This weekend I get to preach at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in Kent to launch a short series of midweek conversations about our evolving times and cultural context. My working title is: “What’s Going Here? Becoming St Columba’s in a Rapidly Changing Kent, Church, & World.”
St. Columba is a vibrant and flourishing community of faith rooted in the Way of Jesus, and its Vicar is Rev. Meghan Mullarkey, who I worked quite closely during her MDiv studies.
Part of my task is to guide the leaders of this faith community to locate themselves in the times we are living while exploring why we need to continually let go of our assumptions about church while opening to the invitation of the Spirit… providing an ever-deepening understanding of our broader culture, some of the reasons why things are changing, all the while helping frame a capacious imagination for G-d’s shalom in the midst of it all. Whatever is happening around us, and within us, our invitation is to discern together how we, as persons within a collective, might welcome reality and discover a way of love amidst it all. So, as the values and practices of society—and even those of their neighbors in Kent and beyond—continue to evolve, St Columba’s, as a faith community, have the unique opportunity to collectively discern how they might join G-d in loving their neighbors and neighborhood while also learning to love themselves.
In addition to preaching this weekend, I have three midweek conversations to facilitate:
- Attending to the Signs of Our Times… The Metacrisis, Post-Christianity & the Fragmenting of Western Systems
- Conversations After Church… Why People are Leaving Our Churches & Why it Might Point to Hope
- Your “Big WHY”… So what is the Church About Anyway?
It’s gonna be so fun.
Peace, dwight
