Seasons Greetings, Beloved!
Advent is a time of reflection and preparation. It is an opportunity to consider what, exactly, we are waiting for as we anticipate the birth of the infant in the manger. What will be different? How will we be different because of this? How do we prepare for the coming of Peace on Earth, the Word Made Flesh, in times such as these?
Linda Mellor offered a possible Advent theme: "Do You Hear What I Hear?" In addition to being a great Christmas song, it is a shockingly relevant question right now. How is it that we are all living in the same world and yet perceiving events so very differently? What does that mean for us? Who is writing the narratives we are all relying upon? Can we trust what we see, hear, and believe we know? Can there be peace when truth is on such shaky ground?
At the same time, Ann Craig suggested that we might want to consider using The Women's Lectionary for the year ahead. This year-long schedule of texts explores readings we don't see very often, pairs them together in really interesting ways, and is unapologetically feminist and womanist in view. The women's lectionary and the theme do you hear what I hear connected brilliantly: after a couple millenia of the patriarchy, what do we hear when we hear the stories of women? What stories have been cast aside, possibly without our notice?
As we always do, we will be telling an unfolding visual story in addition to the one we tell in words. We wondered at who would be in the telling of the nativity if it were women doing the telling, and we wondered who would occupy the roles if we were to cast the play in a modern light.
There will be surprises in the Advent season this year. We will meet some new characters, and reintroduce ourselves to some old ones, with fresh faces. One might say we are making new connexions to the age old story we know so well. Join us for the old - and new - story.
Blessings of the season,
Pastor Grace
It is no accident that I came back from renewal leave to hit the ground running. It was by design. We have so much momentum, and I didn’t want to risk any of it. And, while Target should not be planning for Christmas yet, I actually should. Still, I could not have imagined how exciting my first few weeks back were going to be.
In these short couple of weeks, we have: launched Wellness Connexions (all credit goes to Jacqui Vedder with help from The Grove, and Linda Mellor), hosted a community conversation on Industrial Development Agency grants and how to create affordable housing in the community, offered an epic Halloween to All Saints celebration (great thanks to The Grove, in particular Erin Edib, Jacqui Vedder, Linda Mellor, and Margaret Howe), been featured in a conference article about HEARTS and Playschool working together, offered a Taize vespers service, and participated in a conference on leadership in challenging times.
A big reason to rejoice in this list is that these successes came together largely without me. It is a sign of a healthy church that is equipping members and friends to implement their faith in the life of our community. As people come into our church for the first time or perhaps the first time in a long time, I have had countless opportunities to share what it means to be Methodist and how these events are crucial to our calling. We’ve heard great comments like “my church would never do something this cool!,” …“I forgot how good it feels to be in here,” …“this place is awesome!” and many more statements of new life, new ways of being perceived, and new possibilities for what our future together might look like if we embrace it.
If you ever wonder if what we do here matters, it does. The general public has come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of Christians in the world: Christian Nationalist, evangelical, judgmental ones, and the ones who say and do nothing. That is the perception we are working to overcome, and at a time when people so desperately need a place to consider prayerfully, grow spiritually, think critically, and find the solace of fellow seekers. We are poised to meet this need in ways we have not been before, certainly in my time here.
- If you ever wonder what you can or should do as a part of your relationship to our church and to our new life as New Connexions, now is the time and these are some ideas:
Are you able to participate in our food ministries? With SNAP being cut, the need is about to skyrocket. We cannot meet it all, but with more help we can do more. - Are you a musician? Would you like to be a part of creating ever evolving and unique worship opportunities?
- Would you like to teach a knitting class? Beginner Spanish? Herb gardening?
- Could you be the person to help us begin a Messy Church each month?
- Do you have people in your life who could benefit from HEARTS? Can you volunteer?
- Can you learn to run Sunday tech so the whole burden doesn’t fall on Linda?
- Are you able to find and write grants?
- What amazing ideas do you have?
Perhaps the single best comment I heard about us in recent days is “I didn’t know church could be like this!” Can you think of a better gift to offer people as we move into the long nights of winter, the complicated emotions of the Christmas season and whatever the next breaking news story might be? Because I don’t think I can, and all we have to do is help with the wrapping and hand out the good stuff.
See you on Grove and Main, Beloved,
Pastor Grace
A year ago for our wedding, you gave us a fantastic present to look forward to – a hot air balloon ride. We immediately decided it would be how we celebrated our first anniversary. As so often happens plans got juggled and we missed the weekend we wanted, so we had to wait til the very last weekend the balloon went up. As also so often happens, that turned out to be an incredible blessing.
As the sun rose, we launched out of Kinderhook for what was supposed to be a one hour flight and became over two hours. We floated in perfect sunny skies cradled between the Catskills and the Hudson to the west and the Berkshires to the east. We watched the fog slowly dissipate, hovering ethereally over the river and lakes longest, as the glow on the mountains and another balloon made the world look lit from within.
Even our somewhat bumpy landing only served to make the experience more memorable. We missed a tree by about 6 feet and stopped traffic as we hovered the balloon inches off the ground to move it to a safe place to deflate.
Thank you so much from both of us for such a perfect and unforgettable adventure.
Love,
Limina Grace
There is power in names. Naming something is a declaration of what you intend, your vision. Names are ideas to lean into, or sometimes to push against. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but a good title can sell a lot of copies. In just the precious few weeks we have been proclaiming the name New Connexions, we are seeing the power a name can have.
New Connexions, it turns out, is more than a merger between two small congregations. It is a statement of our hope for ourselves, a commitment to Methodism, a vision for how we want to be in relationship with our community. And naming the thing seems to be helping us to live into it as well, because we have a lot of new activity happening.
We recently held our ‘re-release party,’ unveiling of our new logo at an Ice Cream Social and ministry fair. So much hard work went into getting ready for that day! Swag was purchased, research was done, people gave of their time, their talents, and their wallets to get the job done. And while I know those of you most involved are tired, I also hope you are energized. I hope we are all energized. See, we even became more connected to one another as we went about the work of reintroducing ourselves to our community.
We have plans underway for a series of events, Wellness Connexions, in the fall. The goal is a pilot program we hope will turn into an everyday reality for our church. The idea of New Connexions as a ‘third space,’ where disparate members of our town and region find a place to call home and new people to call friends, a place where we take good care of one another in all sorts of ways, a place that brings generations together, fosters dialogue and builds, well, connexions, is a powerful witness to the best of what church, what Methodists can and should be.
Methodism is based on the idea of connexion. We are remembering this secret to our historical success. Connexion is what motivates us to be engaged in the world around us, to have a continuous, intentional conversation between our beliefs and our interactions with the world. New Connexions has waded right into the waters of meeting the needs we find before us. Our Methodism keeps us connected through the idea that we ask one another ‘how is it with your soul?’ And stay till the answer is ‘well.’ Our blooming identity is a prolonged invitation for people to gather here and ask that very question, and receive that very answer. And Methodism has always been a ministry primarily of the laity. We are embracing that anew as well. The ideas emerging are your ideas, your passions, your perceptions of what is needed here and now. As it should be.
While you are reading this, I will be on renewal leave. I have some connexions of my own that have gone long untended. And while everyone likes to be needed, I am so excited to see what I’ve missed when I come back, because I can feel the drive and vision of this congregation has been reconnected. I love that, truth be told, you don’t need me. You have each other – you are New Connexions.
Ever onward and with love,
Pastor Grace
By the time you read this, New Paltz UMC and Memorial UMC, Modena will have become one. After careful thought on the part of Administrative Council of each church together, henceforth we will be known as New Connexions United Methodist Church. Sometimes there is a lot in a name.
Connexion is how John Wesley referred to our movement. We were different from church, because we transcended any congregation. Methodists exist not to be another denomination, largely indistinguishable from the others. We exist to be the builders of connexion: from our stated beliefs to our everyday actions; from our church doors to our communities; from those cast aside to those with influence. Our foundational commitment to connexion made us the builders of hospitals and schools, the founders of prison ministries, the first church that opposed slavery from its inception. Our connexion is our superpower, our sacred inheritance. We should celebrate and foster it – but for far too long, we have stifled and ignored it.
Perhaps, as we take strides toward living into the founding principle of Methodist Connexion, we are reclaiming some of the world-altering secret sauce of Methodism. And, like in the movies, when the hero diffuses the bomb with two seconds to spare, we are right on time – not a moment too soon.
Our world is a divided place. War, famine, ideological rifts, the greatest income inequality in history, and an epidemic of loneliness. I don’t say this to depress us – I say this to galvanize us. The needs are obvious. And we have the means to address them – if we can only embrace our inheritance – our passion for reaching beyond ourselves to foster new connexions.
While we may not be able to make significant progress on the global needs, at least not alone – we can foster connexions that make such change possible. And we can meet the needs that do present themselves locally: we can grow our community building ministries and projects like our recent pot-luck, Sans-Cyber Space and Social Justice Sing-a-Longs. We can register the increasing need for Free Fresh Food. We can commit to growing the HEARTS dementia ministry and support the work of Plutarch for Refugees. We can embrace our place on Main Street in a college town and our reputation for being a safe place to hold challenging conversations with love and care.
The choice to merge a church is not an easy one. It’s a brave choice to make. For the folks from Modena it means leaving the place they have called home and taking a tremendous leap of faith that their new home and enlarged church family will come to have the same safe familiarity. For the folks here in New Paltz, it means letting go of a bit of ownership, making space. For all of us, it means a season of gentleness and welcome. How convenient that shared sense of purpose is a key to building connexion – as I’ve said, there are a tremendous array of purposes begging for us to fill them right now.
There can be a lot in a name. We have chosen the older spelling of connexion on purpose. First of all, it is a hallmark of Wesely’s writing and vision. It also contains the cross. The cross, the purpose of which was to break down the walls between us and between us and a loving God. What’s more, X marks the spot, the place from which our strength and belief flow. And New Connexions transcends our physical location – as our church has come to do as well. We are more than a community church – we are a collection of believers choosing to reach out in love while the world retrenches in fear. We are choosing connexion. And if we keep choosing it, we are right on time.
We all know Lent is a time of giving something up. I hate to say sacrifice, because most commonly what we give up is something that doesn’t really cost us much except willpower – chocolate, meat, doom-scrolling the internet – choosing something that will benefit us personally. It’s a great thing to do, healthy and productive. I’m not sure it is getting to the true purpose of Lent, though. So, what does true Lenten sacrifice, done with intention, look like in this particular moment in time?
Every year in this season, I pray we are looking to relinquish ideas, habits, or even relationships that keep us from coming closer to God. I also hope we might live the Easter story as if it is brand new, as if the outcomes are not all predetermined, as if we can make different choices. These two ideas go together, giving up those things that come between us and God so we are freed to make choices that interrupt the need for Jesus to sacrifice his life so that we might learn. We retell the story every year, but we don’t do a great job of being changed by the story. Which means we repeat it the same mistakes it highlights in our own lives, denying the sacred power of transformation in which we are being called to participate.
How – right here and now – are we to engage the sacred call to being transformed in ways that inspire us to “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” What are we sacrificing, what is the Gospel preparing us for, and what is on the other side of the challenges we face? These are the kinds of questions a timely and relevant faith invites us to answer. Asking them boldly and bravely is also what will set us apart from the Sadducees, Pharisees, Herodians, Imperialists, apologists, racists, xenophobes and their ilk – the ones who have hijacked Good News and turned it, time and again, into a nightmare for so many of us.
The stakes are eerily similar right now. Disagree with the Caesar and find yourself deported or disappeared, your research or career ended, your family torn apart, your healthcare and basic humanity denied. If it feels surreal to find yourself in times that border on biblical, that is only to be expected. It is surreal. It also highlights that we are not without tools to address the present moment. Knowing what we know about how power reacts to being confronted, knowing how a lone prophetic voice will be targeted and martyred, knowing what the outcome is when we join in the condemnation, or just ‘wait and see’ how the whole thing turns out - knowing what we know, what are we, as Christians who remember our baptismal vows, going to do?
I started this piece by challenging us to be more mindful in what we give up. But I don’t want you to get the impression that only grand displays and world altering sacrifices matter. In fact, the more of us who are measured and intentional, the less need there is for such dramatic (and traumatic) displays. And I have a tangible suggestion for you to consider.
You’ve probably seen the new sanctuary seating – six pews have made way for three vintage seating areas. It’s a big change in how our space feels, and for many of us I’m pretty sure it has felt like a disruption, a sacrifice of what we have always known and loved. If we make Lenten sacrifices to pick up more meaningful things, I hope it will help to know what we have picked up, and why these might be offerings of special meaning and magnitude right now.
As the pews were being removed, a new creativity was coming to the surface, particularly in The Grove, but not only there. This change was directly linked to starting our social justice sing-along musicals, and our tech-free community gathering times. And while musicals and game night don’t leap to the top of the lists of how to combat authoritarianism, I think they have tremendous potential to do just that, and to become the bedrock of a new season of faith in action.
Our people are being torn apart at a time when we were already terribly isolated from one another. Protest, which used to be marked by music and the joy of camaraderie has become little more than angry slogan shouting. People are exhausted, alienated, and disillusioned. And yet we are surrounded by young seekers, people who know in their bones there must be more – more meaning, more love, more purpose. Who know what they think of as justice and common good aren’t what they live. Do you begin to see how transformative we might be at this moment?
As we use our sanctuary – God’s house – to draw people together in songs of hope, love, and resistance, we are connecting people’s lived experiences and their worst fears to their God-given spirit of resilience while making space to commune in joy to reimage the kin-dom come. As we invite people to set their phones aside and meet each other face to face, we are creating space for creative thought, meaningful conversation, and tilling the soil in which Good Trouble might take root and grow.
Sing-a-longs and game night aren’t going to save the nation, nor are they going to get us to resurrection. New sanctuary seating is, in the scheme of things, no big sacrifice. Yet how we engage the possibilities of those changes might be, at least in part, ways for us to rejoice in the resurrection life that comes to us when we repent, repair, and remake ourselves for the sake of God’s love.
With prayers of possibility in troubled times,
Pastor Grace
The combined urgent needs of the moment and the precariousness of our position prompt me to offer a state of the church letter for your new year’s consideration. I am writing this piece on MLK Day, also Inauguration Day, with flags at half-staff to mourn President Jimmy Carter. Which seems to sum up the strangeness of the moment awfully well. I say it often, but it never ceases to surprise me – the present realities of the nation and those of the United Methodist Church are deeply aligned. As a denomination that began as a justice seeking initiative, and a church that grew specifically as a result of, and alongside, U.S. independence, we need to be prayerful and thoughtful in our response to the issues of our time. It is, fundamentally, why Methodism exists. We are called to bring scripture, reason, experience, and tradition as a moral framework into all of the spaces in which we operate, in and out of the church. This is what it means to be the people called Methodists.
For a long time, we have been sidetracked from our mission. And if we are being honest, we have liked it that way. However, all signs tell us that the world has registered our separation from it, even when we have not. Only now, with our congregations drastically shrunk not to mention aging, our buildings increasingly as much a burden as a benefit, our financial viability alarmingly tenuous, and the work of survival making mission feel like a distant luxury, are we reluctantly seeing reality.
Cooperative Parishes were established to interrupt this decline. They were supposed to be a means of enabling us to maximize our ministry capability in ways that were local and contextual. The idea has been that each parish would develop the best ways to proceed for their particular communities, organically growing a grassroots network of ministry to meet the most urgent needs of our unique settings. It is a noble goal, and a timely one. It was also an idea that was given without form or direction, in part because the idea was looking indirectly at realities that our Annual Conference has been no more eager to see than each Methodist in the pews: we cannot continue on as we are. Major changes, including considerations of creative mergers and entirely new ministry models are the only means by which we will ensure a Methodist presence in our communities for decades to come.
I firmly believe we must maintain a Methodist presence, now more than ever. I believe our founding principles are uniquely designed to have traction with Millennials, as well as Generations Z and Alpha. Our small group model with a focus on action and mutual accountability is precisely what these generations (the most spiritually inclined in modern history) are yearning for. Our biggest problem is how far we have come from our own roots and our stubborn insistence that where we are is where we have always been, and therefore must always be. This is a tragic, even sinful, deviation from exactly what makes Methodism unique and compelling.
At the congregational level, everyone has been demanding that the Conference leadership offer direction. After all, change is scary even when we desire it, and few of us have been desirous of the changes we desperately need. So, unless and until someone comes along to make it so, we will continue on as we have been. It’s worked this long. And I have actually heard people say that change is fine – as long as it “happens after I die.”
In the midst of this impasse, a number of leaders have emerged here at New Paltz. We have been having these conversations longer than many of our neighboring congregations, placing us in a position of natural leaders. Making space for brave conversation, deep prayer and bold
re-imagining, it has been frustrating for us to see a reluctance even greater than our own from much of the rest of the parish. This frustration is good news. It means we have crossed a line from clinging to the past and moving toward possible futures. It is good, but it is also unsettling and uncomfortable.
There can be an impulse to withhold commitment, and see how things play out. Perhaps, though, withholding commitment is actually a way of deciding how things will turn out. Methodism is a team sport. Each one of us has roles to fill, a part to play, and the absence of any one of us will be felt by all of us, especially now. Because literally in the last three hours, most of what we hold dear has come under assault: LGBTQIA rights and gender equity; the infrastructure to dismantle racism; protections for creation; the rights of immigrants; access to truth itself; and so much more. If we choose to protect our own interests in the face of such a moral and un-Christian dictates, how could we possibly expect others to join us?
I know there is a lot of uncertainty in the life of the church right now. I also know we stand a better chance than most of seeing our way to possible futures and helping others do the same. Great leaders are frequently just people in the right place at the right time. That is us right now. We have had longer to think about what is coming than most, we are in a more stable position than most, and have a tremendous wealth of conference level knowledge. We are being chosen for such a time as this, and we cannot lead from the sidelines.
I hope and pray that we might all be galvanized in our determination to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. And I hope and pray that you find inspiration in these pages, and even more, in one another.