On February 7th, there will be a Children and Youth led Sunday service. When the idea first got proposed, I was extremely curious as to how something like this would turn out. Truth be told, it has been awesome to work with the kids on this! When I brought the idea to the Middlers class, they seemed extremely excited about it and immediately started conceptualizing various parts of the service and how to make them kid-related. Because of the way the service was divided, the Middlers class was given the responsibilities of designing the first third of the service. On top of this, we have...
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What does Jesus’ lament over the city of Jerusalem in Luke 13:31-35 have to do with racial relations in the US? What does Jesus’ wilderness temptations in Luke 4 have to do with white privilege? How does the prophet Isaiah’s proclamation that God is “about to do a new thing” (43:19) speak into your life regarding your awareness and experience of racialization?
These are some of the questions we’ll be asking during the upcoming season of Lent – which comes early this year. Ash Wednesday is February 10. We’ll be taking the traditional scriptures assigned for the season...
Last Monday I had the opportunity to attend the gathering of Central Ohioans for Peace where the topic for the evening was a documentary called The Mask You Live In. This documentary explores how young men and boys struggle to navigate a very narrow definition of masculinity that is forced on them by almost every angle in American society. The dominant notion of masculinity is espoused everywhere from sports, video games, movies, and TV shows to the many ways, both subtle and overt, that...
2015 is gone, but it’s worth remembering where we’ve been and what we’ve done in the past year. With fear and trembling that I may be leaving out something crucial, here are some of the highlights from the year, roughly in chronological order. Many of these events happen every year and are part of the annual rhythm of the congregation, others are unique to 2015. All of them are the work of an active community seeking to follow Jesus Christ and be led by the Holy Spirit:
Guest speaker Joseph Sprague shares about ministry in prison and neighborhood + open mic night songs and...
On the cusp on another Christmas, we pray that the peace of Christ be known in our hearts and in our world.
This past Sunday we ended our worship with a congregational selfie, a.k.a., taking a family picture. It makes for a nice Christmas greeting card, but was also a way of joining with a movement expressing solidarity with refugees. Along with a banner of our church name, we held up a banner saying #wechoosewelcome. This hashtag started through Presbyterian Church USA, with an invitation for any congregation to join by taking a picture with such a...