Member Mission Newsletter #45 – Epiphany and Lent
January 2007
Epiphany is the church season for mission.
Has your congregation centered on the daily missions of each member, yet?
Let Lent help you.
This month
FOUR STORIES
• "Oral" Bible reflection travels to a recovery group
• A teen leads middle schoolers at church
• Buttons to wear that can open up dialog
• A Christmas story
RESOURCES – FOR LENT AND BEYOND
• "Ten things to do" – a project
• Another Lenten project: Heifer International
• "Taking up your cross leads to abundant life" – a sermon
• For planning the Easter Vigil
• "Merry Christmas" – how member mission might shape an Easter sermon
• "Lay Ministry Update" – new missions of members
• New missions in your newsletter
• "How to Find and Do God's Work: Living Your Faith in Your Daily Mission Fields"
• For use when presenting member mission, a brief summary of WTMATM
FOR MEDITATION
• A leap of faith
FOUR STORIES
“Oral” Bible reflection travels to a recovery group
Darla is part of a biweekly support group for member mission participants that uses the Bible reflection method in Chapter 15 of WTMATM . She found it so rich and easy to lead that she used it with a group of twelve men in intensive treatment for addiction at their daily 45-minute session. All were in the process of discovering what “the higher power” was for them as part of the twelve-step program. She introduced it asking if any would find it offensive to use a Bible reading. When no one took offense, she explained the reading came from a Gospel in the New Testament. She noted, too, that she was part of a group using this method to look at how they were living from Monday to Saturday. As they began, she said, “You can think about whoever your higher power is.”
She used the reading her support group had used that week, Luke 21:25-26, about the end times. That group had no trouble with the imagery as they connected it with their own struggles with change.
In her treatment group, the members drew on what was going on their personal lives in recovery. All found one way or another to connect with the reading. Members, whom she had expected would not participate, did choose to participate. For all to participate was notable for a recovery group. One recognized that, with the positive changes in his life, his family and friends may be challenged, even frightened, to see the changes occurring in him. The changes would be like the shaking of the earth and the roaring of the waves in the reading.
Pleased to find the reading and reflection easy to lead, Darla hopes to use it monthly. For those not having WTMATM at hand, the reflection proceeds with the passage read three times as follows:
Reading 1 – what word or phrase catches your attention? – share without elaboration or comment;
Reading 2 – how does this passage connect with my life? – from personal to public concerns and shared without elaboration or comment
Reading 3 – from what I have heard and shared, what do I believe God is asking me to do, to be, or to change in the week(s) ahead? – again, concise but long enough to be clear.
One or two minutes of silence for reflection as directed follows each reading; then the sharing begins.
A teen leads middle schoolers at church
Bea Hersh-Tudor, a high school senior, leads a group of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders at Trinity Church, Plattsburgh, NY. The group, varying for five to nine in number, meets after church on Sunday in the living room of the former rectory. They center on service projects such as sending a goat to a poor family through Episcopal Relief and Development and assembling Christmas gift boxes of small items for children that a nearby church sends all over the world. In all this, Bea enjoys teaming up with her adult co-leader, Sarah Sorenson.
How do you see God at work in your mission at church?
“I see the kids happy and coming up with great ideas for things to do. They come up with great questions. And my faith has gotten a lot stronger. I’m a lot quicker to ask God for help and I thank God all the time.”
How do you see God helping you in your mission at church?
“Actually, the kids do most of the work. God helps me through the kids. They ask a lot of questions that get me thinking and learning and I’m able to come back to them with what I have learned. And God gives me confidence. As we started, I was not sure it would work. Then, in five minutes, I saw it would work. Also, I have asked them how they wanted to pray together and they have come up with lots of ideas about what they want to say in prayers we have yet to put together.”
Buttons to wear that can open up dialog
Verna Kosiba of Trinity Church, Milford, MA uses any of seven buttons to wear when she wants to open dialog with others open issues in the wider world. Each button has a single word followed by a question mark Go to dontassume.org to get them from the Boston Center for Community & Justice, Inc. at $5.00 per set. You’ll find this interesting description of their purpose. “Getting our ‘buttons pressed’ is often uncomfortable, but can lead to learning too. ‘Pressing Buttons’ is a campaign that intends to get people questioning and reflecting about ways we judge one another, and the consequences of those judgments. The seven buttons pose simple questions about unearned privilege and unfair discrimination. Whether you wear the buttons or see the buttons on others, we hope the buttons make you think.”
Here are samples of how Verna uses the buttons:
“Equal?” – are we all really equal?
“Native?” – who really is a native American to talk about native Amercans
“G.E.D.?” – suggests a high school dropout to discuss making assumptions about people’s educational level
“Privileged?” – people may look privileged – leading the good life – you don’t really know what’s going on in their life behind what you see
Contact: Verna Kosiba, POB 633, Upton, MA 01568; 508-529-3081; vernakosiba@msn.com
A Christmas story
As he welcomed visitors at the midnight liturgy, the pastor encouraged visitors to return promising they would find the church to be a “warm and friendly place to be.” After the closing hymn, a gay member went quickly to a visitor and chatted with him at length. When a family member asked him about it, he said, “I saw this gay man all by himself and went over to assure him that our church was a safe place to be.”
RESOURCES – FOR LENT AND BEYOND
“Ten things to do” for global warming offers some unique Lenten disciplines. Show the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”; discuss it; and go to http://www.climatecrisis.net/pdf/10things.pdf to print out and offer the list for participants to choose their discipline. Two of the ten are:
Change a light – Replacing one regular light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb will save 150 pounds of carbon dioxide a year
Recycle more – You can save 2,400 pounds of carbon dioxide per year by recycling just half of your household waste
To get a DVD of the movie from $13.50 up plus shipping, go to www.climatecrisis.net and click on “Buy the DVD.”
Another Lenten project for any church group or church as a whole: Heifer International supplies an animal or tree seedlings for families around the world that need help to become self-reliant. Training provided by Heifer ensures that plants and animals stay healthy and productive. Contact via phone at 800-422-0755 or online at www.catalog.heifer.org
“Taking up your cross leads to abundant life”; a lay person’s sermon on living your daily missions and finding life as a resource for Lenten preaching and teaching; Elizabeth S. Hall; Mark 8:27-38; at St. James’ Church, Keewatin, Ontario, Canada; Diocese of Keewatin; September 17, 2006.
For planning the Easter Vigil: Consider adding the prophets’ call to justice to the readings with a passage from Amos or Micah; end the readings with the Easter Story followed by the sermon and Holy Baptism – as liturgist Louis Weil recommends. Thus, the readings announce that the candidates are being baptized into the resurrection faith and its call to join the mission of Jesus Christ. If you are unable to do the full vigil, a shorter 75-minute form for Easter Day – seven were baptized – is available at membermission@aol.com
“Merry Christmas”; how member mission can shape a Christmas sermon as a resource for preparing an Easter sermon; the Rev. A. Wayne Schwab; Christmas Day, Year A, Luke 2:1-20; at Trinity Church, Plattsburgh, NY; Midnight Christmas Eve, December 24, 2006; go to Sermons > “Merry Christmas” on the web site.
“Lay Ministry Update” by Ramona Lewis is a piece of every newsletter from St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Brown Deer, WI. It’s one of the ways Ramona keeps member mission before the people of St. Martin’s who hosted a regional orientation to it in November 2003. Contact Ramona at 7032 W. Sandpiper Court, Milwaukee, WI 53223; 414-355-2090; lewisaramona@msn.com
New missions in your newsletter: When members take on new jobs, new community service roles, participation in wider world issues, school projects or activities, and the like, list them in church newsletters so that members can pray for them and ask about them by way of support.
“How to Find and Do God’s Work: Living Your Faith in Your Daily Mission Fields” – a teleclass that explores how your Monday-to-Saturday life is precisely the place where mission can and does happen. These sessions introduce potential leaders to the member mission process for discerning your daily missions. A later series will offer a full training experience. Class size is limited to eight. Sign up for two Tuesdays, February 6 and 13, 2007, from 7:00 – 8:15 p.m. (Eastern time) at http://eministrynetwork.org/mdlcministry.htm#howtofindanddo at a cost of $22.00.
FOR MEDITATION – A Leap of Faith
In “An Invitation to Insecurity,” Marilyn Chandler McIntyre argues that the quest for security can be a dangerous pursuit. “Our dream of safety has to disappear,” W. H. Auden wrote in a poem at the outset of World War II. McIntyre comments on Auden that people of faith need to be reminded that the “security God offers is not a promise about what won’t happen – for instance, we won’t be hit by plagues, bombs, loss of loved ones, or sudden poverty – but about what will happen: ‘If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there’ (Ps. 139:8 KJV).” She says that “real security is not a zero-sum game. It can’t be achieved at others’ expense.” She thinks American energies should be spent on trying to make the rest of the world feel secure – “helping others feel safe from our own weapons of mass destruction,” for instance – rather than just on homeland security. [From The Christian Century, October 17, 2006, p. 7.]
* * *
God is most interested in how we live from Monday to Saturday.
Sunday – all of church life – helps us to do it better.
* * *
All content on this website is copyright protected.
© Member Mission
www.membermission.org
10 Jubert Lane
Plattsburgh, NY 12901
PH/FAX 518-561-1184