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May 2010

This is a season when we at Memorial UCC get many reminders that what we do here is connected to a much wider church community. The most powerful reminder is the feast of Pentecost (which is on May 23 this year), a celebration of that point when Jesus' first followers were propelled out of the shadows to share the good news about Jesus.

So we are connected across time and space to a wide array of Christians. Not all of us understand Jesus' message in the same way. Not all of us use the same styles of worship. We are part of a multi-dimensional and multi-colored quilt of faith. Even as we rejoice in the kind of Christianity we live out here at Memorial, we can appreciate and learn from the many different ways people understand God and Jesus in their lives.

There are more prosaic connections as well. We are part of a denomination - the United Church of Christ - that has its roots in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, in immigrant communities that settled in the New World and in the coming together of disparate groups that found unity in essential matters while respecting variety in practice.

Because we are connected at the regional, state and national levels with the UCC, we have the opportunity to share in some of the riches of that connection ñ things like the camps at Pilgrim Center and Moon Beach, the Lay Academy for developing leadership, the continuing education and accountability for clergy, the resources for Sunday School teachers, the mission projects in places like Biloxi's Back Bay and global connections in Bethlehem and Honduras and England and Germany.

Our denomination, like so many institutions, is in a period of transition. Last month at the annual meeting of the Southwest Wisconsin Association, our delegates joined with others across the region in dreaming of how we will support each other as the statewide structure of the UCC reshapes itself. These changes will mean fewer resources at the regional level, putting more of the burden on local churches to be creative in their connections to one another. Next month, the state UCC will hold its annual meeting to look at how it will move into the future. The national UCC has been making adjustments like this as well.

These are all important matters in how churches function and I urge you to at least be aware of them. None of them, however, matter as much as what happened on the first Pentecost, when people committed to Jesus and his message felt God's Spirit giving them the courage and the energy to go about transforming the world so it would be closer to what God's vision intended.

It takes some organization to do that, of course, but first comes the wind and the fire that sends us forth to love and to serve our God.