Special Service for Lent

Do you carry around burdens, regrets, have a conscience about choices you have made, or unresolved resentments, anger or other feelings you haven’t dealt with?

Lent is the opportunity given to us to address these burdens and sorrows and to receive God’s forgiveness and free ourselves from the weight they carry. Common Worship contains a service for us to do this together as a community.

It’s called a Corporate Service of Penitence and we are planning to hold one as part of the series of Compline. It’s a structured service of prayer and hearing God’s word. During it we give ourselves space to reflect on the matters that burden us and talk to God about them – and let’s be clear, we each do this silently, we not called to speak out our innermost thoughts.

After this period of reflection we each come to the altar for personal absolution and the laying on of hands. The result of receiving such absolution following our personal confession to God gives us joyful release from any burdens we have been carrying. Through this service we are reconciled and restored in our relationship with God and with one another; we are restored to our original baptismal state, renewed in the joy of having died, and been reborn into life in Christ.

This will be a very special service that is a powerful way for us to collectively come to God and witness to one another our commitment to a life lived in Christ. What might sound like a downbeat service ends in great joy.