Discussion Forum

Message For August, 2010

mumc.pastor@middletownumcnj.org (Rev. Glenn Ferguson) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:42:49 -0400

Dear Members and Friends,

As we come to the end of another summer and begin to turn our attention to the renewal of the regular schedule, there are a few things I�d like us all to keep in mind.

��Mortgage Elimination Plan- We are, at the end of August, 5 months into the program that began March 31 and we are making solid progress. As of August 15, we had received contributions totaling $112,629. That�s a little more than halfway to our goal of $214,000. Our monthly interest payment is down to $858.26. It started at more than $1,400 per month; a significant savings! There are still a number of families who have not yet committed to helping with this effort to free the church�s finances so that they can be put to better use. I want to encourage those families to pray about it and consider making whatever contribution they can make (beyond their regular giving). Those who have made commitments and/or are already giving to this program- Thank-you!

��Regular Worship Hours- Resume on Sunday, September 12 with our Praise Service at 9:00 a.m. and the Traditional Service at 10:30 a.m. Sunday School will also resume its normal schedule beginning September 12 at 9:15 a.m. The Chancel Choir will begin rehearsals on Wednesday, September 8 at 7:30 p.m. If you haven�t sung with the choir before I hope you�ll consider joining us this year. It�s a lot of fun and a way for us to further serve God in leading worship.

��Sunday School Staff- We are re-organizing our Sunday School classes this year to try to maximize the use of our space and personnel resources. We are in need of several teachers and/ or co-teachers for the elementary and senior high grades. If you feel God calling you to minister to the children and youth of our church by leading them in our Christian education program, please speak to me ASAP.

��Annual Church Conference- The District Superintendent, Rev. Fran Noll, will preside at our annual worship/meeting on November 11 at 7:30 p.m. where we review our work in the previous year and set goals for the one ahead. This is where we also elect those who will serve the Church in 2011 and listen to and accept annual reports from our various ministry teams. If you are the chairperson of one of our teams or committees, please begin to prepare your reports so that they may be included in the booklet. Reports should be turned in by October 31.

��Spiritual Gift Seminar- This is open to everyone in the congregation and will be held on two consecutive Saturdays; October 23 and 30, beginning at 9:00 a.m. I will be leading this seminar based on my doctoral work, and will guide participants through a process that will help you discern what your Spiritual Gifts are and how they may be used in and through the Church to build the Kingdom of God.

There are a lot of other things that will be happening as the program of the church ramps up for the year ahead. You�ll be able to check out many of them elsewhere in this newsletter. I pray that you will find many items that will be of interest to you and your family and that you�ll also find new ways in which to serve God through the Church.

Grace and peace, Glenn Ferguson

Message For July, 2010

mumc.pastor@middletownumcnj.org (Glenn Ferguson) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:10:27 -0400

Dear Members and friends,

I have told you, now and again, about some of the highlights of journeying in the Holy Lands. I have mentioned primarily the big things, the beautiful things, or the highly symbolic things.� One of the small things; one of the details that you might notice as you travel around the central hill country and throughout the Judean Wilderness is that there are no fences to mark off ownership of property; at least, not many. That has partly to do with laws and customs concerning ownership of the land but it is also about the nomadic heritage of the people. Many of those who live in the countryside have a Bedouin background or are themselves still Bedouins. These are the people of the land who live in tents and who move around the region with their herds and flocks, following the grazing grass. In such a society, things like boundary lines and fences become irrelevant. At most, you�ll see, from time to time, small piles of rocks that mark the edge of one person�s acreage and the beginnings of another�s. Even those are largely informal nods to convention and have little or no meaning for day to day living.

Fences are primarily the instruments of those who have a fair amount of material things they want to protect or who have a modern and western sensibility about the ownership of property. Somehow, this world that God has entrusted to us has become an asset that is �ours.�We do what we think we have to do in order to keep what belongs to us. Don�t worry; this isn�t a treatise on the evils of private ownership coming from someone who owns no property. In fact, we, as United Methodists, acknowledge the right of individuals to own property. Article 15 of the United Methodist Doctrinal Standards in the 2008 Discipline reads: �We believe God is the owner of all things and that the individual holding of property is lawful and is a sacred trust under God. Private property is to be used for the manifestation of Christian love and liberality, and to support the Church�s mission in the world. All forms of property, whether private, corporate, or public, are to be held in solemn trust and used responsibly for human good under the sovereignty of God.� (�103)

So owning things, owning property is just fine. The problems arise out of our skewed understanding about the relative value of the things we own. We create fences and safes and burglar alarms in order to keep what we have. Granted, in our society, measures of protection often seem prudent, but what I want to say about fences and indeed about all of the barriers that we erect between ourselves and others is that they help create and largely define a fractured society. That�s not how God would like it to be. Dorothea of Gaza, an early Christian mystic, wrote: �If God is at the center, you cannot get closer to God without getting closer to your neighbor. We are born, we live, and we die with each other.� This is an acknowledgement of the intention of God at Creation. To paraphrase a poem I wrote for the cover of last December�s United Methodist Relay, there were �no fences in Eden.�� It was the sin of Adam and Eve that first brought separation and barriers into the world.

It is the reconciling presence of God in Christ that tears down the barriers, the fences, the walls, and all of the defenses that human beings erect. In Christ we are made one body; one family of faith, and in Christ, there is a union of spirit to spirit and soul to soul.�� Catherine of Siena wrote: �We have our own vineyards, but there are no fences�there is a contiguity of existence.� What she means, in part, is that though we have our differences of background, faith, and journey, we are essentially one. It is this unity that will see the Church through any difficult times that come. We may struggle, but we don�t do so in isolation. We have each other. We have Christ.

Grace and Peace, Glenn Ferguson

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Message For June, 2010

mumc.pastor@middletownumcnj.org (Glenn Ferguson) — Sun, 30 May 2010 12:28:15 -0400

Dear members and friends,

Now that Memorial Day has passed and summer has begun we would do well to remember a few things.� One has to do with our attendance at worship.� Of course the summer weather and the end of school for most necessarily means a change of family schedules.� The church schedule also changes.� Beginning with June 27, we will go from two services to one service that will be held at 10:00 a.m.� As we did last year we will be alternating traditional worship and praise services, beginning with praise on the 27^th. Sunday School will be held during the summer with the children being dismissed from worship at about 10:15 to go to what we think will be a fun and nurturing program for them. Celia Cummins will lead Summer Sunday School using a curriculum called The Gospel According to Dr. Seuss by Rev. James W. Kemp. Celia writes:

Come one, Come all,

We're going to have a ball!

Reading the stories of Dr. Seuss to please us,

And learning the lessons of Our Savior Jesus.

We'll read, talk, laugh, and have fun,

Being with our friends and following The Son!

It will all happen in the Double Classroom in the education wing. Everyone welcome K-6^th grade.

The Christian�s need to worship God and to have Christian education doesn't take time off during the summer.� Obviously our schedules have an impact on what we do and where we are but it is important that we give priority to our commitments to God.� For the person of faith these ought not to be optional, to be tended to if and when it is convenient.� Bearing the cross of Christ is not a matter of convenience but of obedience.� Beyond that, we need the ongoing fellowship of being with our church family. Grace Imatha, a Bible teacher at our Annual Conference a few years ago, said, �I am a follower of Jesus because I am free from my time and culture.� What she meant was that, as a result of being a Christian, we are not bound by the influence of the world around us.� That includes prioritizing our resources of time, talent, and treasure.

In addition, it is vital that we maintain our giving during the summer.� Traditionally, the church experiences a cash flow problem because even though the bills remain constant the giving tends to drop off.� In this year when we are trying to eliminate the mortgage, it is important that we not lose ground before September.� We hope that you'll be here on a regular basis because that's the most important thing, but when you're not here be sure to keep your giving current.� We are making good progress in eliminating the mortgage, but we don't want to fall behind with regard to the budget.

Please keep the Annual Conference in your prayers as laity and clergy travel to Valley Forge June 3 to 5 to worship, tend to the business of the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference, ordain and commission new pastors and deacons, and set the course for the GNJAC for 2011 and beyond.

I pray you will have a blessed summer and that we will see you each week (that you�re not on vacation).

Grace and Peace, Glenn Fergson

Message For May, 2010

mumc.pastor@comcast.net (Rev. Glenn Ferguson) — Sat, 01 May 2010 19:08:48 -0400

Dear Members and friends,

Some of the men have just come back to Middletown from our weekend away at the Keswick Retreat Center. We had a rewarding time of fellowship and fruitful discussions and devotions around the theme of �Connections.� To give a framework for our time, we first watched the film �A River Runs Through It.� The storyline suggested several sub-themes: Identifying ourselves with each other and God; forgiveness; and patience and waiting for God�s timing. These were all tied to how we are connected to God and one another as people of faith in a nurturing community.

As I have been thinking about it since, I have turned back to a book titled �Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations,� by Robert Schnase. In the book, the writer lists radical hospitality, passionate worship, intentional faith development, risk taking mission and service, and extravagant generosity as the hallmarks of healthy and dynamic congregations. In the section on Passionate Worship, Schnase writes:

�Vibrant, fruitful, growing churches offer Passionate Worship that connects people to God and to one another. Lives shaped by God�s Spirit become the nucleus for congregations with extraordinary warmth, graciousness, and belonging.� I can�t help but be reminded that worship, at its best, is relational; it connects us. I�ve long known that this is the case but it is good to have it reaffirmed now and again.

What do we do when we come together for worship? The Worship Team and the Praise Band work with me to try to create opportunities for this touch to take place in every service. What I�d like all of us to consider is how we participate in the worship as congregants. Each person has a part to play in the service. Do we come ready to worship? Are we focused on God, putting aside other concerns for the time being that we might open ourselves to the presence and work of the Spirit? If not, we�ll have a less than rewarding experience. A vessel cannot be filled that is already full of something else and if we come with our own agendas to worship there will be no room in our hearts and minds for God. Do we pay attention to the promptings of the Spirit or are we more concerned with whether or not we like a particular song or hymn, whether the service is going overtime, or whatever we might have planned for the afternoon?

If we are able to be present to God as God is present to us, we will have a rich worship experience that will strengthen our connection to God and to one another. A preaching professor once told me that every sermon is preached a multiplicity of times: once for every person in the sanctuary. It�s a way of saying that we bring a variety of life-contexts to the hearing of God�s Word, so each of us hears what God is trying to communicate differently. Nevertheless, we are drawn together like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle; each one unique, each one having a place and contributing to the completion of the whole. When we leave our time of worship, the ties that bind us should always be stronger and our sense of the abiding presence of God more profound.

Grace and Peace, Glenn Ferguson

Message For April, 2010

mumc.pastor@comcast.net (Rev. Glenn Ferguson) — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 14:15:57 -0400

Dear Members and Friends,

Recently, my wife and I have had the opportunity to see performances of two operas, two very different operas. One we saw at the Met, the other was broadcast on PBS�s series, �Great Performances.� The former was Verdi�s �Attila� about the conquest of the Roman Empire in its death throes by Attila the Hun. The latter was �The Tales of Hoffmann �(Les Contes d'Hoffmann) by Jacques Offenbach. My purpose in mentioning them is not to give you a detailed review of the performances; however, I do want to mention the contrasting styles of the productions for a moment. �Attila� was staged in a very uninvolving way; the performers barely related to each other as they appeared and sang. They rarely interacted with each other except from a distance and though I realize this is a style of production favored by some, I personally don�t care for it. It left the audience as uninvolved as were the characters on stage. On the other hand, �The Tales of Hoffmann� was opera as it should be (at least as I like it). The characters� interactions and the intensity of their relationships were powerful and it seemed to drive the performers� singing.

All of this is simply to illustrate the difference between acting separately and with only tenuous connections compared to acting in concert and with unity of vision and purpose. The Church at its best is like the latter. We are not simply a collection of people with loosely defined goals and values acting separately toward some unspecified future. We are the Body of Christ, a unified community of believers whose goal is making disciples and transforming the world. We may have our own ideas about how things should be done in the Church and by whom, but for the good of the body and the Kingdom of God, we must be willing to accept that sometimes things aren�t going to be the way we�d like them to be. In addition, that has to be okay with us. There may be hymns you don�t like on a given Sunday, but perhaps they speak to someone else. As the body of Christ, we should give thanks that they have meaning for someone else. A decision of the Administrative Council may be one with which we don�t agree but our theology of the Church is that the collective discernment of the council usually has a better chance of being what God wants for the Church than the wisdom or desires of any one individual. Many times the council has information that the individual may not and they have the benefit of having discussed whatever the issue may be in some detail before coming to a conclusion.

The question is: are we willing to put the good of the Church ahead of ourselves? If we remember our membership vows, the answer ought to be yes. Jesus was faced with the dilemma of whether or not to place himself above the good of others. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he struggled with the desire to avoid the torture and death that was coming his way. He would have preferred to not be imprisoned, betrayed, deserted, whipped, humiliated, and crucified. Instead, he put the needs of humankind before his own: �Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.� (Luke 22: 42) I think these are the most important words ever spoken. Without Jesus� determination to accept what we call The Passion; without his death on the cross and rising from the tomb, all of us would be lost.

How sad that in the Church, where we bear the name of the One who gave everything for us all, that we still sometimes behave selfishly. Of course, we�re not Jesus and we are going to fall short of the mark at times. That�s when we ask for forgiveness and try again. That�s when we remember what Jesus did for us and recommit ourselves to living in community with one another in loving, self-sacrificing service.

Grace and Peace, Glenn Ferguson