 Ministry Highlights for may 2024 Last Sunday It may have been a three-day weekend, but Plymouth showed up to worship together on May 26th.  Pentecost Sunday On May 19th, the children's chorus "Kids Will Sing!" was part of our Pentecost service and at Fellowship Hour we had our first "Fellowship That Transforms" gathering. (More will follow at intervals over the summer.) A pray ground at the front of the sanctuary provided space for kids to worship in their own way. Sunday Celebrations In May there were two special coffee hour celebrations: on May 12th we celebrated Joyce Sjogren's 98th birthday and on May 26th, Tricia and Jim Medlock's 50th wedding anniversary. Confirmation On April 28, six youth were confirmed. The Kids Will Sing! group participated in the service.  It’s been almost a month now since Leadership Council made the difficult decision to place our senior minister, Hal Chorpenning, on paid administrative leave pending the result of a fitness review initiated by the Rocky Mountain Conference’s Committee on Ministry. In that time, our staff has stepped up to a challenging situation with grace and diligence. Mark continues to be our point person for music; Phil is overseeing administrative and financial needs; and Marta is taking the lead on worship and pastoral care. I’m grateful to our entire staff, and to the many Plymouth members who have stepped up, or who will step up in the coming weeks. The love we have for our congregation and each other has been apparent every day. Rev. Erin Gilmore with the Rocky Mountain Conference has informed us that the fitness review is underway, and that interviews have begun. At this point we still do not know how long the fitness review will take, or how many interviews the committee is likely to conduct. This period of waiting is difficult and potentially frustrating. I will continue to share any updates we receive with the congregation. As always, please feel free to reach out to members of Leadership Council with any questions or concerns. In this season of waiting, there are also lots of exciting things going on! As in previous years, summer worship (with one service at 10:00 a.m.) is underway, and Marta, Mark, and Brooklyn are hard at work on a wonderful range of services. Fellowship groups are meeting, including Fellowship of the Grape on 5/24 and Plymouth Social Club on 5/25. And the long-awaited roof repairs are complete! We continue to be a vibrant community filled with people doing good work together. However you contribute to the life of our congregation, thank you for continuing to be Plymouth during this season! Adam Redavid, Plymouth Moderator P.S. There are a few questions that have come up often: Why is this review occurring right as Hal was about to retire anyway? The Conference received the complaints before Hal announced his retirement. It is important to note that pastors don’t retire from the United Church of Christ; they always have to retain their standing. This process would be happening regardless if he was at Plymouth. Why didn’t these members of the congregation try to handle this internally? The Conference works to ensure that all internal efforts have been exhausted before moving forward. How can we support the staff? Know that the changes we are making to be more efficient are very helpful and things are running smoothly. Oh, and chocolate is always welcome. :) I’m confused, what is happening? You may not have received our first letter on April 24th; that letter went out to covenanted members of Plymouth only. The short answer is that Rev. Hal Chorpenning is on administrative leave for a fitness review with the Rocky Mountain Conference, United Church of Christ.   Image: B. McBride Last week, I wrote this reflection as part of a visionary care assignment for my Justice & Spiritual Care course at Iliff. The prompt was to imagine my commitments and how to bring them into alignment within my care context. I wanted to share these reflections with you, and I invite you to share your own commitments with me. Much love. - Brooklyn
I am a commitment to wholeness and integrity. I am a commitment to radical, courageous, unconditional love for all people. I am a commitment to truth-telling, liberation, and flourishing. I am loved apart from my importance. I am important because I am loved. I am exactly where God wants me. I will be fully present here until God moves me. To be a peacemaker, I will show up as an empowering cheerleader and empathetic advocate. Small is all – how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. If we want the turmoil in the world to stop, we need to address the turmoil in our small circles. Our church is one of the greatest and most important spaces where we can practice the world as it should be. If we allow dysfunction and other destructive practices in our church, then we cannot expect those problems to change at the large scale. Instead, when we see people speak truth to power, we should respond with empathy and love. That same empathy and love should be extended to all people in pain, and I know there are people in pain across the whole spectrum of the issue we are entrenched in right now. To care for our community, I will lean into mutual aid, where we “work to build a new world, where people create safety through community building and support each other to stop harmful behavior through connection rather than through caging.” Instead of “caging” ourselves and each other, we need to be connecting with each other. We need to be having these complex conversations in the context of our relationships rather than putting our ideas of people into different boxes of right and wrong. Recently, a ministry coach and dear friend of mine taught me about the idea of backpacks and baskets. Her eight-year-old daughter says that God wants us to store in our backpacks things that we always need. Her friends tell her stories that they want her to put in her backpack, but her backpack cannot get too heavy. So at the end of the day, she puts it in a basket. She can carry the basket when she needs to, and she is still holding their story, but she is not carrying it in her backpack. Maybe some of the pain of our congregation needs to go in baskets, not in our backpacks. Now is the time to get abundantly clear about our values and our hopes, as this time requires “the combination of adaptation with intention, wherein the orientation and movement towards life, towards longing, is made graceful in the act of adaptation. This is the process of changing while staying in touch with our deeper purpose and longing.” I wonder what it would look like to ask our congregation: what are we committed to? I wonder if we would find ourselves in alignment. "May our wonder outmatch our wounds," prays Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Black Feminist love evangelist. I want to lead from my wonder, not my wounds. May our wonder outmatch our wounds, and may we recognize that there are deep wounds that need to be healed. - Brooklyn Works Cited
Two Tuk Tuks picked us up at the retreat center's entrance. These tiny open-air taxis look like roller skates, making the ride fun. Three of us were crammed into the back of one, and two of us in the other. This adventure was outside our schedule, but someone got wind of a street market on Tuesday morning. When I found out, I was all in. Hanging with the locals brought me extraordinary joy—and their art! I chatted at length with several merchants. One man made beautiful jewelry out of thin wire. I asked, “Do you make all of this by hand?” He immediately said “yes,” went behind his table, grabbed a piece of wire and tools, and began to show me how he twisted the wire into beautiful designs. Then handed me a simple ring with three spirals atop each other. “Oh!,” I said. How much? He says, “It’s for you.” Then he said, “The first spiral is creation, the second is people, and the third is balance.” Whaaattt!? That’s so good, I thought. I wish I knew his name and story. So, I bought a necklace charm from him, for far more than I wanted. [Insert eye roll—I was probably suckered.] Also, how about the Holy Spirit = Balance? Later today, we practiced a long, spacious 90 minutes of Vinyasa. We started with our hands at our hearts in prayer—pressing our pinky fingers and thumbs together while allowing our three middle fingers to blossom like a lotus flower, meaning divine essence and rebirth. And, then we practiced balance. With eagle pose, half moon pose and dancer pose. To balance takes all of my presence, intention and strength. At the end of our practice, we put our hands together again, bringing them to our foreheads. The teacher calls this our third eye, meaning intuition and inner vision. I like to think of my third eye as the sacred search for self love, peace and harmony within. Then, we say namaste in unison, meaning honoring the divine in self and others. This week, the retreat has focused on healing. Often, we need to heal from a place of grief or loss. Yesterday, I transitioned to the book As Long As You Need, Permission to Grieve by J.S. Park. The author calls himself a grief catcher, and I love that image. He says, “Grief is the debt we pay to live and love and chase the stuff that gives us meaning.” I also got my kids three dream catchers from another merchant today. Some of them may call them grief catchers and that's okay. Sometimes grief needs to be held and heard and wondered about. It made me think of the three spirals on my new ring made by a Costa Rican man at a market. If you are paying attention, wisdom comes to you in the most unexpected places. Balance can allow room for that. Jesus’ story of loss and grief is so powerful that we can heal and rebirth from the ashes of his death. Out of that rebirth, the Holy Spirit moves among us like an energy force and invites us to so many possibilities of equilibrium. Egalitarianism? Equity? Fairness? Justice? Or, as the jewelry maker would say it, balance. Namaste, Marta *P.S. This July, we are going to do a worship and learning series and book study on the book As Long As You Need, Permission to Grieve by J.S. Park. Get your summer flyer in the Overview, or pick it up on Sunday.
Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. - Exodus 20:8
A troop of monkeys gathered in the trees above our heads as we wandered the jungle sidewalks this morning. We were looking for a yoga studio where we could practice at 11 a.m. I said, “Hello, friends!” [to the monkeys] and thanked them for joining the community of saints this morning—all the critters that live among the varieties of palm trees, sweet-smelling flowers, and veiled in a heavy dew. I was so delighted to see these monkeys. They made the ride from Liberia, Costa Rica, to Nosara in a fifteen-passenger van on “developing” roads, worth every nauseous moment the day before. Last fall, I began planning this continuing education week a few months after I finished an academic program at Ilff. My postgraduate work spanned from 2010 to 2023, give or take a few years of break. I wanted a different type of education. I signed up for a yoga and meditation retreat in Costa Rica, not knowing anyone but knowing that my sacred body and mind needed this work to ground my ministry with the sacred bodies and souls of all of you. In the Fall of 2023, I learned that Plymouth’s personnel committee reviews a continuing education proposal from pastors before approving the time away. This is a great way to ensure accountability and a connection to the work. I decided to call the proposal Rest is Resistance. Soon after I decided on this excursion, Rev. Thandiwe Dale-Ferguson, the pastor of First Congregational in Loveland, said she would like to join me. A few days later, her long-time friend Nikki [whom I met during that time period] also wanted to join us! A few months later, I met Allison at the yoga studio in Fort Collins, where she became my traveling companion. Her friend Meg joined us from Delaware. I practiced yoga at Yoga Pod in Fort Collins approximately four times a week and got to know the beautiful instructor, Joy, who is facilitating this retreat in Costa Rica. All of a sudden, it’s monkey business! And I feel like I am hanging in a monkey tree with a barrel of monkeys in the middle of a Costa Rica jungle. Perhaps this is a tiny miracle if you believe in those. I thought I was going alone, but I now have new friends. I knew what my body needed, I knew what my soul needed, and God knew what I needed. Here is what Thandiwe and I worked on together as our continuing education proposal: Rest and sabbath are foundational concepts in scripture. Our creation story includes a full day of rest -- and it’s God resting. If God needs rest, so do we! Jesus regularly retreats and rests. Gospel stories tell us of wilderness and mountain excursions; water turned into wine, and naps in boats. If I have learned nothing this past year, it is that rest and sabbath are necessary and life-sustaining spiritual practices. The practices of rest and sabbath stand in sharp contrast to our culture’s focus on productivity and doing, doing, doing. Occasionally, our “self-care” practices are escapes rather than rest -- watching television, scrolling through our social media feeds, or going on a shopping spree (just to name a few that I enjoy). Do these activities really rest our bodies, minds, and souls? I can’t speak for you, but for me, they don’t. If we are to take scripture seriously, rest is most often characterized by activities that engage our body, mind, and spirit:
More than just a beautiful place to escape, this is an opportunity to rediscover and renew my energy: mind, body, and spirit. It is an opportunity to explore the idea of rest as resistance -- not just as theory but as embodied practice. It is also an opportunity for me to invite our congregation to this mindset. Given my first year at Plymouth and what we know about ministry, this will be an opportunity that I can take to stave off burnout and ensure I am spiritually well as we continue our shared ministry. And, of course, this kind of “rest as resistance” learning must involve more than just a yoga retreat. I listed some books in the original proposal. But I was recently given some new books that feel more relevant to the church and me. My retreat reading will include:
In my original proposal, I suggested regularly journaling. Instead, I plan to write several blog posts about this time to share with all of you this week. Your connection to me and this work is important. Tricia Hersey writes about rest as a form of protest against production. She writes about her lived experience as a melanated person. She says, “Rest supports our grieving by allowing space, and with space, we can begin healing from the trauma of grind culture [or healing from the trauma of anything]. Grieving is a sacred act and one of the ways we can begin to reconnect with our bodies as we craft a rest practice.” What is your “rest practice” going to be this week? How do we transform grief into power? Lay and rest in these questions. ~ Marta |
|
RSS Feed