News from SOJ
An Oasis
IN recent months, we've found words to express our identity and mission. Here's what we've come up with. Rooted in a pluralistic Christian heritage, Spirit of Joy is an oasis for inquiring minds, contemplative souls, and compassionate hearts. An oasis because SOJ is a fueling station: a place to renew our energies and increase our capacity for loving God and others, An oasis is a touchstone, a resting place, not a permanent destination. SOJ provides sustenance for the spiritual journey. In particular, we see this through the three primary aspects of our ministry mentioned above. Inquiring minds speaks to our attention to learning and growing as we strive for greater spiritual maturity and understanding. Through educational opportunities, including Sunday morning study hour, guest speakers, special topics, etc. we provide a safe place to explore our faith journeys in ever greater depth, with curiosity and the awareness that we can never know too much. Contemplative souls refers to providing meaningful worship opportunities using a variety of modalities in an attempt to meet as many diverse needs as possible. An emphasis on spiritual disciplines has created a centering prayer ministry group, as well as one focusing on lectio divina, both of which are ways to deepen one’s experience of the divine. Compassionate hearts is about social justice and being with and for the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten. Spirit of Joy does a single mom’s oil change twice a year, serves a meal to the men at St Stephen’s Shelter once a month, collects food for the local food shelf, and participates in Armful of Love at Christmas. Both individually and collectively, we seek to follow Jesus in providing for “the least of these.” SOJ feeds us, nurtures us and then urges us to focus outside ourselves to a world desperate for loving hearts and willing hands to serve the poor, the marginalized, the forgotten. As a community, we exist to encourage, and support people on their spiritual journeys, but also to challenge and stretch us in uncomfortable ways as we seek to follow Jesus. |
A Pastoral Word about our Congregational Meeting Saturday 1/17/15
As pastor of Spirit of Joy I'm grateful for the prayers, the spiritual commitment, and the expertise that have been coming together over the course of this past year as we prepare to leave our adolescence and enter into young adulthood as a congregation. We are 15 going on 16, and in church life-cycles, that means we're about to make some significant decisions that will shape our future. We know adolescence is a difficult time in our personal lives. We face decisions about who we are, who are friends are, what paths to pursue, which doors to open and which ones to close. We experiment with different styles of clothes, music, and language. We drive our parents a little bit crazy. Our idealism ramps up to fever pitch, along with our judgment of others and ourselves. But at the same time, we feel deeper compassion and tolerance for others than we've ever felt. We become aware of our own limitations while feeling invincible. We feel the deepest betrayals cutting our heart in two while simultaneously falling passionately in love. It's fortunate that all of us who are adults were 15 once. But it's also fortunate that we didn't stay that age forever. Who could sustain it? To complicate matters, we bring our own individual coming-of-age to our church community. You may remember we explored family-of-origin issues in some depth last winter and spring, discovering how our own upbringing still shapes our spiritual lives and frames our expectations and experiences of the church today. Thankfully, we bring our own adult faith experiences with us, too. We're our own older mentor as our community comes of age. Individually we have walked this path before. We bring the self-reflection and spiritual strength of the older self we know in our 20s, 40s, 60s, and 80s, to walk beside the emerging "self" that is Spirit of Joy at 15. This Saturday is an important day for us. Thirty-five of us have been directly involved in one of our four focus groups since September and many more have been involved indirectly. The ongoing work of these groups has explored in spiritual and practical matters the main things involved in Selling the Property or staying in it, articulating our Identity and Mission, nurturing Healthy Stewardship, and Finding New Space. These groups will be sharing tonight in Ministry Council and on Saturday at our Congregational Meeting what they have discovered so that we can discuss it all together and reach consensus about our next step together as a congregation. Here's what we know so far.
Ongoing updates from each of our four groups have been included in the weekly emailed announcements for the last few months and shared in worship. An email with a summary of the four group's findings will be sent to all church members this week. Then at our Saturday event, which will be held at Church of the Apostles in Burnsville where we launched this discovery stage of the process back in September, we will discuss our path forward together. If we decide on Saturday that we are in consensus, our next step will be clear. I look forward to taking it with you. It's good to be in ministry with you. Blessings and Peace, David |
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