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

My family is in a huge time of transition. In just a few weeks our daughter will graduate from high school. It's a ritual and rite of passage signaling that this stage of our life as a family is over. She just turned 18 so is now legally an adult. We celebrated that...

This week has been a big one in the United Methodist World. Here in Oregon we voted to allow 3 churches to leave the United Methodist fold. The reason for the leaving is around theology. There are people and churches who hold that Christian teaching means that queer...

This past week I got to attend the Habitat for Humanity HopeBuilders lunch with a crew of folks from the closed Capitol Hill United Methodist Church. CHUMC chose to close in 2016. We were able to use our endowment and work with the conference trustees to sell the...

Starting this May we will be reading the entire bible over the course of a year! We are starting with the story of Pentecost from Acts and will continue on through the story of the early church and the letters to the faithful written by the apostles and their...

Before the pandemic we had bible study every Tuesday morning. It was a pretty good crowd of folks for the size of our church. And then once we resumed in person there were just 3 of us, which ended up being just 2 of us when the third came out of retirement! So for...

This season at the parish we are working together to discern our what.  What is it that God is calling us to in this moment in our community? Are we to be about caring for children? Serving the houseless? Welcoming our community? Or something else entirely? Our...

This week we celebrate the heart of the story of Christianity. We see Jesus fight against injustice, teach his disciples, rest and pray, live out his faith, serve others, do miracles, embrace suffering and death, and in the end remind us the God is bigger than...

This week is Spring Break in Oregon and it is an important moment of rest. It's been hard getting ready for it as the week after is holy week and there is so much to be done as a pastor in preparation. But rest is so important. In fact it's biblical! Yet our society...

This past week we had an amazing retreat where we played together, grieved together, and embraced hope together! We are engaging in a process of: 1. Discovering our Why 2. Discerning our What 3. Developing our How Our why we already know. Our parish statement is we...

A few weeks ago I had to get my mom to the airport the morning after a record setting snow fall. Along the way we were helped out by strangers and were able to offer help to others. There was something about the change of the rhythm of normal life that allowed for a...