Mark Rupp has been pastoring at Columbus Mennonite for nearly a month and this coming Sunday is his installation service.  Mark will preach, and Lois Kaufmann, our Central District Conference Minister, will be here and will lead this part of the service.  For first time pastors, installation is usually accompanied with the conference’s giving of a ministry license, a two year credential which can lead toward ordination. If you have been following denominational publications you know that Mountain States Mennonite Conference, after a year and a half long period of conversations and discernment, gave a ministry license to a woman in a covenanted relationship with another woman.  This was a first for our denomination.  It has been controversial enough that our denominational Executive Board felt compelled to issue a statement which, in part, requested that conferences refrain from issuing ministry credentials to persons in same-sex relationships.  But we, as a

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.  http://www.columbusmennonite.org has been born again!  (If the site has a picture of the church building on it, this is the previous site and means the new one hasn’t fully uploaded for your browser.  Refresh your browser or try again soon). Like any baby, it’s not completely finished, just finished enough to get started.  One of our hopes for a website was that we would be able to update it and adapt it to our needs

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 the spiritual life does not consist of honoring the ordinary and finding the holy in the common, I’m not sure what value there is in it. “This, now,” is what we are given. I don’t know why it’s so hard to remember this. My mind races ahead and faces back but forgets what

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 the Enlightenment focus on the exemplum vertutis, the virtuous and exemplary man, to the emphasis on the common man in these paintings.  “Man.”  These paintings often take the perspective of the ones in poverty, or victims of violence or natural disaster.  There is a painting of two women observing the flooded Ohio River at Portsmouth

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 the highlights, we should also be willing to come to terms with the shadow side of Scripture – the parts which portray God or the life of faith in a way that do not fit with our present convictions.  A number of you