Last year disrupted many so things for us, especially our connection to our church life. While many churches around the country have reopened, many remain closed, and many congregants still feel unsafe to attend in-person worship. While nothing virtual can replace the experience of Word and Sacrament of in-person worship, the Church has employed new ways to keep Christians connected with online worship, devotionals, and as many zoom meetings as you can imagine.
Besides hearing the Word and receiving Holy Communion, one of the most cherished parts of worship as a Lutheran is the liturgical calendar. Seasons and feast days are useful tools that connect us to the tradition of the Church catholic and help direct our hearts to God in new ways, renewing our devotion each year.
And so when the normal routines of church are not present in our lives due to the pandemic, we felt that keeping students connected to the rich tradition of seasons and feast days would help keep our hearts turned towards God. Through simple social media posts with some information and a proper prayer from our Evangelical Lutheran Worship hymnal, LCM Madison has tried to keep students connected to the liturgical calendar. Perhaps students were reminded of new seasons or learned about feast days they didn’t even know existed. Either way, in this unprecedented year of firsts, hopefully, the LCM Liturgy Project presents the comfort of God’s steadfast love and the Church’s ongoing mission to preach the good news.
Sam Lanzer, Political Science, 2022
Student Perspectives are part of a series from the newsletter called “What, exactly, is it like to be a student in a pandemic?”
In any given year, it seems as though the Lutheran Campus Ministry community is becoming something new. As a quarter of our student population leaves and another class is welcomed, life at LCM is always changing. But this year, with all of our activities shifting to a virtual format, our community’s life together changed profoundly. Leaning into the strangeness of these times, we tried some new experiments: a small group especially for first year students, a social media based reflection on the seasons of the church year. At the same time, students continued to experience classes, campus life, and LCM’s Thursday night faith conversations, but in new formats. Here, we have gathered four reflections on an unusual fall semester at Lutheran Campus Ministry. In them you will hear our longing to return to an embodied expression of our community, but you will also find that we have found God’s presence in our virtual experiences.
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