Worship and Music for the 2025 EcoFaith Summit of the Upper Midwest

a preview from the Worship Team

EARTH’S CRIES, EARTH’S CALL

Becoming Midwives of Hope for the Healing of Creation

Shiphrah, Puah, and Pharaoh: How will these characters from Exodus 1 color our worship and music at the 2025 EcoFaith Summit for the Upper Midwest? For the entirety of our gathering the two midwives at the beginning of Exodus will become our model for courage  and calling to be instruments of life.

Worship, music, and lately, dance, are a vital part of our EcoFaith gathering. This April we live into the story of the two Egyptian midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to deliver life rather than death. Our worship team (Pastor Dianne Loufman of First Lutheran in Duluth, Pastor Emily Meyer, director of The Ministry Lab, Pastor Jonathan Dodson, Immanuel, Ebenezer, and Bethany Lutheran in Plummer, MN, and musician/composer Paul Jacobson of St. Paul) is crafting a worship experience that opens our hearts to their story (opening worship), leads us deeper into processing and celebrating their story through music, singing, dance, reading, collaborative story-telling, and prayer (midday worship), and sends us on our way encouraged, enlightened, and reflecting the courage of Shiphrah and Puah (sending worship).

Our recent summit gatherings have been a perfect occasion to introduce new hymns from All Creation Sings, an amazing source of new hymnody. The 2025 Summit will feature one ACS hymn in each of our three times of worship.  The opening worship, which centers on two reflections exploring the midwives’ story, one by Dr. Diane Jacobson and one by the Rev. Dr. Kelly Sherman Conroy, will gather us in singing a lament: “For the troubles and the sufferings of the World, God, we call upon your mercy; the whole Creation’s laboring in pain.” Appropriate to the midwives’ story, this hymn pictures our World in travail, in labor pains. Opening worship leads us into  presentations by the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda and the Rev. Dr. Kelly Sherman Conroy.

Midday worship features a newly composed Canticle for Shiphrah and Puah by Paul Jacobson. (Is it the first ever canticle commemorating those heroes?) The canticle begins and ends with an injunction to “Listen!” to the cries and calls of a Creation in labor pains. This service will revolve around three “six-word stories,” each imagining in a nutshell the characters of Shiphrah, Puah, and Pharaoh, and the congregation will be invited, in small groups, to compose their own “six-word stories” to reflect on Pharaoh and the midwives. These stories from the congregation will be gathered and shared in the Sending Worship at the close of the Summit.

We treasure the opportunities to gather with you to worship the God of our miraculous but wounded Creation, which is crying and calling to us to listen and act for its healing.