More Details and Holy Week Services

We are still finishing details on the temple and embarking on Holy Week services at the same time. This is my beautiful wife and my director in matters "choir". While I build stuff, she creates the beauty of the service's hymnography. She spends hours marking the texts of the services so the choir can chant them in unison.

This is Matushka Joanna and Mary decorating for Palm Sunday.

And Alexi and Timothy trying to figure out IKEA cabinets for the altar/sacristy. We bought a closet and cabinet set up to hide all the vestments and sacristy items from view. We sacrificed a sacristy closet to change the Church design to what you see now.


When we built the dome we didn't have anything to put in it. One of our members' parents in Chicago donated an antique brass chandelier. When they got an estimate to ship it, the cost was nearly 800.00. We had to decline because of the expense. One of our inquirers works as a flight attendant for an airline and got assigned a flight to Chicago on Friday. The donors dismantled and packed the chandelier and met her at the airport. She checked it as luggage and brought it back to us on Saturday morning. Seraphim takes on installing our donated chandelier. He is centering the chains that will hold the 80 pound chandelier in the dome.



He finishes reassembling and hanging the chandelier.

And we test it... Let there be light!


This is our first Holy Week service in our new building. It was our hope to be in by this time and we made it, though there are still details to complete.

On a side note... Last Saturday was my family's 10th anniversay of being recieved into the Church. When we were recieved we had begun a Mission in Tempe with four other famiies under the Antiochian Archdiocese's Department of Missions. That Mission ended up farther east due to circumstances beyond our control. After a couple of years of discussions, four years ago we decided to help the OCA start a Mission in Tempe. On the 10th anniversary of our reception into the Church, we moved into this temple in Tempe. This is our first Bridegroom Matins.

This is me (Subdeacon Steven Paul) and Reader Bill Basil (my co-host on Our Life in Christ) at the kliros at Bridegroom Matins.