Hi First Presbyterian,
It’s time for our Mid-Week Meet-Up! This Sunday is going to be pretty exciting. Not only will there be multiple baptisms during worship, but I will be starting a sermon series focused on the content of the Fall small groups, which started this week. The small groups are reading the book Neighborhood Church: Transforming Your Congregation into a Powerhouse for Mission. Our Director of Christian Education Craig Kunkle, the Christian Education Committee, and the Vital Congregations Initiative have been working together to choose this topic and this study for small groups.
Part of the work of transformation (which is a focus of the book) is understanding who we are as a congregation. To do the work of transforming into something new, we have to understand what we’re transforming from. The Dutch priest and theologian Henri Nouwen once wrote about taking the Lord’s Supper, and he described drinking the cup of the Sacrament as happening in three stages: holding, lifting, and drinking. Before we can lift up and drink the cup of salvation, we must first hold it. He wrote: “Holding the cup of life means looking critically at what we are living. This requires great courage, because when we start looking, we might be terrified by what we see… Still, we intuitively know that without looking at life critically we lose our vision and our direction. When we drink the cup without holding it first, we may simply get drunk and wander around aimlessly.” There’s a reason we begin worship with a confession of sin: if we don’t acknowledge the ways we need to change, we cannot become something different.
To help us do that as a congregation, we’re going to be taking the U.S. Congregational Vitality Survey during worship this Sunday. Surveys will be handed out to be completed during both services. For those of you who won’t be in worship in-person, an online version of the survey will be sent to you early Sunday morning with a link to complete the survey. [If you worship from home and need a paper survey, please let us know ASAP by emailing connect@pittsfordpres.org.] The survey will be collected and sent into the PC(USA) national office to be analyzed, interpreted, and sent back to us. When we get the results of the survey back, they will be incorporated into the small group study. For those of you not participating in a Fall small group, the results of the survey will be available on a subsequent Sunday.
This survey will help us do the work of self-reflection, which is spiritual work. This is the reason it will be happening during worship. Our self-reflection should also focus on the truth of Jesus Christ. I hope you will worship with us on Sunday – online or in-person. And I look forward to discussing the results of the survey together.
Peace to you,
Pastor Neff