Feeds:
Posts
Comments

“Faith Deserts” Follow-Up

August 29, 2011 by Nathan Melcher

The following is Nate’s article from this month’s issue of The Shorelines newsletter:

During my sermon “Faith Deserts” on July 31, we explored how Jesus had just learned of the murder of his cousin, John the Baptist, and had stolen away to seclusion only to have the crowds follow him (Mt. 14:13-21). Rather than send them away, Jesus embraced them, taught them, and ultimately fed them in what we often call “The Feeding of the 5,000.”

I put it to the congregation that sometimes we find ourselves in “faith deserts,” these places where we lose faith in how God and people around us can be a part of going through the big stuff, the little stuff, and all the stuff in-between. Trying to tackle everything on our own, all the time, isn’t getting us anywhere. It’s giving in to the fear of letting others in. Instead, my hope is that, as Rally Sunday approaches, we’re giving serious thought to how we can use the fall as a season of fresh starts and rejuvenation. My hope is we can find the small groups and emotional support networks we need, be they here at Exelsior UMC and/or elsewhere, and that God will be a welcomed, present part of this new way of exploring life. I asked people to think about this for six weeks.

So have you been doing this? Have you been taking this six-week period between July 31 and Rally Sunday – September 11 – to see if you’re in a faith desert or a faith oasis? If so, what’s your answer and what are you going to do about it? If not, isn’t it time you asked yourself about it? Isn’t it time you asked yourself if you’re letting God and the people around you in so you’re not trying to do it all by yourself? I think so.

I’d love to hear what you have to say on the matter. Continue the conversation on our church blog, faithjourneylifejourney.com.

Regards,

Nate Melcher

Posted in Community, Theology | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

September is the time to find community

August 23, 2011 by Nathan Melcher

The following is Kent’s article in this month’s issue of The Shorelines.

I am writing this on one of my favorite days of the year. Tonight we will hold the confirmation final retreat for this year’s 10th Graders. It is 18 hours of intense listening to each other that we hope will make for lifelong friendships and strong Christian faith, too. What I particularly like is the honest sharing of lives and the total appreciation of the gifts that each youth brings to life. This is the acceptance and encouragement we see Jesus bring to his relationships in the Bible. And this is the mission we have taken on as a congregation; connecting faith journeys to life’s journey. We become community together.

Our mission trip this summer to Pocahontas, Iowa was particularly rewarding because of this Faith Journey aspect, too. Because we showed up to help just a few months after the tornado, people were still telling their stories. They were still finding personal healing in the fact that we took time to listen to them, look at their pictures and do some volunteer work in the hot sun. An Iowa farmer and some suburban kids turned from strangers to community members as we responded to the blows a tornado struck on a farm.

I think this is the reason for all of us to attend these first few weeks of Welcoming Sundays or Rally Sundays. It is the time to find a fellowship group or study group or service group that can give us the opportunity to listen to each other and make real community. As much as anything we do in the church, connecting our lives moves us from strangers to community. In doing that we experience how a Faith Journey makes for a happier and more meaning-filled Life Journey.

On the journey,
Kent

Posted in Community | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Mission: Iowa 2011 – Day 4

July 18, 2011 by Nathan Melcher

I’ll just dive right in with today’s entry, dear reader, as we did with today’s work. After breakfast and after the men moved all their gear out of the sanctuary so HUMC could have Sunday morning worship, we had a bright-and-early 7:00am start at Jim’s farm. We spoke with him for a moment as he expressed his gratitude for our service, then we headed down to his ditches and a field to sweep them for debris.

Someone’s Life in the Ditch

We pulled beams, boards, sheetrock, branches, roots, rocks, twisted pieces of metal, cookie tins, furniture pieces, shoes, clothes, underpants, toys, and a lot more out of those places. It’s a testament to one of the great truths of a tornado: when it enters your life, it truly does spill it all out for everyone to see. We were pulling items out of the ditch three months after the tornado; imagine how much was already removed before we got there. Now think about all of the stuff in your house, all of it, splayed out for the neighbors to not only see but for them to pick up for you. A tornado makes your life an open book and that’s out of your control. I get the sense that the loss of control is one of the most difficult things to struggle with in the midst of such tragedy.

John’s Show

Next, we headed over to John’s farm just down the road. We’d been told ahead of time that John intended to “put on a show for us,” tell us his story. It’s exactly what he did. Continue Reading »

Posted in Mission: Iowa 2011 | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Mission: Iowa 2011 – Day 3

July 17, 2011 by Nathan Melcher

Good morning, dear reader. If you want to make your reading of today’s entry one with sensory participation resembling what many of us experienced, take the following steps:

  1. Turn off your air conditioner.
  2. Turn on some bright lamps and point ‘em right at you.
  3. Start a fire in the fireplace.
  4. Sit next to it.
  5. Rub some dirt and tar on your arms, face, and in your hair.
  6. Bend over and lift up your computer fifty times or so.

Doing all that could be key to feeling the heat of the day out in Verina, Iowa. I’ll cut to the chase and say that after our work day ended, I discovered a post on my Facebook page from Art saying the state of Iowa had declared a heat advisory and asked people to get indoors near the time we’d wrapped up for the day. Sunday looks to be even hotter, so we’ll see what happens in terms of what sort of work we do and at what time.

Paint the Town Red, White, and Blue

As you can likely tell by now, today saw us return to Verina to continue work on yesterday’s unfinished projects. If we had thought a little more, we’d of taken more “before” photos of the park because the “after” is a night and day difference in terms of a welcoming arena for gathering, playing, and town pride. The crew finished painting the bell (red for the bell, white and blue for the base) as well as the small barn (a more accurate nomenclature, I’ve been told by the youth, than when I named it a “shed” in yesterday’s post), the merry-go-round got its white panels to match the red panels and blue bars, and the picnic shelter got a fresh coat of white paint on its peaks and beamwork.

The merry-go-round received a little extra white paint in the center, which had already been painted blue. A little splatter turned into *ahem* a clearly intentional white splatter piece of artwork. Despite its accidental origins, it does look nice, indeed. The merry-go-round isn’t the only thing that received accidental painting. Stepping off of it, Kelsey managed to stick her foot onto the edge of a paint can and tipped a wave of white paint on her white shoe, leaving one side white with mud and dirt and the other side pristine white. Meanwhile, William reports the crew had to contend with not only hornet nests in the picnic shelter rafters but also “spider nests,” – large clumps of spider webs with hard clumps of wrapped egg sacs and “food.”

Later, several people got to Continue Reading »

Posted in Mission: Iowa 2011 | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Mission: Iowa 2011 – Day 2

July 16, 2011 by Nathan Melcher

Greetings, dear reader! We had our first full work day and night on the town so settle in for some stories and photos. Have you subscribed to the blog yet, via email or RSS feed? Now’s the time to do so. Plus, please keep those comments coming and I’ll gladly read your “letters from home” for the group during evening worship.

Note: PHOTOS ARE UP!

Sprucing Up the Town Square of Verina, IA

We left HUMC at around 8:00am this morning and, after a brief visit from EUMC congregation member Art, who has a farm in the area, we drove out to Verina, IA (pronounced “Vare-eye-nah”) to do repair to the city park and City Hall. Verina is a very small town, bigger than Ware yet smaller than Poky. For a sense of geography, we were in the town square: on one side of the street is City Hall / Town Library, then the Fire Department, then the American Legion Hall. Across the street is the city park.

The group split up in two, with Alex N., Dan, Jacob, Kent, Loretta, and Trevor joining Mayor Chris on the roof of City Hall / Town Library to do re-shingling, while the rest of the group painted various items in the city park.

The shingling job is a tricky one to tackle. City Hall is a small building at only 25’ x 12’ yet an expansion to the building leaves workers dealing with two types of shingling. The wooden shingles on the expansion below the regular tar shingling gave them the most trouble today, as everything needs to be pried off and Continue Reading »

Posted in Mission: Iowa 2011 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Mission: Iowa 2011 – Day 1

July 15, 2011 by Nathan Melcher

Greetings, dear reader, to our annual Excelsior United Methodist Church mission trip blog. You can read about our experiences in Beaumont, Texas (2008-2009) and Cedar Rapids (both in 2009 and 2010) and remember you can subscribe via RSS or email by clicking the links on the right-hand sidebar. I hope to Twitter updates @excelsiorumc, too, depending on my wifi access during the trip.

Note: I’m having trouble with the photo uploads and will get them up a.s.a.p. Thanks for your patience.

We also appreciate your comments on these blog posts! Each evening I read them out loud to the group like letters from home and they can really boost our spirits. Thanks in advance for your words of love and encouragement.

A Little Context…

This year’s trip takes us to North Central Iowa county of Pocahontas where we’ll do tornado damage clean-up and repair in towns and surrounding farmsteads. We’re staying in Hope UMC in Pocahontas (known locally as “Poky”) and traveling throughout the county to get our work done.

A severe storm system swept through the western portion of Pocahontas County on the evening of Saturday, April 9, 2011, creating a swath of tornadoes that cut through the lives of many residents. The dozens of tornadoes wiped farms clean off the map, ripped apart homes, and left debris all over the county in a path of destruction costing millions of dollars and putting life at a standstill for the county. By the grace of God, there were no fatalities that evening; the only two reported injuries were from Continue Reading »

Posted in Mission: Iowa 2011 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

LYFE Camp Week I – The Campers have arrived!

June 12, 2011 by Nathan Melcher

I’m going to do my best to blog about LYFE Camp here at the Excelsior UMC blog all throughout the week. All I have time to say is that the bus has arrived and the campers are here! We kick things off with dinner at 5:30pm (Sloppy Joes, I believe) and it’s all good stuff from there. Prayers for good weather, safe and healthy campers, and profound faith experiences all week long (all month long for me – I’ll be at three weeks of LYFE Camp in a row).

Regards,

Nate

Posted in LYFE Camp | Tagged | 1 Comment »

On calling someone an “Illegal”

June 3, 2011 by excelsiorumc

The Minnesota Annual Conference voted to postpone a piece of legislation before them asking the people called Methodists to please stop referring to persons who are not in the US by legal means simply as “Illegals.” There was debate on the floor from both sides of the issue and after a break in proceedings, the group who proposed the legislation made a motion to postpone. There was some more debate on whether or not to postpone but in the end, the body voted to “start” the conversation on the issue, not “end” it. You can read the motion and the outcome here.

I have mixed feelings about this. I appreciate the spirit of the postponement and how it allows for more dialogue on the matter. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like the people called United Methodists tend to funnel into the extreme center on many social issues… except one like this which allows a group of persons to be isolated, marginalized, and excluded.

Here’s the remarks I’d prepared on the original motion to be presented from the floor. We voted to postpone before I had the opportunity so I thought I’d post it here. If the legislation returns in 2012, perhaps I’ll get the chance to say this or something similar. Take a look, please (and part of it is based on something I learned in El Salvador which you can read about here):

I speak in favor of the motion. In March of last year, I had the blessing to travel with my seminary to El Salvador to march in solidarity with thousands of people from around the world to celebrate Archbishop Oscar Romero on the 30th anniversary of his assassination. While I was there, I learned about current US immigration policy and our cap of 20,000 immigrants per year, per country. For the Swedes and the Norwegians, this works fine, but not for the Salvadorans or Mexicans or Guatemalans and so on. For these peoples, the line to legally immigrant to the US isn’t just out the door, it’s down the block and around the corner. Six, seven, eight years is a long time to watch your children suffer in poverty.

I didn’t have to travel to El Salvador or learn about current US immigration policy, however, to know that defining someone by a one-word label like “Illegal” is exclusive, dismissive, and dehumanizing. Even if one uses this label because they can’t forgive someone’s breaking the law, that doesn’t mean the label isn’t hurtful. And even if one uses the label without meaning to hurt, that doesn’t take away the hurt.

If you have ever been dismissed, excluded, or had someone define you merely by one aspect of the things you are – an aspect they perceive as negative – please offer respect to persons who are not in the US by legal means and their allies who stand in solidarity when we tell you that to dismiss a population of men, women, and children as “Illegals” isn’t accurate. It’s hurtful. Thank you.

What do you think about the issue, Excelsior UMC? Speak your piece in the comments section.

-nm

Posted in Theology | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

2011 Lent Daily Devotional #24

April 6, 2011 by Nathan Melcher

Lent Devo #24 (John F.) Writing Week – today, write down something you know you want to change as a first or continuing step forward.

Posted in Spiritual Practices | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

2011 Lent Daily Devotional #24

April 5, 2011 by Nathan Melcher

Lent Devo #23 (Nate M.) Writing Week – today, write down someone you need to forgive and why. More writing to come all this week.

Posted in Spiritual Practices | Tagged , | Leave a Comment »

Older Posts »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.