St. Paul's 2021

  Workshop Invite, Welcome, Connect Last week I attended a digital conference of several hundred folks around the country. It was hosted by a group organized around 3 verbs that healthy churches demonstrate: Invite Welcome Connect We might see these verbs as the actions that Jesus himself did as he gathered disciples. When he met someone who was open to God’s work, he said, “Come and see.” The gospel reflect that they dropped what they were doing and followed him. As Jesus traveled, ate, and slept with his followers, he welcomed them into his movement. He listened to them and to their needs, and he met those needs, usually in surprising ways, always in deep and life-giving ways. Jesus met them and connected with them in the actual lives they lived. The digital conference gathered 100’s of examples of how churches have invited, welcomed, and connected with people over the last difficult years of pandemic. Just a smattering include: Zoom social hours, prayer time, worsh...

  One of my basic assumptions throughout almost all of my ordained ministry has been that God has some mixture of calling for each community of faith just as is true for individuals. And then together with that and assumption that God gives us all of the tools that we need to be able to do that calling. Along the way in my ministry I have come to the commitment that whatever I should do and whatever it is that the community should do we should do it with the best of our ability, making the best use of what God has given us to work with. In my monthly cycle of devotional readings, I encounter this quote from George MacDonald: “What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.” Recently I se...