Two weeks ago today three of us from CMC sat around a table at which Edith Espinal made the decision to go into sanctuary in a local congregation to avoid imminent deportation.  After one location quickly fell through, we found ourselves being asked whether the Mennonites would be able to step forward.  That Saturday morning Leadership Team met to get oriented to the situation and discuss how we might process this as a congregation.  After a congregational meeting the following day and another one that Wednesday evening we felt we had enough information and enough congregational support to offer our building as sanctuary to Edith. Many CMCers stepped forward right away to donate time, money, ideas, and material resources to prepare space for her.  This included a major bathroom remodel to install a shower, clearing out the crib room and furnishing it as an apartment, installing security cameras, and developing

  I’m getting caught up on On Being podcasts, and just listened to Krista Tippet’s conversation with Mary Catherine Bateson.  She’s the author of the book Composing a Life, and daughter of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. One of the things she touches on is the value of being a participant-observer in life.  It’s something she learned from her parents, who, as good anthropologists, learned to both carefully observe and actively participate in the cultures they were studying.  Bateson notes that the observing part includes self-observation, being aware of how what one is doing and seeing is affecting oneself. Bateson says: “There’s a huge benefit in being a participant-observer.  There are people who just observe and don’t engage with others.  There are people who just engage and don’t think about what’s happening.  And to learn to be simultaneously observing and learning, but at the same time to be fully

In November of 1957 a group of students in Columbus started meeting together.  They were all from other places.  What they shared in common was an upbringing in a Mennonite congregation, and a desire to fellowship with each other.  As the group grew, they went from informal gatherings to establishing a new congregation, with charter membership established in September, 1962.  Over the next three years the young congregation would hire their first pastor, purchase the Neil Avenue Presbyterian Church at West 6th and Neil, and grow to a regular Sunday attendance of around 100, with a quarter being preschool age. In those early years the fellowship was active on the OSU campus.  Members joined a rotation of WOSU radio’s “Morning Devotions,” sharing 15 minute reflections.  On Armed Forces Day, the group sponsored a viewing of the film “Alternatives,” which displayed ways other than the military of serving one’s country and

August 9, 2017   An early morning run along a familiar trail. The air is cool for August. The Olentangy crawls along beside me. There’s a fog over the water, the river in another state, hovering over itself, contemplating its own possibility to float, change, vacate the predictable flow, disappear and appear elsewhere.   The planet turns slowly and already the sun is claiming the air. The river remains, in itself, and follows its course. My breath becomes mist in front of me and I move through it, along this path that leads toward home.     Joel  

Before we put Vacation Bible School (VBS) completely out of our minds, I wanted to take a minute to reflect back on the takeaways from a week that zoomed by so quickly.  There were plenty of takeaways about what kinds of things worked well this year and what kinds of things we could do differently in the future, but if I let myself take off the organizational-administrator hat for just a second, I think there was a deeper takeaway that is worth sharing more broadly.  The theme of the week was “Digging for Treasure” and had a strong emphasis on the parables of Jesus.  Early on, we talked about how parables are a kind of story that Jesus told to help his listeners be curious about what it means to love the world around us like God loves.  Each night we heard a parable read and watched it acted out