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Pie! How I love pie! And that love is both familial and religious; pie suppers are a deep and savory part of United Methodism as I have lived it. This fall at Trinity will be a tasty time, for sure. Your Membership Team will be managing signups for the Bible Study, and your Finance Team will be offering insightful, brief presentations during worship starting in mid October. The finance campaign will conclude on All Saints Day, a day we celebrate the whole pie of believers, not just the ones currently in the room or on the earth. And it is the day when we anticipate the gathering and feast to come, the reunion to end all, and I wager there will be pie, right?

…you would have to decide if your current spiritual practice was more like a fermented drink, bubbly and growing, or more like a still drink, kinda flat. Summer is the perfect time to mix in the opposite of what you already are doing, spicing thing up if you are coasting, or watering things down a bit if you are too hoppy. Again, these are summertime things, seasonal things; you don’t have to change something for the rest of eternity! But self-chosen change is the only kind of change that really works at the core level, and the only kind that helps us modify and improve in the long run.

For good or for ill, we are not a denomination that tells you, in clear bullet points, what you must believe to be a follower of Jesus. But a consequence of that is that, unless we are quite clear about what we really think and believe, we may find other Christians incomprehensible, reprehensible, or worse. And that is just the other Christians! In the larger world it is even more important to own our self understandings about the Divine and our relationships that flow from that primary pairing, because they color and inform literally everything we do. We may not be able to change the minds or hearts of others, but we really need to know our own minds and hearts.

Membership continues to reach out with events and tech updates.

Every year I fill out the self-evaluations from our Annual Conference, and every year they ask an interesting question about what words my friends and I would use to describe myself, but also what words an enemy would use to describe me. That really gets you thinking, and wondering about the way the world sees you.