Tag: community
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Rooted in Love
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom you belong. Amen. A friend of mine up in the Twin Cities once told me about his attempt to join a local pickleball league. (Anybody here ever play Pickleball?). He had seen the game, thought it…
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To Be Trinity
I recently read a story about a family that left their church one Sunday, and as they got into the car, the critiques started rolling in like they were filling out a review on Yelp: The list of pros and cons just kept coming. Finally, their eight-year-old piped up from the back seat and said, “Well, what…
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Erase the Lines
Have you ever had one of those days when you didn’t feel like you belong? Maybe you’re somewhere new…somewhere different…and you’re not confident you’re going to fit in? When I was a college student, there was a woman I dated during my junior year. (This was, of course, before I’d been swept off my feet by…
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The Middle Place
Here at church, almost every afternoon, we see student drivers practicing their driving skills under the watchful eye of their instructors in the church parking lot. They will practice winding through the rows, parallel parking and angle parking. It makes sense to me; It’s a big lot with plenty of room. I did the same thing when we…
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The Day the Sky Was Torn Open
Humans want to be included. In fact, we have a fundamental need to be accepted, welcomed, even wanted. We long to be invited. We hope to be included. We want to belong. And so we gather. We get together in groups, or neighborhoods, or clubs, based on things we share in common. We gather in stadiums (Skol!), in arenas, in homes,…
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The Things That Unite
28 of us were driving up the North Carolina coast in two large vans. I was a youth minister and Habitat for Humanity was moving our youth group from one work Habitat site to another. Our two vans stopped at a drawbridge that had been raised to let a boat through…we were in a line of…
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Drawn into Community
Pastor Amy Starr Redwine, a pastor in Richmond, Virginia, tells a story about a class she took while a student at the seminary. The class was called: Confession and Forgiveness from a Pastoral Perspective. Pastor Redwine wrote that the class was incredibly popular, and the 45 slots filled up as soon as registration opened. On the first…
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Sabbatical Reading: “A Church Beyond Belief”
In my stack of summer sabbatical book reading, the next book on my list was “A Church Beyond Belief” by William Sachs and Michael Bos. Flipping the pages of the book, now that I’ve read it, I noticed that I have far fewer highlighted sections than I have in previous books. I think in this…
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What’s Right
So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. Galatians 6:9 We live in a transactional world. We do things because we receive things. We go to work, so that we earn a living We loan someone money, expecting repayment…
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Beyond Church Walls
This morning I finished the next in my series of sabbatical books to read. Beyond Church Walls: Cultivating a Culture of Care by Rick Rouse. Trinity has worked hard in the last couple of years to think about how we connect and serve within our community. We were working to connect individuals to serve at…