Why do we do what we do in worship? Why that color on the altar, a song there and a prayer here, water and bread and a cup? Most of us who make worship happen every Sunday have never been told. On Saturday, October 24, we're going to find out together.

In the morning, five short units on the why of worship, with games and prizes along the way. Jake South leads the unit on music. In the afternoon, three teams choose from four planning kits (Baptismal Renewal, Maundy Thursday, a Service of Healing, and Good Friday Tenebrae) and build special services for the coming year.

The workshop is for everyone who touches a worship service: choir and orchestra, The Awakening band, handbells, liturgists and acolytes, the altar guild, ushers and greeters, Moments With Children, youth, and sound and media. If you've ever wondered why we do something on Sunday morning, this is your day.

We start at 9:00 a.m. and finish by 4:00 p.m. The breakfast table opens at 8:30, and lunch is on us. There's nothing to read ahead of time. Bring your questions and a pen.

​Register by Friday, October 16 so we can plan lunch: Register on Church Center. Trouble registering? Call the church office.

Somebody in our church family is going to have the worst week of their life this year. Probably more than one somebody. None of them should have to go through it alone, and since August a team of folks called Covenant Cares has been meeting every other week to see that they don't.

When the team first met, I held up the handbook we'd put together and told them, "Don't make the mistake of thinking that this is the ministry. You guys are the ministry. The people we recruit are the ministry."

​Pastoral Doesn't Mean the Pastor

For a long time the American church had one answer to a hard week: call the pastor. Somebody's sick, call the pastor. Somebody dies, call the pastor. Somebody's lonely on a Tuesday, and that call usually never came, because there's one of me and a whole lot of you.

"Pastoral care doesn't mean the pastor," I told the team. "Pastoral just means working in a pastoral style." You don't have to be ordained to sit beside a hospital bed and be the presence of Christ. A handful of things do belong to clergy, like Holy Communion, baptism, weddings and funerals, and the team knows to call me for those. The rest is shared work, and I'm still in the rooms where a pastor belongs.

What's Different Now

Every one of our special care members, the folks who can't get out much right now, can reach out to someone they know will be there when they're needed. That's a real person with a name and a phone number, who checks in with them month after month.

The team keeps track of the days people tend to forget: about ten days after a loss, when the casseroles stop and the family heads home, and the first anniversary.

After every visit, a short report comes in the same day. When one of us is traveling or under the weather, the people we visit still get a call.

The team also runs its own meeting. "I am here when I can be," I told them, "and I am not the chair."

What We're Learning

I came to our September meeting ready to make the case for caring for caregivers. The room made it better than I could have. Around that table we heard about several households where someone has been caring for a loved one for years, and the church hadn't known. One of our team put it this way: "It's not really that you want anybody to come do something. It's just that somebody cares and acknowledges you."

Caregivers are on our list now, too. We're also exploring a card ministry, a room where anyone can pick a name, write a card and drop it in the box, and a way to bring our special care members to the Joy Group's Christmas gathering, rides included.

In the Team's Own Words

I asked the team what congregational care means to them. I should have known they would say it better than I do.

"For me congregational care means no one is overlooked," Jim Gross told me.

Jane put it this way: "Congregational care calls me to be available, if possible, when I become aware of a need in the congregation. This works better using a group of responders."

Wally was honest about the limits: "It does not mean we fix every situation but rather to identify ways we can be of help."

And Joe had a word for anyone who can't be with us on Sunday right now: "Even though you may not be able to be with us in person, we value you as members of CUMC. We are here to listen to your needs and concerns and to help you in any way we can. Please know that God loves you and that we love you."

Walking With You​

Hospitals can't tell us you're there. So when you or someone you love is headed in, would you please give the church office a call?

If you're caring for someone at home, we want to walk with you in that. It would be our honor.

And some of you are really good at sitting with someone without trying to fix them. We'd love to talk with you about joining the team, and someone will go with you the first time.


Grace and peace,

Pastor Joey

Have you looked at the window on a cold and snowy night and wondered what people without homes could possibly be doing in that weather? If that question has gnawed at your conscience, you may be getting a nudge from Heaven. And we have great news for you: Room in the Inn returns this winter, and Covenant UMC is responsible for five nights across the coldest part of the year. We open our doors on November 6, December 4, January 8, February 5, and March 5.

Here is how we do it. We open the building to a small group of neighbors who have nowhere warm to sleep. They arrive in the evening. We feed them dinner. They shower, they sleep in a warm room, they get breakfast and something to take with them, and they go in the morning.

It takes more hands than you would think and less expertise than you would fear. We have a team that cooks. Other are helping to set up beds. Several of us sit with our guests after dinner and talk, which sounds like the easiest job. If you think about it, it won't surprise you to find out that it is usually the one that matters most. A very few volunteers are needed to stay overnight. In the morning, another volunteer or two come in to make breakfast.

That sounds like a lot. But you don't have to sign up for all of it. You might do exactly one of those things, one time, on any one of those five nights, and that  contribution will make all the difference in the world.

We hear most people say the same thing after their first night. They came expecting to serve strangers and spent the evening in conversation with people.

We are not solving homelessness in Memphis. That effort is bigger and requires more hands and feet. That can't be done from a church fellowship hall. What can be done from our building is the ministry of keeping specific people warm and fed -- and treated like people. We'll do it five nights this winter, and that is the part you might be considering.

​November 6, December 4, January 8, February 5, March 5.

Call us. If you want to be on the list when it opens, let the church office know.

On the first Sunday in October, Christians all over the world come to the Lord's Table on the same day. We'll be among them on October 4.

This Sunday changes the size of the table. Ours in Cordova is set beside tables in Nairobi and Seoul and São Paulo, and beside a house church somewhere whose name we'll never hear. Different languages, the same words. The same bread and cup. The same Lord.

It started in 1933 at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. The Depression was grinding on and the world was drifting toward war. One congregation looked at all of that coming apart and chose to act on a hope that the church is more one than it looks. Other churches caught the idea, and it spread.

It's also one of the United Methodist Church's Special Sundays. The offering that morning funds World Communion Scholarships for racial and ethnic minority students, here in the United States and around the world. Somebody is in a classroom right now because churches like ours gave on a Sunday in October.

​Would you plan to be at the table with us on October 4? There's room for you.

Maybe you know the prayer circle. Folding chairs, heads bowed, and the prayer coming around the room one person at a time. Somebody prays beautifully. Somebody prays for a long while. And you spend most of the circle working out what you'll say when it gets to you. I've been in that circle. I've rehearsed in it. By the time my turn came, I was talking to the room more than to God.

Those prayers are real, and God hears every one of them. But somewhere along the way a lot of us started to believe that prayer means talking, and that the good pray-ers are the ones who can find the words.

Prayer is bigger than that. At its heart it's communion: time spent with God, in God's presence, with nothing to prove. Sometimes you speak. More often, if you let it, you listen. You stay a while with the One who has been waiting for you all along.

Someone who has carried this church's prayer life for years put it to me simply: there's a difference between praying and asking. Most of our praying is asking, and God welcomes every word of it. But asking is only one part. The rest is praise, and thanks, and just being with God.

That's what this evening is for. We're borrowing an old shape, the evening prayer service from the United Methodist Book of Worship. The lights will be low. There will be quiet music. A few short prayers will be led from the front, and then there will be silence, long enough to actually settle into. Sit wherever you like, down front or alone on the back pew. Nobody will ask you to pray out loud. If you need to slip out early, go with our blessing.

"Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10). That's the whole invitation.

The service is Sunday, September 27, from 5:30 to 6:30 in the Sanctuary. It will be one hour, and we'll keep it to one. We'll gather like this every quarter, starting now.

I'd save you a seat, but you get to pick your own. That's sort of the point.

Once a year every United Methodist congregation holds a charge conference, and ours is Monday, November 2, at 6:00 p.m. in the Sanctuary. Our District Superintendent, Rev. Dr. Jathaniel Cavitt, will preside.

It sounds more formal than it is. We look back over the year and hear what Covenant has done with it, in numbers and in plain words. We elect the lay leaders who'll carry the work into 2027. And we take care of the business the United Methodist Church asks every congregation to tend.

If you're serving on a committee or leading a ministry next year, this is the night your service for 2027 becomes official, and we'd love for you to be in the room.

If you've never been to one, come anyway. It's the clearest look you'll get at how Covenant actually runs, and a good chance to meet the people who'll be leading it.

​Everyone is welcome.

For four Wednesday nights a group of folks has been stopping to think about what they actually believe. We've been examining our assumptions and going deeper than the guesses and false starts most of us picked up along the way. We started with grace. We looked at how we read Scripture. We took up the water, the bread, and the cup, and we traced the connection that keeps any Methodist church from standing alone.

The last night has two halves.

The first half is about Sunday morning. Why we gather around Word and Table. What each part of the service is for. Where the Traditional service and The Awakening agree, even when they sound nothing alike. And why the calendar we keep is older than any of us.

The second half belongs to the class. Since the first night there's been a basket at the door collecting question cards, and I've promised every week that September 30 is when we'd get to them. Your questions set the order, not my outline. Nothing is off the table.

You don't need to have come to the first four. Grab a card from your table and add yours to the pile.

Dinner is at 5:30, and class starts at 6:00 in the Fellowship Hall. If you're still finishing dessert, that's fine by me. If you sing in the choir, you'll get the worship half before rehearsal takes you at 6:30.

​At the end of five weeks nobody has to do anything. But if you find yourself wanting to call Covenant home, just let us know. The path to membership is short, and I'd be glad to walk it with you.

Trunk or Treat is Sunday, October 25, from 2:30 to 4:30. Pull your car into the lot, open the trunk, decorate it however you like, and hand out candy to whoever walks up.

Here is why we give an afternoon to it. It is the easiest welcome we offer all year. Nobody needs convincing to come get candy. Children run between the cars, parents stand around and talk, and by half past four a good many people have had a genuinely nice time on our lot. That is worth two hours of anybody's Sunday.

There are two ways in. Sign up for a parking space on the boards in the Narthex and outside the Spirit Center, arrive by 2:00 to park and set up, and bring enough candy for a steady line. Or, if parking a car is not your thing, candy donation bins are behind the main desk in the Smith Covenant Center and in the Narthex. Plenty of people help that way and it matters just as much.

Our youth have dinner together right afterward, from 5:00 to 7:00, so the evening keeps going once the lot clears.

​Come be part of it. Would you sign up this Sunday, so we know how much lot to save?