This August, your local queer, storytelling, bar church is…tired. And we’re getting ready for a whole new season. So this month, it’s Reruns! Read what Vince had to say about it in the weekly newsletter:
Our daughter, Nola, is currently making her way through the back catalog of Super Friends. Last year she burned through ThunderCats, (hoooooo!) and I tried to get her into Gummy Bears with no luck. (No judgments, please. Screen time rules were for pre-pandemic life.)
Revisiting shows with her has been fun. The way the theme songs come back like a reflex. The way the character voices transport me to a shag carpet in the 80’s. The way the stories trace familiar pathways through my brain. There’s a certain pleasure to re-runs.
Coming back to a TV show, or a movie, or - OK, yes - a book, it’s nostalgic. It takes you back to a particular time and place. But it also brings you into the present moment in a different way.
A re-run is a kind of measuring stick, marking off the distance you’ve traveled from the person you were when you saw it the first time. What you thought was funny. What you thought was meaningful. What you’ve kept from who you were, and what’s changed.
Re-runs show us what has held up. In the show and in us. The cringey bits we’d rather forget about, and the solid stuff we ended up building on.
This month we’re trying something new: we’re going back to services that are old. We’re revisiting worship from our first four years to see how it holds up. To see who we’ve been and to measure who we’ve become as a church and as individuals.
We’re picking some of the services we think were great, (but maybe not well-attended) and we hope you’ll join us to re-run them (or, let’s be honest, probably run them for the first time anyway.)
Sundays at 5pm on a lawn in Ravenswood, we’re transporting you to August 19, 2018 in a garden in Rogers Park. To July 14, 2019 in an improv theater in Northcenter. To Shark Week, 2018 at Red Line Tap… Don’t miss it — again.