United in Worship Project

ABOUT US

This project is evolving out of the need for St. John’s United Church, Marathon, ON to support the faith communities of St. Andrew’s UCCan, Schreiber, St. Paul’s UCCan, Manitouwadge, and Grace UCCan, Hornepayne which make up Crossing Boundaries Cluster.

These Communities of Faith have been in relationship with one another for more than ten years. The name embraces who we were prior to Jan. 01, 2019. We are all at the confluence of three Conferences (MNWO, Manitou and London), and three Presbyteries (Cambrian, Spirit Dancing and Algoma). Our nearest neighbour, St. Andrew’s UCCAn is an hour’s drive west and the farthest neighbour, Grace UCCan is two hours’ drive to the south east.

St. John’s worship team, led by the Very Rev. Dr. David Giuliano, 39th Moderator of the United Church of Canada (along with four Licensed Lay Worship Leaders) met monthly to plan worship, have Bible study and to plan support for our neighbours who were, and continue to be, without paid accountable ministry personnel and without trained lay worship leaders.

Initially, one of the LLWL from St. John’s led worship in each of the communities in the cluster once a month and were pulpit supply at St. John’s when David was away.

As our faith communities grew stronger in our relationship through our monthly face-to-face encounters and our gatherings as a whole community of faith twice each year, it became apparent that more was needed to support each faith community.

We began by providing worship liturgies and sermon texts along with digital presentations to support the worship experience for each of the cluster faith communities.

All of these Communities of Faith have embraced a base level of technology to make use of all the resources we have available, delivered through the Internet using a Dropbox account. The demand for access to these resources has grown to approximately 80 Communities of Faith from across Canada.

Our first project was and continues to be the On-Line Licensed Lay Worship Leadership Training program.

The intent was to provide quality training without the added burden of travel. St. John’s UCCan worship team hosted a development team to create a training program to be delivered on-line for persons wishing to become licensed by their Regions as License Lay Worship Leaders.

This development group hired Rev. Dr. Christine Jerrett to develop the curriculum and to fill the role of Course Director.

The program, now hosted by The Canadian Shield Region of the United Church and delivered through United-in-Learning (https://united-in-learning.com/index.php/llwl-online-training-program ), will begin its fourth year of operation in October 2019.

The program is open to all members of Communities of Faith within The United Church of Canada, and complies with the requirements for licensing laity as outlined in The Manual.

Our technology is such at this point that by September 2019, St. John’s UCCan will be hosting multi-site worship with at least two of our near neighbours and possibly two of our extended neighbours in Nipigon and Chapleau.

As we approached the restructuring of the United Church of Canada, we became aware of a project which began through Rev. Will Kunder, Support for Communities of Faith Minister for Canadian Shield Region, to encourage Ministers from across Canada to create and share liturgies and sermons with Communities of Faith currently without trained worship leadership. This opened the door to merging the St. John’s support to our cluster churches, to seeking support from and sharing with all communities of faith in need of support across Canada.

The outcome is this United-in-Worship Project:
A joint venture of The United Church of Canada, Canadian Shield Region and St. John’s United Church of Canada (Marathon, ON). Contributing worship leaders and their communities of faith have volunteered liturgies for worship, sermons/reflections, and creative time and energy. We add digital presentations to support the liturgies and video versions of the sermons/reflections, asking that participants always acknowledge the work of the authors and their Community(ies) of Faith for their generosity and discipleship.

We have moved to this web site from our origins with Drop Box because of the demand for these resources and are grateful to Churchweb Canada for their assistance in developing this site.