A creative collaboration between Trinity United Methodist Church and Sellwood Faith Community
Our community exists to embody the love of God in the world because we believe everyone needs a safe space to be loved for who they are already.
Conflicts
As many of us head to see family over the next week and month it can be a time of revisiting conflicts and old wounds. Many people talk about churches as family. And while most folks use that language to express how people in churches care for each other, spend years...
Dynamic
At our annual gathering of church leadership last week one of our members who has been around this specific church a long time said that this was one of the most wonderful, dynamic times in the life of the faith community. As we talked about the future of our divided...
Fishes and Loaves
Here at the SE Portland Parish we understand that our worshipping communities are in ministry with our neighborhoods. One of our most beautiful assets in Portland is the engagement level of citizens in their neighborhood. With Eilidh and Jeff attending the...
Work of the People
Liturgy is the stuff of our gatherings as a church. It's the pattern of how we respond to the divine. In most traditional churches liturgy refers to the prayers and words of worship, the order and form of the gathering. The word comes from two greek words which mean...
I Don’t Want To
We are in a season of systems shift here at the Parish. We’re hammering out the business plan for Steele Street School. We have a team in place to engage in pieces of the work, but at the and of the day it falls to me to complete and finalize the plan and I don’t...
Spiritual Engagement
For a long time we've been thinking about how to engage the hundreds of people who walk by the Sellwood Faith Community House each week. We've tried a few short term, interactive projects which were successful, but our front yard now has a new permanent resident, the...
Making it Work
The church has long been built on a system of tithing. People in the congregations give to the institution. These gifts pay for the lights and heat, for the pastor's salary, for the curriculum for Sunday School, for programs with our neighbors, and more. This model...
The Holiness of Listening
We are a community to share what has made us who we are, finding God and community in the pain and the joy that comes in the journey of life.
Evaluating and Adjusting
One of the things we try to do on a regular basis at the Parish is to evaluate and adjust. Jayde and I do this ourselves in our weekly staff meetings. We also bring this ethos to the various leadership teams of the parish. We ask how's it going? What's working? What...
Welcome Truth
This past week one of our members, Ace Waters, preached about what it means to be an ally. She told of her own mistakes, made when she didn’t believe someone else’s truth, and shared her own journey of discovering her truth as a trans person. As I was getting ready...