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Two years later – We are still here

For the past two years, this church building has been home for Edith. A community of support well beyond our congregation has formed around Edith and her family. What initially began as the right thing to do has grown into friendship and shared life – including celebrating birthdays and graduations. And events like this where we mark the passage of time. Friendship has blossomed into solidarity – sharing together in the work to enable Edith to return home to the family apartment.

The fact that Edith Espinal has been living inside a church
building, in sanctuary, for...

Talking about sex…at church

This Sunday at retreat will be the final week of our worship
series on our (Membership) Commitment statement. Which means it’s time to start a new worship
series.

That theme, for the month of October, will be Healthy
Sexuality. I guess that means we could
either have full or very empty pews for those four weeks.

There are any number of ways of doing this poorly. The Church, for its part, has done a lousy
job historically of guiding us into healthy sexuality. The Church has largely seen sex as a
necessary evil for pro-creation,...

Casting no stones

The headline
of this morning’s Dispatch addresses executions in Ohio and the drugs
needed to carry them out. Despite drug makers
warning Ohio officials not to use their products for executions, the article
details multiple occasions in which state officials acquired these drugs, sending
them to the state death chamber in southern Ohio to serve as the three drug
cocktail for lethal injections.

However, there is good news on...

Enemy love

This week highlights our 5^th commitment: “Love
our neighbors and enemies, pursuing wholistic peace with justice.” We didn’t plan for it to coincide with the
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the US, but it does.

When Jesus says, in Matthew 5:44, “Love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you,” he was talking to the crowds of people who
had come to him. They were not the
powerful determining national foreign policy.
They were the poor and the sick.

Julie Hart will be preaching on this topic on Sunday –
nothing...

What is Formation?

A few months back, the Christian Education Commission and I organized a workshop that was meant to help clarify the purposes of Christian Formation and set some goals to help move us toward our vision for Christian formation with children and youth. The congregation as a whole has been doing some visioning this past year, so we thought it might be helpful to do something similar that would focus more specifically on the work of our commission.

We started the workshop by doing some brainstorming in small groups on the question, “What is the purpose and goal of Christian Formation...

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