Dear Beloved Community,
Around the staff meeting table yesterday, we marveled at how many of you came, excited, to our kickoff gathering at 9:00am on Sunday as part of our Startup Sunday activities. We discussed how most Sunday School classes – even the new one that just started! – are already nearing the max capacity of their rooms, how full the youth room was for Sunday School, the new visitors that show up every Sunday. We noted your energy for the capital campaign, and your delight in the new project and campaign video, even though it ended early! (Technology is so great until it isn’t, right?! It’s fixed now and available to watch on YouTube and in today’s newsletter!)
As we talked about you with such love, we did so in the Commons, that beautiful space at the heart of our church house intended to foster friendship and community. We did so with the begun-yet-unfinished art project from Sunday right at the center of our table, hands clasping just waiting to bear your mark, and the hopeful images of our impending building project over our shoulders.
Friends, in every corner of our life together – Commons and beyond! – I see unbridled hope and abiding peace. I see joy, flourishing and potent. And love, love above all else.
My sermon on Sunday was titled, “What is Church For?,” and in the weeks since I chose that title, I’ve had it just under the surface of my mind. It has stimulated thoughts for me about the global Church and our particular American expression of it (and particular, too, in election years like this!). But mostly, I have joined the apostle Paul in thanking my God upon every remembrance of you, dear church. Because in all the Sunday excitement, all the new faces and big imaginations, all the yearning and hoping for what will be, I hear what our church is for.
We are for being “a community in the heart of the city called by Jesus to practice bold love of God and neighbor and boundless compassion for all people.” That’s the God-shaped vision set before us, our north star that summons us ever closer to the heart of God, the heart of our city, the heart of each other, the heart of life together.
“What life have we if we have not life together?,” Bonhoeffer asks. Call me crazy, but life – and church! – is for living, together! Grateful, always, to live it with you.
Together in God’s work of Love,
Pastor Emily