If you were in worship last Sunday, you heard me share that we will have a record number of young people attending the Winter Camps at Camp Friedenswald the next two weekends. At last count, we will have 10 High Schoolers and 12 Middle Schoolers attending their respective weekends. That’s a record for at least as long as I’ve been around. Additionally, we will be recognizing a record number of young people as part of the Coming of Age Celebration on February 4th.  We will be blessed by the gifts of these 9 young people as they lead us in worship, and we will have the opportunity to bless them as they enter this new phase of life.  Also, the Christian Education Commission has been having a lot of conversation recently about how to best adapt to the reality that our Godly Play inspired children’s classes have been attracting a

It’s 11am on Tuesday and the CMC fellowship hall is coming to life.  Carpools, caravans, and solo drivers from as far north as Bluffton/Pandora and as far south as Cincinnati are converging in Columbus to hold a service of prayer, singing, and testimonies outside Senator Sherrod Brown’s office downtown.  We will deliver a letter signed by Mennonites from across Ohio urging him to support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and Israel.  Our church is a gathering point before heading out together, about 60 of us from eight congregations.  We’re part of 1700+ Mennonites in 41 separate public actions across the US throughout the day, organized through Mennonite Action.    It’s the largest Christian witness to date calling for a ceasefire.  The Dispatch picked up the story, with pictures, HERE.   (Photo by Joel Miller) We have a plan, but we’re also improvising.  Once we’ve reconvened in front of the federal building

Church health is much more than numbers, but it’s helpful to track how many people are joining the circle of care and community that is congregational life.  Please pass the black registers at the end of the bench…  Music Sunday has always been a high holy day on the church calendar and this past Sunday our attendance was 234.  I had Mim do some research and that was the most people since Easter 2019, the other peak high holy day.  The sanctuary doesn’t feel quite as full due to Zooming households – an option that extends our community even further – but it seems significant that we have hit a post-pandemic high. One of the gifts of the past couple months has been a wave of new attenders.  The “local visitors” category this past Sunday included 23 people, mostly folks who are about to cross the threshold of six services

Many of you expressed kind words last Sunday about the lyrics I wrote for our Advent theme, which we will be singing to the tune of What Child is This? There are more verses coming each week, which I’ll include below. For now I wanted to give a little more context for what I wrote, and also pass along an invitation for you all to do your own creative work.  When conversations about Advent began happening a few months ago, Joel mentioned a very loose idea of building upon the question Isaiah asks in one of the lectionary readings, “What shall I cry?”  He pointed out that each of the Advent readings for this new lectionary had prophets and other figures wrestling with that question even if they weren’t asking it as directly as Isaiah.  This loose theme grabbed my attention. In this season of waiting and watching, of hope

Since September, we’ve been working our way through the Narrative Lectionary.  This series of readings roughly follows the chronology of the biblical story.  We began with creation and have reached the Babylonian exile.  One of the inherent features of the Narrative Lectionary is that we go nearly four months without any readings from the New Testament.  Have you noticed?!  And one of the challenges is to take these scriptures on their own terms, strange as they are at times, without simply discounting them or reading them as a prelude to Jesus.  These were, in fact, the very scriptures from which Jesus drew wisdom. This Sunday is the beginning of Advent.  As the Narrative Lectionary is designed, we’ll stay in the Hebrew Bible all the way through Advent until Jesus is born which, quite naturally, transitions us into the gospels and early church.  For this year’s Advent theme we’ll be dwelling