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.
Something We Cannot Ignore
As you may have read last week, we have almost made it through the first two weeks of Steele Street School. It has been such a gift to have these children in our church building. Their vibrance radiates from the playground to the Reading Room and everywhere else they...
Doing the Math
On Tuesday night as we were wrapping up day 2 of our new ministry, Steele Street School, one of the parents of a participant stopped me to thank me for offering the day camps. After we chatted a bit and I went back to tidying up, I started doing the math. How many...
New Again
This spring we split off some of our leadership from Sunday Dinner and started Snack Church. I was worried a little bit about what might happen to dinner. In the past when we've started a second gathering people have migrated to the new thing and the original...
Annual Conference
Each year hundreds of United Methodists across Oregon & Idaho gather together to do the business of the church, celebrate our shared ministries, and connect with one another. We are able to serve God together in ways we never could alone. But we are struggling....
Unsettled Spirit
Sometimes sitting down to enjoy a cup of coffee and read the newspaper opens up a spiritual and existential crisis. Mine came about this Saturday as I read an article about criminal justice. There are five men who as teenagers committed murders in the mid-’90s in...
Rest
Last weekend I took the whole weekend off and spent 72 hours disconnected. Part of the time we spent on a farm outside Damascus, playing with the barn kittens, feeding the pigs, and capturing the rogue chicken. We played games, read books, played with watercolors,...
Strategic Planning
This week Jayde and I are headed to the coast for a full day of planning. After a year of working together, we will be reexamining the responsibilities that each of us oversees, making sure that we are engaging with the tasks we each find fulfilling and stretching as...
Darkness and Light
Today is one of those days where I am just a little down. Perhaps it's scrolling through Facebook and reading dire news about our climate crisis. Or maybe it's disappointment and frustration over an event that didn't go as well as hoped. It's the gray sky outside and...
At the Table
This week Christian author and conversation starter Rachel Held Evans passed away. Her words and leadership touched many people and my Facebook feed was full of folks sharing meaningful quotes from her work. One quote that stood out to me was: I love this because it...
Eye Witness
I had a fairly dramatic incident unfold a few weeks ago. It involved some heated emotions and a lot of words. I retold folks about the event and what happened. And then this week a video of that moment was shared with me. It turns out that the whole thing was less...