, friends and not-friends. Food was important to Jesus, and he...

Preparing for Worship - Ralph Manuel, handbell coordinator. How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise him! (Psalm 147:1) Among the many adjustments we all had to make during the fifteen months that our church suspended its in-person...

Preparing for Worship - R. G. Huff. The year was 1954. The place was Knoxville, Tennessee’s Atlantic Mills Discount Store. I got separated from my mother. She was shopping for cloth. I was not interested, so I wandered off into an aisle more suited to four-year-olds —...

Preparing for Worship - Jeff Brummel, associate minister of music.  My major in college was music education, which qualifies me to teach K-12 music in public schools. Perhaps the most discussed topic in those densely filled years was nurture. To be honest, this...

Preparing for Worship – Jenna Sullivan, Pastoral Resident I’m currently learning how to play the piano. Our beloved Jeff Brummel has taken up the task of teaching me. Jeff says he is in the musical teaching lineage of Johann Sebastian Bach. As someone with no prior...

Preparing for Worship - Ashley Robinson, Pastoral Resident. This week I had the privilege of co-leading worship at Vacation Bible School with my partner in mischief and co-resident, Jenna Sullivan. Each day the worship was full of joy, song, dance moves and the daily...

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...

Preparing for Worship - Doug Haney, associate pastor.  This Sunday morning’s opening hymn, “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” is a wonderful Welsh hymn with theologically rich lyrics set to a singable and distinctive melody. All three stanzas draw on the epic story of...

Preparing for Worship - George Mason, senior pastor.  “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘Let us go into the house of the LORD!’ ” Psalm 122 is what is called “A Song of Ascents.” Jerusalem is a city on a high hill, and the Temple was on the top of the top of it....

Preparing for Worship - LeAnn Hampton, Wilshire member Can you imagine it? Friends are gathered together sharing experiences of their lives, telling their stories. Each person starts with a phrase that describes when the event occurred — “in the year of the big storm”...