Virginia Episcopalian Magazine Winter 2014 Issue | Page 6

Stretching continued from page 3

Jazz Mass
The Clergy of St. James’s, Richmond
In the fall of 2012, we began offering a Jazz Mass to
our lineup of weekly services. This 5 p.m. Sunday
afternoon service features top jazz musicians from
the community. The music is paired with a liturgy
that is simple, open and sacramental. There’s jazz,
poetry, Scripture, prayer, Eucharist and fellowship.
For the first year, we met in our sanctuary, which has
great acoustics but is a large space. This year, we decided to
move the service from the sanctuary to our fellowship hall,
allowing us to be more flexible and creative.

Now in our second year, the service brings together
longtime members and a new group of people who had not
been part of our worshiping community before. The altar is a
large round table set with hearty portions of bread, wine and
other foods that the earliest followers of Jesus would have
consumed at their Agape feasts – olives, cheese, hummus,

grapes and more. The hearty portions remind us of the
abundance of God’s love.

Holy Communion at Jazz Mass is a natural
extension of what happens at the sanctuary altar
on Sunday mornings, and what happens musically
in jazz. We pray and give thanks to God, and then
we share communion and fellowship together.

Jazz Mass is a much more intimate service than our two
larger Sunday morning services, but it is growing because
worshippers are passing the word around the community
and bringing friends. We also have targeted advertising
on the local NPR station and have people coming in off the
street. It’s a joyous service that has the integrity of good
music and good worship.

‘An Ever Widening net’
Tim Hall, St. Peter’s, Purcellville
St. Peter’s, Purcellville, has a heart for mission.
But it wasn’t until we began inviting guests
for mission and outreach presentations that
we realized how teaming with other Christian
organizations could have a multiplying effect on our
mission work and help us become more intentional
in developing an ongoing mission program. We joined
with St. James’, Leesburg, on a mission to the Julia C. Emery
Mission School in Bromley, Liberia. Our missionaries returned
with an enthusiasm for the Liberian people that reverberated
throughout our church. We were inspired to continue to grow
the relationship. But how?

Formation of our Mission Committee was a first major
step. We sought guidance from Buck Blanchard, diocesan
director of Mission and Outreach, and on a visit to St. Peter’s
he told us there is more to mission than sending teams.
Sometimes the most important mission work you can do, he
said, is to support the missionaries that are already doing the
work of Jesus’ Great Commission.

We joined with Purcellville Baptist for a Guatemala
mission trip, learning from its mature mission model. We
developed mission guidelines and a plan of action to do
three major things: fund our own parishioners on spirited
undertakings they brought before the committee, commit

to supporting long-term missionaries, and
nurture and expand our own short-term mission
capabilities, with an underlying goal of involving
the entire parish in mission.

God has blessed us with enthusiastic
congregational support as we have intentionally
developed relationships with Casa Chirilagua
in Alexandria, Servants 4 Him and Redeemer’s House in
Guatemala, and St. Peter’s Episcopal Church and School in
Caldwell, Liberia. And most recently, God called us last year
to work with Episcopal Appalachian Ministries to explore
establishing an ongoing relationship there.

So we’ve found that it’s a lot of little things – keeping
your options open, giving up control, being team players,
seeking guidance, offering assistance, making commitments,
welcoming change, providing consistent leadership – that
engender a vibrant, consistent and Spirit-filled mission
program. With God’s grace and provision, we’ve grown
our mission program from a pastime to a passion that
helps to fund (and support with time and talent) full-time
missi