This is the final week of our official stewardship campaign, collecting pledges for 2023. We have been so blessed by the generosity of this church and we pray a prayer of gratitude in this service.

This week, the theme in these movements of God’s people comes to the final movement of MISSION. We have experienced the grief and struggle of EXILE times; the joy and expectations and sometimes disappointments of RETURN, and now we are sent back out into the world as God’s hands and feet for MISSION. God does not wait until we have it all together or until we feel ready. Our God is a God on the move; and we are, as our Presbyterian saying goes “the Church Reformed and always Reforming“! God gives us a mission and a purpose and good work to do right now; right where we are, just as we are. This may be scary, but it is also a crucial part of our future with hope. This is why the Church exists! Thanks be to God!

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As we continue to think about the idea of a future with hope in these uncertain times, we remember the central story of our Bible when God’s people also longed for a future with hope; when everything they had built their identity around seemed to be shaken or even gone in the experience of exile. And yet this week, we consider what it is like to return home. CAN you really go home again? When you get back what you have been missing (like in person worship after pandemic for instance), can everything just go “back to normal”? Can we? Will we ever be the same? What does God want from us (and FOR us) now? These are the kinds of questions we are blessed to consider as a community this week. We hope you will join us and listen for how God might speak to you and your life in these important conversations.

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Last week was the introduction to our special Stewardship series “A Future With Hope” where we thought together about the cycles and rhythms and movements of life; the ups and downs and how we react to those. Our framework for this thinking is the scriptural theme of exile; a difficult but central piece of the identity of ancient Israel and their descendants as the people of God. This week, we think more about times when perhaps we experienced exile; maybe not physically from our homeland, but all of us went through being pulled apart by years of pandemic and the effects of that still reverberate in communities like ours. We also have all experienced being pushed apart by societal divisions and those who would profit from those divisions. Maybe personally we have each experienced times of feeling not at home in our bodies, our relationships or our life circumstances. Exile may actually hit closer to home than we think. And so how do we get through it? And more so, what is God trying to do within it? What role does the church play, and why are communities of faith a crucial part of God’s plan for a future with hope? Let’s explore this together!

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Every Fall, we enter together into a season of stewardship. We consider where God has brought us, and we look ahead to the future. These last few years have been some of the strangest, scariest and most transformational in church history! The Covid-19 pandemic has brought countless changes to our ways of being together. It has brought difficult questions about what no longer serves us well as a community and where we might be invited to follow Jesus using what we have learned; individually and as a church. Our dream is of a FUTURE WITH HOPE! But what does that look like? How do we live in that?

This particular stewardship campaign (from 10/9-10/30) will draw from imagery of movements in human life that God has built into our story; movements that have always been there as God’s natural rhythms of creation, but which seem all the more evident now that we have been through so much upheaval and change. Movements of EXILE –> RETURN –> MISSION.

We will consider Biblical stories of exile from one’s home into unknown territory–how Israel’s exile story shaped them, but also speaks to a restless homesickness that one can feel in our culture as we try to recenter ourselves in these times. Exile stories always end with a return home as people who are never quite the same and then being sent out again from our comfort zones to participate in God’s mission in the world.

This week we dive in and confront how movement and change can be so difficult for us; so disorienting and scary. And yet, we are given promises about a future with hope even in those times from a God who never changes. Join us for this journey!

Learn more about this campaign here

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This week we continue on in the Gospel of Luke, learning from Jesus’ stories and teachings about the best ways to follow in His path in our real and messy lives. This week, we come to a more famous sound byte of Jesus’: that we only need faith as small as a mustard seed and we can move mountains. We can do hard things! But He also tells this strange short story about slaves not needing thanks but just doing their duty. Is that what we are? Slaves in this life of faith? What does Jesus mean by this? But this provocative part of the Gospel does give us some helpful questions about life:

How can we give what we have to the world without resentment and depletion? How can we serve without expecting recognition, just because it is the right thing to do? How do we know when to give and when to receive service from someone else?

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