Heaven Practice Recap

Jasmine and I were on the fence about making the drive to Hurdle Mills for Heaven Practice at the Hester Grove Missionary Baptist Church this past Sunday, but some pointed encouragement from Jeff at coffee hour after the 10:30 service got us off that fence.

My experience of heaven practice is partially informed by interdenominational experiences growing up in Sanford. My family was Methodist (St. Luke), and my best friend’s family was Episcopalian (St. Thomas’). So my adolescence was approximately one-quarter Episcopalian, as I attended his youth group every week and we spent many weeks and weekends at Browns Summit, the youth camp that was run by the NC Diocese until it was sold to the state in 2005. While the Methodists are far from unstructured in their worship, I immediately took to logic of the liturgy and the order of service of Episcopal practice. 

Attending Heaven Practice, both at Hester Grove, but also at Bethsada Baptist this past September, has impressed on me that the ways in which we worship are distinguished primarily in terms of aesthetics: what we sing, how we speak, what we see. This is part of the appeal of participating in Heaven Practice—seeing how our fellow churches do the same things differently. (Lisa was particularly jazzed by the intro music she got before her sermon Sunday evening.)

But we also get to see what, at a fundamental level, is the same. For me, hearing and singing the doxology after the offering—that same old melody I heard at St. Luke UMC a thousand times—was like seeing a gleaming silver thread that winds back through my life to my earliest memories of worship.

So if anyone reading this has not yet attended a Heaven Practice service, I encourage you to go—to see not only what is different, but also what is deeply familiar.