Yesterday I wrote a depressing piece about how more often than not a church service is more show than anything else. Today I’m pleased to report that it doesn’t have to be that way.

On Sunday, August 20, June and I attended the Sunday morning service at Hyde Chapel at the YMCA of the Rockies just outside Estes Park, Colorado. The theme of the service was “Lessons from Bible Point.” Bible Point is a small mountain on the grounds, where a young man who loved Jesus and loved the YMCA of the Rockies is buried. The Ewellogy’s September 7, 2022, 54th wedding anniversary blog includes a picture made there.

There’s a mailbox near the grave, and people have left all kinds of letters. The chaplain, Greg Bunton, gathers these letters and keeps them. He brought a few(!) for us to see, and they built the service around snippets of some of these letters.

So what made the service “not a show”? A service that June and I both were moved by? Here are some random observations:

• The service opened with the local Gideon telling stories about lives changed by people reading Bibles placed by the Gideons. Simple but inspiring.
• Then the volunteers who comprise the Chapel staff took turns reading from the letters left on Bible Point.
• They would read three or four letters on a topic:
  • Praise for Creation
  • Thanksgiving
  • Pain, sorrow and grief
  • Confession, forgiveness, healing and guidance
• Then we sang a hymn related to what the letters were about
  • Hymns. Remember those?
  • Hymns to which we all had the words and music from a … wait for it … hymnal!
  • Hymns accompanied by one person playing the piano. (June and I grew up playing piano for church services. We met over the piano at a Christian summer camp when we were 12.) It’s not just nostalgia for the old days. It’s that people gathered, and we all sang. There was no need for a praise band to rehearse hours for just the right sound either when we were growing up or at the Hyde Chapel service. I have written on this issue before.
  • Without trying, I noticed the words to the hymns. Remember when people actually wrote hymns with depth and meaning? (There are a few such hymns today. For example, “In Christ Alone,” often sung at Easter, composed in 2001, is a fantastic hymn. And there were plenty of bad hymns in the old days.) HOWEVER, song for song, I believe there was more substance in the older hymns. For example, here’s one we sang that Sunday:

• We shared Communion walking by the messy pile of letters, having been reminded that life is messy, but Jesus came into that mess, taking the mess upon himself on the cross.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. (1 Peter 2.24, ESV)

I’m not sure this blog captures the elegance, simplicity, and authenticity of the service. We hadn’t even planned on going…I think it was a God thing, and, as I say, I left more hopeful that Sunday morning doesn’t have to be a show. It can be a meaningful gathering.