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

This blog was originally posted on Hacking Christianity on July 23, 2015. I am sharing it again now in light of the news that Roe v Wade is probably going to be overturned by the Supreme Court. You can read about that news here. Early on in the scriptures we see the...

This season we are focusing on practices of healing. We are exploring and creating ways to tend our souls after 2 years of pandemic, wrestling with the fall out of climate change, navigating our deeply divided political life, grieving the rise of gun violence in our...

This week one of the things I get to work on is dissolving the Sellwood Faith Community Corporation. This is simply a financial hoop we have to jump through The Parish is not going anywhere, and both Trinity and SFC are strong components of this new expression. Back...

This week we get to sing some of my favorite hymns. I can remember singing these songs surrounded by people at the church where I grew up. I can picture the Garners sitting in front of us, Randy's lovely voice ringing out. I remember Easter in Spain, the same melodies...

Last week as I looked out at the gathering on Sunday morning I felt sad. There were 15 of us in the Sanctuary and it just felt like not enough. A visitor had made some cutting remarks about there being "no one" at worship. And suddenly our gathering seemed inadequate....

For Lent this year I have been wearing the same bracelet every day. It's basically like a purple shoelace with a silver tree charm in the middle. Someone gave it to me a while back and I decided to save it for the season of Lent. It's a great reminder for me, a marker...

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...