By Ava McClung This past week has been a busy one for me, and I doubt I’m the only one. Between travel, errands, work, camps, visiting family and friends, shopping for school supplies and trying to maintain some semblance of a routine, summer can be exhausting. I find...
By Juliana Moore We are in the middle of summer, aren’t we? The heat has arrived, and some of us are scattered hither and yon, as my grandmother would say. I find that these “lazy days of summer” are anything but lazy. My past month has been filled with travel and...
By R.G. Huff I have to admit that I did not choose to write this preparation for worship based on the Gospel reading from which Timothy is preaching today. While the Richard Strauss ballet Salome is based on it, the beheading of Jesus’ cousin is not one of those...
By Timothy Peoples It was 14 years ago this week when a church much like Wilshire allowed me to preach as their pastoral intern. I was a junior in college, afraid as all get-out and not fully ready to preach at the 8:30 and 11 o’clock worship services. The only thing...
By Abbey Adcox Each year on the Youth Choir mission tour, we are asked to experience the week through a specific lens. This year, Darren asked us to consider how we might learn, love and be courageous throughout the week. In our evening gatherings he read the...
By Ava McClung As I enter adulthood, I find myself constantly unmaking and remaking my image of who I am and how I fit into the world. I’m living away from home for the first time. I’m meeting people with wildly different backgrounds from my own and opening my mind to...
This past week I volunteered to work at Wilshire’s Vacation Bible School. No applause, please, because it was my first time. In fact, it’s safe to say I haven’t been near a VBS since I attended as a child. It’s not because I don’t believe in its value. I have great...
Our offertory today is an arrangement of the hymn, “Be Still My Soul,” which was written by Katharina von Schlegel of Germany in the mid-1700s. At this time there was a movement occurring in the Lutheran church that focused on religious pietism and emphasized themes...
By Charlie Fuller When I was growing up, we regularly celebrated what we called the “Lord’s Supper” every quarter. In one of the churches I served much later in life, we had the meal sometime around once a quarter, if the pastor remembered to schedule it. I’ve had the...
It’s Trinity Sunday, and for most of us the concept of the Trinity is confusing and even a daunting idea to comprehend. This one God broken into three aspects may not seem as monotheistic in the way our brain would like to comprehend. Eleventh-century theologian...