Dear Friends in Christ,

Last Sunday, we adapted our plans for our worship and annual meeting. With late-morning snow predicted, we worshipped for a half-hour without the bulletin and started our annual meeting at 10:30am in the sanctuary. We were “out the doors” shortly after 11 am as the storm started.

Adaptation allowed us to return to our homes with the assurance of being safer. Whether it’s about safety or survival, adaptation is a human gift from God that permits us to move forward with life.

These days, it’s good to remember this. Our world has been changing in disconcerting ways. Secular political leaders have developed and adopted reprehensible ways of governing that could become normalized. Churches have moved to the sidelines of our culture at a moment when society desperately needs our witness of Christ-like values and ways of practicing caring relationship with one another. Adaptation of our ways of being and practicing church is being called for.

This upcoming Sunday, we’ll continue our series on parables, stories by which Jesus taught his followers how to adapt their usual ways of human thinking and acting that too frequently resulted in insensitivity, violence, and destruction. These ways stood – and still stand – in stark contrast to more divine ways of imagining and bringing forth a new order, one worthy of being called the Kingdom – or Kin-dom – of God.

As followers of Jesus and participants in the church, ours is a divine calling. God yearns for our Christ-like humanity to be more effectively seen and adopted in the world.

How might we achieve our calling? It could start with learning from – and being transformed by – Jesus’ parables.

Blessings of Adaptation,
Pastor Ed