We continue to search for the right Director of Children, Youth, and Family Ministries to partner with First Church. We have hope for a great fit amongst our current candidates and look forward to updating everyone as soon as we are able! In the meantime, Pastor Rachel and I have been coordinating our family discipleship with the support of about 20 incredible volunteers.

We have gotten to share time with our young folks each Sunday morning and night, pondering trust, relationships, death, and how many kinds of UNO we have collectively played (there are apparently 700+ UNO versions and spinoffs). Reaching back to my Youth Director and intergenerational discipleship era has been a joy and a stretch!

Join First Church Friends of Music as it presents a special concert that spans across the musical spectrum to dedicate the Sanctuary’s Steinway piano on Sunday, November 8, 2 pm.  The concert is a free event as a gift to the entire community and features three luminary pianists taking the instrument to its limits with vastly different musical styles.

As United Methodist clergy in full connection, Pastor Rachel is ordained into the Order of the Deacon and I am ordained into the Order of the Elder. There is a whole lot behind these Very Official Words, but practically they mean that Pastor Rachel and I are connected to our fellow clergy by covenant. Not just that we share a profession or serve in the same area or report to the same adjudicatory bodies, but a covenant of call, identity, and accountability.

FUMC's Land and Housing Circle is forming a Turnover Team to support Path Home’s urgent shelter needs by helping prepare rooms for families moving in on short notice.  

When was the last time you heard a story that was just too good not to share?  

There are plenty of stories that are too incredulous, sorrowful, or angering not to share, but I have in mind the ones that are chock full of good.  

Maybe it was in a newspaper that you clipped for a friend, or a post too perfect to keep to yourself. My household often swaps stories about urban issues, wider church happenings, and household cats.  

Elliot Stein is a reporter with the BBC who hosted a feature that ran for several episodes describing rapidly disappearing and obscure skills, the people who are the last in a long line of artisans who attained those skills, what their loss will mean.

Some days, we put on our blinders. Other times we are blinded by the grief and gravity of the world’s injustices. But occasionally, when our efforts align, we see the reality around us and the hope that exists anyway.

For me, this week is one of the latter. Even as we are focusing on the violence against Gazans, the Sumud Flotilla seeking to provide humanitarian aid, and the National Guard being mobilized in our own city, there has also been hope! I want to share some of those stories of hope with you, as well as practical reminders for how you can be hope for others in this moment.

Wednesday afternoon I walked down the road to the Freddy’s pharmacy and rolled up my sleeve to be vaccinated. Contracting COVID has become an unfortunate annual tradition for me since we left lockdown. Fortunately, each year’s booster has kept my illness manageable.

A new book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America by Christian Smith,  has recently been added to the library collection and is ready for checkout! It is also currently being discussed by the Christianity in a Changing World class on Sunday mornings. Read on for a review by First Church member Phyllis Leonard.

On Sunday afternoon a note appeared in my inbox from some dear colleagues. Included in their note were the words of a Hopi Elders’ prophecy. Primed by our pondering of Mordecai and Esther’s plight as it relates to the plight of the modern age, their words struck me, providing both challenge and encouragement. A bright splash on an otherwise grey and soggy day! I offer them to you in the same spirit. Ponder them as you go about your day, engage your relationships, and examine your interior in the quiet times:

You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered…

“When Mordecai learned what had been done, he tore his clothes, dressed in mourning clothes, and put ashes on his head. Then he went out into the heart of the city and cried out loudly and bitterly. […] a very great sadness came over the Jews. They gave up eating and spent whole days weeping and crying out loudly in pain. Many Jews lay on the ground in mourning clothes and ashes. When Esther’s female servants and eunuchs came and told her about Mordecai, the queen’s whole body showed how upset she was. She sent everyday clothes for Mordecai to wear instead of mourning clothes, but he rejected them.” Esther 4:1, 3b-4 (CEB)

On Sunday we met Mordecai from the book of Esther. When Mordecai learns of planned violence of genocide against his people, he is overtaken by grief. Grief over such callousness and disregard for human life, grief over such comfort with violence, grief over those who were to be harmed.

Two dozen women sat in a neat circle together, mostly strangers. At the head of the circle (if there can be such a thing), four facilitators convened. Well, more beamed at the group who had come from all corners of the country and the UK.

These joyful hearted facilitators held many professional titles between them: spiritual directors, professional coaches, clergy, seminary professor, former dean of Duke Divinity School, organizational developer, healer, yoga instructor, non-profit founder, abbess at a monastic community, and more.

School just started and already there is a holiday on the horizon. 
 
Labor Day began as a day recognized by labor activists and individual states and is rooted during a time when labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers made to the country. In June 1894 president Grover Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September of each year a national holiday. (You can learn more about the origins of the holiday here.) 

We are coming to the end of the summer season and gearing up for fall. The leaves will change, the rains will return, the air will smell sweet, the animals will begin eagerly gathering all they need for the winter months. In this liminal time it’s important to remember who we are and who we were created to be. 

I’ve been reading blessings written by Meta Herrick Carlson. She offers the following blessing for rest. 

The Northwest Harvest on Cherry Street had me hooked.

Every Monday afternoon a gaggle of students would pile (and pile) into too-full cars to go from the school parking lot just a few miles west to Seattle’s Capitol Hill. If we couldn’t press drivers into service, we’d squeeze into the 550 Express bus, schlepping our school bags up the steep hill until we reached the food bank’s metal gates.

Waking from sleep is a marvel. Some of us are groggy, slowly coming to consciousness as the last strange dream fades. Many of us are achey. Some, I have heard, are ready to jump up and greet the day. Some of us interrogate that tickle in our throats: is it from allergies, post-nasal drip, or our immune systems being tested by a cold or covid?

However we wake, each new day is a gift. The moon retreated, the sun rose, and the world kept turning! If we’re fortunate, nothing shook or erupted in the night. If we’re fortunate, there’s running water to wash our faces and something to wrestle up for breakfast.

As each new day brings new stories from occupied or war-torn communities with restrictions on humanitarian aid, piled on top of the stories from our own community of those in desperate circumstances, we don’t take these morning miracles for granted.

What do we do with this gift of each new day?

“Your paperwork is a little off balance.”

A dozen of us sat at the conference table. Perched to my right, a silent advocate. To my left and around the table, members of the Board of Ordained Ministry. We were there for my written and oral doctrinal examination to be commissioned as a provisional Elder in the Texas Annual Conference, one of the many steps along the way toward being ordained.

At commissioning, the Board focuses on your theology. At ordination several years later, the Board wants to see the fruit of your ministry. This was theology time. A member of the Board remarked with gentle criticism on my paperwork, having noticed that it contained three times more on inclusion in the church than on the nature of the Holy Trinity. Whoops!

“How is it with your soul?”

We have been hitting deep (and sometimes poorly worded) questions through our worship series, “I’ve Been Meaning to Ask.” In our weekly conversations, we have found other ways to be curious and courageous with one another, using questions as: What has shaped who you are? What makes your heart hurt? How can I show up for you in this moment?

Those who aren’t the touchy-feely type may be uninterested or even intimidated by these questions. But these aren’t questions just for folks like the Care Team to ask alone; they are for all of us!

A new book, Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel  by Dr. Lorette Ross,  has recently been added to the library collection and is ready for checkout! Read on for a review by First Church member Susan Duncan.

The newest revision of our United Methodist Social Principles is hot off the Cokesbury press!

The Social Principles are our denomination’s ethical aspirations for the common good in public policies and personal commitments.

I first encountered these principles in confirmation class. Boy did they pack a wallop! I remember the pride I felt when I learned that in the stickiest, murkiest, and most important issues of our day, the United Methodist Church knew where it stood.

For the first time since they were first approved in 1972, the social principles have undergone a complete revision with 4 primary focuses: the community of all creation, the economic community, the social community, and the political community.