A creative collaboration between Trinity United Methodist Church and Sellwood Faith Community

This month we began singing again. It has been so lovely. At Dessert Church our littlest member never really got to experiencing music in community as he was a baby when the pandemic began. Now as a toddler it has quickly become one of his favorite parts of church....

This week, with the removal of the state mask mandate, we let our building users know they can choose to resume eating food and drinking coffee during meetings and stop wearing masks. In the office Bill and I are mask-less, but during bible study we put them on. At...

Torn paper heart Last week it was announced that a new denomination, the Global Methodist Church or GM Church, would be launching on May 1st. This new denomination is a conservative offshoot of the United Methodist Church. This has been a long time coming. It feels...

Things are hard. The world is at war. The pandemic is still impacting us all. Our country is so divided. A man killed his three daughters at a church. The data out of the school district shows we are failing our black boys. People on twitter are calling me spineless...

My dreams lately have all been about not measuring up, of being lost, or of having to pack and move. This is the season of clergy appointments and church transitions in the United Methodist world. While I have no intentions of moving this year and have made that clear...

This fall our Parish began work with the Southeast Organizing Cohort. Our leadership has been through trainings like this several times now, most recently with the Parish Collective cultural lab program in late 2019. Our hope in joining this time was to have a chance...

Every year I like to write about how things are going with the Parish.  Right now, nearly 2 years in to the pandemic, I would say we are holding steady.  We have hybrid worship in place and are continuing to refine and improve that practice. Attendance is holding...

On Thursday I was working with Bill, our parish volunteer secretary/project manager/pastoral idea coordinator, to break into a locked cabinet. I wanted to get a different screw driver and told him I'd be right back. The next time Bill saw me was nearly 2 hours later...

Each season a collection of our Parish leaders get together to talk about worship. We evaluate how worship has been going and review the themes we have chosen to see how they have landed in our community. We then think about the upcoming seasons of worship and what...

This week we did Star Words for Epiphany. It's a ritual where we each draw a star out of a basket, each star having a word printed on it. The words are meant to guide us in our faith over the year. Sort of a mystery we have to attend to and figure out as we journey in...