For the last half year we have been plodding along in the creation of a new church website, working with the good folks at LightSky who were recommended to us through Central District Conference. Because the church staff has worked on it little by little and watched it slowly take shape we’ve recently been calling it our baby. We’re now happy to announce that labor has ended and we have a birth, or a re-birth. www.columbusmennonite.org has been born again! (If the site has a picture of the church...
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Although we haven’t been following the lectionary readings for Sunday worship this summer, it is worth remembering that this is the season of Ordinary Time. This is the space between Pentecost and Advent in which we are neither immediately anticipating Christ’s birth nor death. Easter has happened. Pentecost has happened. And now it is Ordinary time, and life is happening. And life is ordinary. And yet, if we are willing to pay attention, it is permeated by all those things we celebrate and observe in the heightened seasons of the year – birth, death, resurrection, Spirit-gift.
If...
There’s a new ministerium of pastors forming in Columbus to meet monthly to think creatively about various ministry realities, organized by a couple ministers with the Episcopal diocese. Love those Episcopalians. Today over lunch we met at the Columbus Museum of Art and were given a tour through the Modern Dialect exhibition, displaying paintings from American artists from the 1920’s to the beginning of World War II. The question that the presenter was asked to help us think about was “How can our faith communities support prophetic voices?”
The presenter spoke of the shift from...
We are nearing the end of our Twelve Scriptures summer worship series. After this Sunday, focused on the Beatitudes of Matthew 5, we have only one Sunday remaining. It has been a rich time whose learnings can hopefully keep informing the mission of the congregation long after the series ends.
If you remember, the Twelve Scriptures was one of two parts of the survey we issued in the spring. The other part was called the Six Scriptures in which you were invited to name up to six of the most troubling and difficult passages in the Bible. The idea was that if we are going to hit...
I came across a new phrase that I especially like while reading some Richard Rohr: “The edge of the inside.” Rohr, a Franciscan, uses this phrase to talk about his own relationship with the church and religious life, and commends it as a privileged position from which to see and live.
When you’re on the edge of the inside, you’re still inside the institution of the church, still participating in worship and ritual and community life. But you’re on the edge. You have a critical distance from the trappings that religion brings with it and you are aware of the shortcomings and...