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June 27th, 2018

6/27/2018

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 Last week I received this email from Bart Reed about our matching grant for our new online giving option (here on the website):
 
While I'm not 100% sure of the final total, I know that we had 6 new $200 commitments come in last week, which puts us over $5000 from over 20 donors.  That means we have hit our full match!   I think it has been a huge success.
 
I agree with Bart and want to invite you to recognize what a huge success this is for all of us. We are facing our financial fitness as a challenge of our vitality, and this is a very concrete sign of our financial fitness moving in a positive direction. The vitality we have witnessed in other areas of our community has at least in part reached the bottom line of our financial fitness.  Although this does not completely solve our deficit, like all the other challenges of our vitality we have faced it is so very important to recognize this first, incremental step.
 
We’ve had many other encouraging signs in the past like having 15 new pledges for 2018 and being on track to fully pay for our capital campaign by the end of the year.  We have stepped up to generously support specific missional needs. We have even taken on a new year-round missional commitment, The Sheridan Story, and have with the help a generous donor kept current with our financial commitment. (You can learn more about The Sheridan Story during worship Sunday, July 29.)
 
With this online matching grant, we have begun the more difficult struggle of bringing our projected income and our projected expenses for the entire year closer than they were before. Our Stewardship/Finance Team is doing its best to be transparent in reporting on our financial fitness. I want to encourage all of us to take a more active role in monitoring our giving as we continue to become a financially fit congregation that is growing in vitality.
 
One other thing:  The other night I was in a meeting where we were talking about online giving and the mechanics of how it worked. One of the folks in the room who is quite computer literate was a bit embarrassed that she had not checked out the online giving option on our website, and the rest of us were walking her through it on my computer. 
 
I was a good guinea pig mostly because I know just enough to get confused on my computer and also because I’d already given to the match. I signed in. Then I remembered my password, which was the hardest part and the miracle of the evening. When it came to the part of putting in a dollar amount, I played along and put in $100 and waited for the prompt to put in my account information. The thing is that since I had done this once before, I didn’t need to. I kept playing along and made the next choice which was… “One time gift.” And then I choose the “General Fund” and then I decided to press, “Donate Now.”

Then I said to myself, "That was a fun way to spend a 100 bucks.”  Somebody there asked me, “Did you just really do that?”  I said “Yea, it was that easy.”
 
Now I’m not trying to get any attention for giving an extra $100. I’m telling you it took longer for me to write the last paragraph than it did to address the challenge of our vitality of our financial fitness by giving online. Here is hoping you have as much fun as I did. 
 
Thank you to all those who got our online giving…on line. And thank you to those generous givers who provided the funds for the matching grant and for those who gave until we reached our goal.

Keep the Faith,
​Pastor Dan

 
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Weekly Memo: A Rainbow Sign

6/14/2018

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Eden Prairie UMC has been what our denomination, (United Methodist) calls a Reconciling Congregation for over a decade. Being a Reconciling Congregation can mean different things to different people. For most of us at EPUMC, it means that we value the great diversity of God’s creation and want to be clear that we believe the LGBTQ+ community is a vital part of our humanity. 
 
This Sunday we will celebrate our 2nd “Reconciling Sunday.” Our rainbow will be up in the sanctuary. We will rededicate our Rainbow flag. And if you ordered a reconciling tee shirt, I want to invite you to wear it to church; I will be wearing mine.
 
Putting a particular name on a given Sunday is a tricky business for me. Every Sunday in worship is meant to be a recognition and a celebration of the new life God has promised us in the scriptures through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When we designate a Sunday for any other purpose, even the most important and relevant, we can also be tempted to leave Jesus out of it.
 
This is why our worship design team does its very best to begin our worship planning in scripture. This coming Sunday is a good example. We recognize that the place of the LGBTQ+ folks is very visible at EPUMC by the “Rainbow” flag we fly out front and the “Rainbow” that will hang in our sanctuary all summer. So of course the first scripture a lot of us think about is the story from Genesis of Noah and the Rainbow. (I’ve just read of a new “pride’ flag that looks a little different and has a few more colors, but if you can give me this one today, I’d appreciate it.)
 
In that scripture, after causing a great flood that almost wipes out all creation and all humanity along with it, God promises Noah, one of the few human beings left, that he will never do anything like that again, no matter how much humanity upsets him. And so God, to both remind herself and humanity of this promise, creates a rainbow. 
 
In our scriptures the rainbow is a subtle and complex image. It asks some interesting questions about the nature of God and our relationship with God. This scripture invites us to consider that what God intended us to be as human beings is a work in progress. It also says that no matter how wrong we human beings might be about working our humanness, God is not going to give up on us. 
 
On Sunday we are going to recognize that standing together with our brothers and sisters of the GLBTQ+ community, loving and accepting people for who they are, understanding our humanity’s need for each other, is -- we believe -- working with God to bring all creation to the place God intended, the new life God showed us in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus.
 
Keep the Faith,
Pastor Dan
P.S.
Our Stewardship/Finance team has extended the time for you to give $200 or more on line to help us meet a matching challenge of up to $5,000. It looks like now we will end up generating around $8,000 through this emphasis
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Weekly Memo: Faithfulness

6/7/2018

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I texted my friend Don the other day. I hadn’t seen him in a while and I wondered where he was. I also asked how his father was doing. My friend’s response surprised me, “He has 1 or 2 days left from what they tell me.  It is time.” 
 
Don and I have become what I’d like to think of as good friends. He is a recently retired, very successful businessman who has traveled the world but likes to hang out with guys like me. One of the things I have known about Don is that he visited with his dad every single day he wasn’t traveling. I’ve listened as Don told about how his dad was doing or what they talked about or what they had for lunch. 
 
What so impressed me is that Don talked about his dad and these visits, not like it was some great sacrifice on his part but more like a privilege, something he wanted to do. You should hear the story about the time Don got caught up in playing the favorite songs of his father on his phone.
 
When his father died, my friend texted me soon afterwards; this moved me.

Hearing from a buddy that you hang out with about something of this depth of importance in their lives… has not happened to me much. Don’s faithfulness to our friendship underscores the greater faithfulness to his father and my guess is to most of the other relationships of his life.
 
Faithfulness is a word I don’t often use. I save it for a moment of depth and importance. Faithfulness is not only the loyalty or reliability that can be measured; it is also the devotion, the sense of trust that happens when a relationship reaches a depth of intimacy that is beyond reason or words. Faithfulness is not only doing what is required, what you should or have to do; faithfulness believes that nothing transcends a relationship, that there is a divine purpose in our connection to one another.
 
Just what exactly that divine purpose might be is a subject for someone above my pay grade to address. If you gave me a guess, I’d say that we catch a glimpse of God’s devotion to be in relationship with us when we are faithful in our most intimate relationships with others. When we give of ourselves in this way, freely, unreservedly and risk the pain that faithfulness can bring, I believe we also come to understand what Jesus was talking about when he said, Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.”( John 13:34-35, The Message)
 
Thornton Wilder at the end of his novel, The Bridge at San Luis Rey wrote about the divine purpose of love. I offer this to my friend Don and all those who have been and are faithful.
 
                There is a land of the living
                                And a land of the dead.
                                                And the bridge is love,
                                                                The only survival
                                                                                The only meaning.
 
Keep the Faith,
Pastor Dan
 


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15050 Scenic Heights Road
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