"What do you do every day?" people sometimes ask us. Music and Worship Foundation employ Sam full time and Sara two days per week to run engageworship, and we can certainly say we're never bored! Things change all the time and there is no such thing as a typical week, but we thought we'd sketch out the week between 19th-26th January 2018 to give you a flavour...

Mentoring

On this particular week there were five different meetings with younger worship leaders we are mentoring. This is an unusually high concentration, but it is an area we are increasingly involved in. The leaders come from a range of churches and backgrounds. Some we caught up with on FaceTime while others we met face-to-face, in our home or cafes.

We feel it is a great privilege to listen to their experiences, ask questions, share our perspectives and pray with them. In this way we hope to contribute to building up the next generation of informed, creative, pastoral worship facilitators.

Teaching

This term Sam is teaching an undergraduate module in "Liturgy and Liberty in Worship" at Roehampton University, so Tuesday afternoon saw him drive off to lead the evening class. This is a great opportunity to go deeper with a primarily Pentecostal student group. He also chatted on the phone to Geraldine Luce about the Songwriting module they will be teaching together at London School of Theology in February.

Meetings

We met with Ruth Robb, head of a wonderful charity called Azalea who work with women caught in sexual exploitation in Luton. We are helping to lead worship for their Alpha-style courses and running one-to-one prayer for their frontline workers.

We met with our friends Lou and Jeremy to plan future events for the Park Church missional community we lead here in Luton.

Sara and Sam also FaceTimed with Alison and Ant from the Potting Shed Church, a Fresh Expression in rural Nottinghamshire. We chatted about how they are developing pioneering and creative expressions of worship and spirituality, and share ideas about how they might develop this into the future.

Website

We post new worship ideas most weeks, and on Thursday it was time to process and share two wonderful Easter poems by Amy Robinson: Waiting on the Risen Christ, and Recognising You with complementary visuals by Richard Lyall. Each year over 35,000 free worship ideas are downloaded from our site, and it takes time to create, curate and upkeep all these resources.

We also spent some time preparing the regular e-newsletter that we send out to over 18,000 subscribers to keep people up-to-date about our resources and events. And we had the encouraging job of organising a second print run for the Worship In The Wilderness Personal Devotions books.

Events

Our events diary for the year is looking really full, and most weeks involve some preparation or organisation for things which are coming up. We spent the weekend with Holy Trinity SE20, speaking, leading worship and generally kicking off their Whole Life Worship season as they follow the Journey Pack materials.

This week we've been prepping for a WLW day for Lichfield Diocese coming up on Tuesday, and another Parish weekend for a church in Balham at the end of next week. We hone our talks, finalise our PowerPoints, gather our handouts and pray that God will use us to inspire, enthuse and encourage.

Want to get involved?

Perhaps you're reading this and getting excited about the varied ways in which God is working through this ministry? Are you feeling inspired to play your part? Right now we're asking for people to contribute on a one-off or regular basis to meet a £4000 fundraising goal for this year, and to sustain our ministry into its second decade. Please support this if you can, and continue to pray for us!