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During our next worship series we will look for Grace, all summer long!  We will embark on a journey that takes us from Yoga to Crossfit, Baseball to Knitting, Picnics to Movies.  There will be space for play and time for prayer.  We hope to rest in the assurance of God’s dynamic presence while we seek to identify the way in which God’s Grace comes to us.  By focusing on Grace all Summer Long we intend to practice “noticing and naming” the ways Grace…

“There is no disputing the common assertion that experience plays a prominent role in Wesley’s overall theology.  However, it is important to recognize that a major portion of his actual appeals to experience were not directly concerned with either formulating or testing doctrinal claims.  They reflected instead his emphasis on the contribution of experience to providing the assurance that empowers us for Christ-like living.  This role is captured in his frequent claim that we human beings are incapable of loving…

“Christ comes alive in the communion between people. When we are alone, even joy is, in a way, sorrow’s flower:   lovely, necessary, sustaining, but blooming in loneliness,  rooted in grief.  I’m not sure you can have communion with other people without these moments in which sorrow has opened in you, and for you; and I am pretty certain that without shared social devotion one’s solitary experiences of God wither into a form of withholding, spiritual stinginess, the light of Christ growing ever fainter in…

“Lord, I can approach you only by means of my consciousness, but consciousness can only approach you as an object, which you are not.  I have no hope of experiencing you as I experience the world – directly, immediately – yet I want nothing more.”  (from My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman pp 20-21) How do you long to “experience” God?

This week we conclude our worship series called Quadrilateral with attention on Experience.  The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church, 2012, states, “John Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason” (Our Theological Task Paragraph105 Theological Guidelines: Sources and Criteria) . From The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church, 2012 (Our Theological Task Paragraph105):   Experience  In our theological task, we follow Wesley’s practice of examining experience, both…

Join us as we walk together in the Pride Parade.  Gather at around 10 in the Crocker Art Museum parking lot. ($10 parking) Parade begins at 11.

In the book “Point of No Return” (by John P. Marquand) there is a man named Charley Gray.  Charley comes to a moment in his career when he is competing to be the v.p. of the private bank for which he works.  While he is waiting on the choice to be made to takes a trip home to the small town of his childhood for a time of wondering about his life.   If he becomes the v.p. he will…

“There are two different ways of describing how you came to know something.  One way is to say you found it out.  The other way is to say it occurred to you.  Reason is involved in both.  To say you found out that So-and-So was the best friend you had suggests that you reasoned your way to such a conclusion.  To say it occurred to you suggests that althought the conclusion was not reached by reason, it was not incompatible…

   The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church, 2012, states, “John Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason” (Our Theological Task Paragraph105 Theological Guidelines: Sources and Criteria) . We continue our worship series this Sunday called Quadrilateral with our attention on Reason.  Our worship will be rooted in  Romans 12.1-3  and the United Methodist Book of Discipline. On “Reason” from…

“We are now challenged by traditions from around the world that accent dimensions of Christian understanding that grow out of the sufferings and victories of the downtrodden.”  Too often tradition is seen as the history of European and American Christians, rather than the diverse flowering of many different expressions of Christianity.  The larger understanding of tradition suggests that particular traditions represent African, Latin American, and Asian traditions must be included as well.  (from United Methodist Doctrine by Scott J. Jones…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfX7ut8gw] …without our Traditions our lives would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof!

“Christian tradition can …be a resource for the revitalization of the church in our time, but we have to be very caution, for the sake of honesty, about the extent to which we can idealize the past and our relationship to it.  We face the temptation of constructing fictive, idealized cultures to satisfy our longing for deeper roots.  Methodist people can take  (John) Wesley as one bridge to the whole Christian past, but we cannot find in (John) Wesley a…