As a pastor, I don’t get too many Sunday to be on the pew side of worship. So, when I am on vacation I love taking advantage of the opportunity to check out worship in another church. This past Sunday my kids and I hit the road for vacation and had hoped to stop at a colleague’s church for vacation. As is our tradition though, we left much later than we intended and I quickly realized arriving on time to the church wasn’t going to happen. Quickly leaning on a teaching maxim, “monitor and adjust” we improvised and had worship while going down the road.
At 11 o’clock when our service would normally start I announced from the front of the van, “Good morning and welcome to the First Presbyterian Mobile Church. Today we are all pastors.” I asked for song requests. We all took turns selecting our favorite songs. After a rousing round of “You are my all and all”, “God of wonders” and “Shout to the Lord”, we then moved to the Word. I quoted a couple of my favorite verses from my recent Holy Spirit study and unpacked a lesson I had learned from it. Then, I queiried my kid’s on there favorite verses. Matt was quick to respond with Matthew 7:7 and Ruth rapidly sorted through her journal for Phillippians 4:6-7. I was pleased to see she was rifling through a journal had bought her for Christmas and she had brought it on the trip.
We moved on to figuring out some kind of offering. We talked about offering God our joy this week and about the possibility that may be God would put someone in our path to help. Grandma paid for our gas. 🙂
We then each shared a prayer for this week. Most of us included prayers for safety during our travels. I suspect that was a wee bit influenced by my recent car accident. Safe road travel isn’t quite taken for granted as it used to be. Matt shared that last week he had a prayer for the week. Another pleasant insight into his spiritual life.
We had a closing song, “Sanctuary” and Matt and I gave us a Benediction. The experience was edifying, fun and hopefully made God smiled as we did our best to glorify him from the road. Our mobile worship wasn’t what I had in mind, but there where some wonderful benefits to it. I loved getting an unexpected and pleasurable glimpse into my kid’s spiritual lives as they shared favorite songs, verses and prayers. I am sure they will remember the experience for years to come.