Preaching and leading worship are my greatest gifts in ministry, and where I find the most joy. I love working with a worship team to create life-changing worship services. In worship I try always to weave together music, word, color, form, and/or movement into a beautiful whole that heals and transforms lives.
During a worship service, I become a channel for the Spirit of Life. I feel the healing energy of love pouring through me into the room, lifting the people, and moving back from them to me. This is a holy process. Not only does it change individual lives, but its effects ripple outward into the wider world.
Most of my worship services combine the pastoral with the prophetic to one degree or another. All equally engage both heart and mind. I often use stories from my own life to illustrate my sermons. Occasionally I do a service that is mainly pastoral or mainly prophetic. Here is what one congregant in Portland had to say about my preaching:
“You will be struck by the caliber of Leisa’s sermons and her passionate delivery. She hooks you from the start, gives you enough facts that you are intellectually stimulated and then stirs the soul. By the end of many of her sermons, there are tears running down faces and on several occasions the congregation has risen to their feet and given her a standing ovation. (This is definitely not commonplace in our church.) It is a powerful experience…above all…she radiates love and hope…for better days, a better earth, a better her, and a better you.” –Jan Holibaugh, congregant, FUCP
Below are links to a few online services, and some scripts for multigenerational services. Also, a few of my most powerful prophetic sermons may be found on the Prophetic Witness (aka Social Justice) page. Some of the sermons I am proudest of exist only in written form, and can be found in the Sermons section of my website. These include “What the World Needs Now,” and “Not the Opposite of Life.”
Online services (many more can be found on the YouTube channel of the Napa Valley Unitarian Universalists):
Casting Spells of Love and Hope
A Theology Adequate for the Night
Multigenerational online services (in these services I assigned video segments to volunteers, and Worship Associate Tricia Lewis stitched the videos together):
The No-Rehearsal Christmas Pageant (as adapted for video)
*Please take special note of the sheep!
The Waters of Life, Chapter 2
*My beginning is awkward, but I wanted you to see how we managed to do water communion online.
Other multigenerational service scripts:
A story video I scripted and narrated for worship at the Institute for Learning Ministry in Feb 2022:
Grandmother Spider Weaves The World
*This video was created in collaboration with Jennifer Hayman, Music Director at All Souls UU in WA DC. I recorded the story, then Jen had a pianist and a young artist listen to it and create the music and graphics. I love this kind of collaborative creative work.