Pastor's Message
October 2012
To the Children of God at Emmanuel:
STOP READING THIS NOW! Stop reading this now if you don’t like to talk about stewardship. Stop reading this now if you don’t want to be challenged in your faith and walk in Christ. If this is not the case then START READING THIS NOW!
Tony Jones writes in The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier,
“Allow me to make a bold indictment: most American Christians don’t really believe in the Holy Spirit…most say they believe in all three persons of the Trinity, but we should in this instance look at action as a reflection of belief.” (p.200)
Ultimately, this means that we will look for ways to save our church that reveal that we believe we can find the right way to “hook” people to come to church or that we can discover the perfect program to get more people into our church. Parker Palmer calls this lack of belief in the Holy Spirit “functional atheism” which is the belief that ultimate responsibility rests with us. It is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen. Jones goes on to explain that a far greater sin than “personal” self-centeredness comes about when it reveals itself at the institutional level. He writes, “The church should be a place where individuals who struggle with selfcenteredness get reminded that our calling is to be God-centered and other-centered. When ‘It’s up to us’ is the subconscious mantra of the church, the church has lost its way.”
The financial stewardship process for this year will culminate on November 11 with the celebration of Thankoffering/Covenant Sunday. Thankoffering Sunday is a celebration of the Women of the ELCA, while Covenant Sunday will speak of our individual and communal response of gratitude to our life in Christ. We will have only one service that Sunday which will take place at 10:30AM. A potluck will follow our worship service as a continuation of our relationship with one another and trust in the Spirit of God to guide us now and forever.
In gratitude that day we will commit our individual lives and the life of this community of faith to the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit. You will be contacted through a variety of ways over the next few weeks prior to November 11 as we seek to trust our personal and communal lives to the power of the Holy Spirit. You will also be invited to participate in the study of the Bible, prayer groups, and individual prayer time as we open our lives to the presence of the Holy Spirit.
STOP READING THIS NOW! START BELIEVING THE SPIRIT OF GOD IS WITH US!
One of Christ’s servants,
Pastor David A. Hendricks - Child of God