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Looking Forward Together

"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." We love to quote that verse — but notice what kind of light it actually promises. Not a floodlight. Not high beams. A lamp, in the ancient world, was a small clay dish of oil that lit the ground about two steps ahead of you. That's it. That's the promise. Nobody who gathered in 1966 could see 2026 from where they stood — no sixty-year floodlight, no master plan unrolled on the table. They just took the next faithful step, and then the next, and God kept lighting two steps ahead, and here we are. After last week's big celebration, this Sunday the anniversary gets personal — because sixty years of church is made of nothing but ordinary people taking one next step: the person who finally walked in the door, the one who joined the group, the one who said yes to serving, the one who came back after years away. Our own discipleship plan says choosing to become more like Jesus is "the first step of a disciple" — which means the life of faith isn't a destination you arrive at; it's a walk with a lamp. So the question this week isn't "what's the twenty-year plan for your soul?" It's smaller, kinder, and more demanding: what's the next step the lamp is lighting for you? Take that one. The path is built two steps at a time.

Leaning Forward: Loving Forward, Looking Back

Leaning Forward

Back to School - When Will We Ever Use This?

Welcoming New Classmates

Back to School- Class is in Session

70 Years of Women in Ministry

This sermon grows out of a challenge that has never fully let go: a conversation with a seasoned border activist — someone who had been accompanying immigrants and families through crisis for generations — who said plainly that as a faith leader, you do not have the right to give up hope. Not a comfort. A call. A weight. And an invitation to understand hope as something other than optimism or wishful thinking. Drawing on Walter Brueggemann's concept of prophetic imagination — the vocation of holding open a future the empire insists is closed, of conjuring and proposing alternatives to the single story power wants to tell — this sermon makes the case that hope is not a feeling you wait to have. It is a discipline you practice. It is what you do when the feeling isn't there. It is lament that refuses to become despair. It is action that refuses to wait for certainty. It is showing up anyway. The sermon names the cost of hope honestly — the exhaustion of holding it, the temptation to let it go, the grief that comes with caring about outcomes you cannot control. And it holds that alongside the long lineage of hope-practitioners in our tradition: the prophets who spoke to empty air, the women who came to the tomb on Sunday not knowing what they'd find, the activists and faith leaders who kept marching when there was no visible reason to. Hope, we learn, is the posture of people who believe the story isn't over. It doesn't require certainty. It requires practice. And like any practice — prayer, Sabbath, generosity — it is something we can get better at, together.

Our youth went to Boerne, Texas, to help a community recover from a flood — and while they were there, it flooded. Plans changed. Then they changed again. (And again.) But somewhere between the mops, the flood buckets, and a gym turned into a shelter, something remarkable happened: love just kept showing up. In this week's message, Pastor Jonathan shares what he learned from watching our students serve, pivot, and even preach — four lessons about love in real life: love is flexible, love can hold what can't be fixed, love stays for the long haul, and love does it together. Along the way: a sweet neighbor who learned our kids' names, a word from Paul about grace being sufficient, and the reminder we all need — wherever you are, grace is there too.

Most people — including most Methodists — have no idea how subversive this tradition actually is. We tend to imagine ourselves as the sensible middle: not too loud, not too political, not too anything. And then you actually read the history. This sermon tells three stories that recover the radical roots of the movement we're part of. Story One: John Wesley in the fields. Wesley didn't start by building institutions — he went outside them. Banned from pulpits, he took to open fields and coal mines and street corners to preach to the people the church had left behind. His class meetings — small groups of working-class people meeting weekly for mutual accountability, financial support, and shared prayer — were grassroots communities of transformation decades before anyone called it community organizing. The method was radical because the love was serious. Story Two: Susanna Wesley in the kitchen. Long before her sons John and Charles changed the world, their mother was doing theology at the kitchen table. When her husband was away, Susanna began hosting theological discussions in her home — drawing dozens, eventually hundreds — in an era when women simply did not do such things. When challenged, she kept going. She didn't wait for permission to teach. She is, in many ways, the first Methodist preacher — and nobody gave her a license to do it. Story Three: The Seneca Falls Convention. In 1848, the first Women's Rights Convention in American history — the gathering that launched the suffrage movement — was held at the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls, New York. Not a coincidence. The Wesleyan Methodist Connection had broken from the main Methodist body specifically over slavery and the full inclusion of women. The people who hosted that convention had been practicing radicalism for years. The sermon lands on a contemporary question: if this is who we come from, what does it mean to be their heirs? The tradition doesn't ask us to admire the radicals from a safe distance. It asks us to pick up where they left off.

America turns 250 this week. That's young — genuinely young, in the sweep of history — which means we are still, in a very real sense, a work in progress. This sermon holds the full complexity of that without collapsing it in either direction: not the uncritical celebration that papers over real harm, and not the cynical dismissal that forgets the genuine beauty of the democratic experiment. Both are true. Both have always been true. The question is what we do with that. This is, it turns out, a deeply Wesleyan question. Methodism gave us the doctrine of sanctification — the belief that persons and communities are not static, that grace is always at work moving us toward wholeness, that being unfinished is not a verdict but a trajectory. What we believe about individuals, we can believe about nations: transformation is possible, and the call to pursue it is sacred. The sermon explores what it means to be good citizens of both earth and heaven — holding Jeremiah's call to seek the shalom of the city alongside the prophetic tradition's refusal to let the city off the hook. The best patriots, it turns out, are the ones who hold the country accountable to its own highest ideals. That's not unAmerican. That's what love looks like.

Many of us carry some sort of religious trauma, that even when we think we’ve handled it enough to come back to church, catches us off guard. A word or even a smell can send us back to a time when we weren’t sure about our faith or belonging due to deep church hurt. So, what do you do? Do you leave again, unable to exist alongside the triggers, or do we find a way to live with them, but not letting them control our lives?  Talking about my experience in graduate school when I left the church after being done with its BS, and finding my way back only to still be talking with my therapist nearly 11 years later and realizing that I still have a lot of unpacking of imbedded theologies that routinely try to ruin my life, even as a Pastor who studied these things and know they’re toxic theology.  Our trauma is ours, but we are not our traumas. We may leave the church because of the harms it has done to us, but God does not leave us when we walk out those doors and say we are never coming back. God stays with us, all throughout our lives, whether we end up back in a pew or not.  Coming back to church is a recognition that we are beloved children of God and that we deserve a place that is what we need for our souls and hearts. Returning to church is defiance to those that say we don’t belong and ran us out the door. And in our stories, we can find truths and understandings that shaped us. These truths are vital to the work of the church in becoming more like the kindom of God, a place of healing and hope for our own souls and our communities.

Many of us carry some sort of religious trauma, that even when we think we’ve handled it enough to come back to church, catches us off guard. A word or even a smell can send us back to a time when we weren’t sure about our faith or belonging due to deep church hurt. So, what do you do? Do you leave again, unable to exist alongside the triggers, or do we find a way to live with them, but not letting them control our lives?  Talking about my experience in graduate school when I left the church after being done with its BS, and finding my way back only to still be talking with my therapist nearly 11 years later and realizing that I still have a lot of unpacking of imbedded theologies that routinely try to ruin my life, even as a Pastor who studied these things and know they’re toxic theology.  Our trauma is ours, but we are not our traumas. We may leave the church because of the harms it has done to us, but God does not leave us when we walk out those doors and say we are never coming back. God stays with us, all throughout our lives, whether we end up back in a pew or not.  Coming back to church is a recognition that we are beloved children of God and that we deserve a place that is what we need for our souls and hearts. Returning to church is defiance to those that say we don’t belong and ran us out the door. And in our stories, we can find truths and understandings that shaped us. These truths are vital to the work of the church in becoming more like the kindom of God, a place of healing and hope for our own souls and our communities.

Most of us learned a version of American history with a lot of gaps in it. This sermon is a personal reckoning with one of the most important: Juneteenth — what it actually was, what it means, and why its story is still unfolding. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston with news that had been true for two and a half years: you are free. You've been free. Those in power had simply refused to say so. The sermon moves through what Juneteenth teaches us about truth and its relationship to liberation — not just as a historical fact, but as a theological claim. The gospel, as theologian James Cone spent his life arguing, is not only about the saving of souls but about the liberation of the oppressed in all its forms. The cross stands not in comfortable sanctuaries of the powerful, but in solidarity with those who suffer. Jesus of Nazareth, standing in his own hometown synagogue, quoted Isaiah — good news to the poor, freedom for the captive — and said: this is what I'm here to do. The sermon wrestles honestly with where the church has failed — including our own Methodist tradition's complicated history — and what it looks like to do the ongoing work. Drawing on the framework of White Fragility and the broader racial justice literature, this isn't a lecture from the outside. It's a testimony from the inside: here is what I didn't know, here is what I've had to unlearn, here is what I'm still learning. The invitation isn't guilt — it's honesty. And honesty, the gospel teaches us, is where freedom begins.