By Maggie Morey Before Sunday School each week, our elementary students begin their time by gathering and singing songs together. A fan favorite of mine is “I’ve Got Peace Like a River.” The upbeat verses cycle through “peace like a river” and “love like an ocean” and...
By Kelly Akins Today is the Advent Sunday when we celebrate peace. What an elusive concept! All around us there are wars, conflict, ICE detentions and a host of other distractions. Our world is anything but peaceful. Yet in all this chaos, we are called to find and...
By Georgia McKee Happy New Year! Well, sort of. Today marks the first day of the Christian year — the beginning of Advent. The liturgical calendar is the cycle that orients us to God. Year after year, we travel through sacred time, letting ancient stories speak...
By Heather Mustain One of the great mystics, Howard Thurman, once wrote, “How moving is the sheer wonder of being necessary to the life of another! The giving of a gentle word when you did not know that such a word was desperately needed; the sharing of so little at...
By Charlie Fuller You likely remember the story. Jesus has gone to Jerusalem with Mary and Joseph for Passover (Luke 2:41–51). Mary and Joseph were a day’s journey on the way back to Nazareth before they realized that 12-year-old Jesus had stayed behind in Jerusalem....
By Timothy Peoples Today begins the first of three Sundays where we will speak on stewardship and generosity. “The Stewardship of Believing,” to be exact. What can we believe together that God can do in our midst? Before you run out to your car to leave or commit to...
By Katie Murray It happened again the other week. I was going about my day with my kids when out of nowhere my mother’s words came out of my mouth. I laughed recounting the event to my mom on the phone later that week: “It’s like you were inside my head telling me...
By Scott Spreier Today’s readings ring familiar to me, especially the one from the Hebrew Scriptures, which I first heard in the rural church I grew up in on the arid plains of western Kansas. Although we were town folk, most of the congregants were dryland farmers....
By Ariel Merivil In her book The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker observes, “There are so many good reasons for coming together that often we don’t know precisely why we are doing so.” So why are we gathered today? Our weekly worship is a spiritual practice — a...
By Jordann McMahan When you hear people talk about God’s faithfulness, what comes to mind? Maybe you think of a particular story from the Bible, such as when God led the Israelites out of Egypt. Perhaps you think of the ways God continued to seek after people, even...