Naptastic

There are thirteen classes. Intentions for the series:

• Fill thirteen weeks
• Hold singing in the space and time where choir practice would be
• Increase participation in choir when it starts back up
• Get David proficient enough with keyboards to play nice music in the sanctuary before service starts. (This is part of a larger conversation.)

To these ends, I want to move Sunday School downstairs to the Wesley Chapel where there is a better-maintained piano.

Intentions for every week:

• Make “a few minutes late” still work
• Begin and end with a prayer
• Sing and discuss at least one hymn
• Conclude promptly by 11:00 so people can do what they need to before worship service starts

The first will be introductory and maybe we just do one hymn in order to make extra time to explain the intention and design of the series.

These are (almost) all the hymns in the blue hymnal by Charles and John Wesley. I've added asterisks for hymns when someone has pointed one out as a favorite.

I want to have one or two hymns per week to sing and discuss.

As of Feb. 23, there are nine* that I'm completely confident I will have ready before the class starts. There is plenty of time to add more. Figure it takes three weeks for me to learn a hymn, and I can probably only learn two at a time.

(*ten if we count 196, but I am really struggling with the UMH harmonization. Full disclosure: I could never play the LDS version either. It only has two verses so I would need to be convinced that it's worth the effort.)

Of the remaining starred hymns, most are less familiar to me, or I struggle to play them.

In terms of theming, “Please Advise”. I'm not used to having this much freedom.

Pride Weekend; we won't be having Sunday School.

(Potential) questions:

• If you had a thousand tongues, what song would you sing?
• What is Charles Wesley singing about?

Points I want to get to:

• John and Charles Wesley's most enduring writings are in the hymns
• The first page of the hymnal–the instructions on singing

This is JUST AN IDEA. I'm not married to it, and if the wiser people in the room say we shouldn't, then I'll drop it.

Definitions of words from the hymn (from Oxford English Dictionary):

• Panoply
  1. a complete or impressive collection of things.
  2. a splendid display
  3. a complete set of arms or suit of armor
• Endued
  1. endowed or provided with a quality or ability.

First, note that this is in the Sanctifying and Perfecting Grace section of the hymnal.

I have pretty strong feelings that military-speak doesn't belong in our worship. But we have to acknowledge that the Bible contains a lot of war, and a lot of what we today would consider war crimes. Through history more recent than the Bible, Jesus' name has been used to commit acts of war and violence against people across many parts of the world, and today in the United States there is an influential and powerful movement to make our country both exclusively Christian and militarily superior, and marry those two things together.

How does our community specifically deal with Christian Nationalism? Does it align with the teachings of Jesus? (“You've heard it said, thou shalt not kill, but I tell you, if you are angry with your brother, you are in need of repentance”)

Does it fall to us to resist Christian Nationalism, and if so, what are we going to do about it?

Coming back to this hymn, are we willing to look at the militaristic language purely metaphorically? (Tie in Romans, “putting on the armor of God”)

This is the last class of the series. Some points that can't be left out:

• Plug the next Sunday School series and note if the time is changing
• Suggest joining the chancel choir