Help Us Celebrate 50 Years of Gathering Worship Resource

In 2024, Gathering will celebrate 50 years of sharing worship resources among worship leaders throughout The United Church of Canada and with other denominations in Canada and around the world.

For the Pentecost 1 2024 issue, we invite you to tell us what Gathering has meant to you as a worship leader. Send us a paragraph, a reflection, a poem, a song, or a prayer that captures the role the Gathering worship resource has played in your life as a worship leader and for congregations you’ve served. How have you used and experienced Gathering? What treasures have you found? What surprises have found you? What connections have you made through Gathering?

Please send your submissions through GatheringWorship.ca or email them to @email by September 1, 2023.

Gathering has a rich history. Fifty years ago, the Reverend John Ambrose, the Special Assistant – Worship, was regularly receiving, by mail, worship materials from ministers across the country: prayers and services that worked well in their own congregations that they wanted to share with others. As these worship materials stacked up on his desk, John decided to find a way to share them. He typed up a collection of these materials, copied them (on a Gestetner duplicating machine!), stapled the pages together, and sent them out in one of the then-regular mailings to pastoral charges.

John Ambrose entitled the package Getting It All Together. The purpose of the collection, according to John, was “to provide fresh resources for congregational worship and an outlet to share the creative things congregations were doing.” In 1984, the name was changed to Gathering. In 2022, we enriched the resource through GatheringWorship.ca.

Fifty years after John’s first collection, we continue to provide fresh worship resources and offer an outlet for sharing the creative things congregations and worship leaders are doing.  

Help us celebrate by sending your contributions to Gathering! Worship leaders like you are the reason this resource is a gift to worshipping communities across Canada and around the world.

Susan Lukey, Editor