Welcome!

As your interim Pastor I hope to provide a "non-anxious presence" so we can work together in ministry and healing. We know that to become healthy we need to deal openly with our feelings and emotions. I am available as your pastor to work with you, dialog and listen, and pastorally to assist as best as I am able. For this to happen, I need your trust and willingness to schedule times when we can get together.

Let's work together to make Community Congregational United Church of Christ most meaningful and spirit directed faith family. To be a community of faith, we need every member to take seriously weekly worship. Lent begins on Sunday, February 21. This is the ideal time to fill the sanctuary as we prepare for the passion of Christ. Take part in activities and continue genuine, committed financial support. God works through us, and this is our opportunity to work beyond where we are.

Shalom Pastor Michelle

Pastor Michelle’s Musings, February 21, 2010

This week I am thinking about meetings. Churches are famous for meetings of all kinds. Most people grimace at the thought of going to a meeting – for their seeming long-windedness, for their drawn out length of time, having to sit so long, not sure if what’s being discussed or decided has any import for anything important, sometimes fear of conflict with other folks at the meeting, and so on.

Friday I attended an all-day meeting. (I can hear your groans.) It was the monthly meeting of Illinois Maya Ministry, an international (Guatemala, Mexico) group of which I’ve been a part for many years. (In fact, some of you first met me when I did a Guatemalan presentation at this church a few years ago.). Anyway, at this meeting, one item was to decide on the when and where to have an immigration forum we will soon sponsor. Concern about our depressed (or is that recessed?) economy and concern about people’s precious discretionary time, we spent long time hashing out where we could do this event at a price reasonable enough that folks could and actually would come. We talked about this six ways to Sunday, as they say, and after about an hour, came up with something “we could all live with.” With usually means, the least objectionable resolution.

About the time we were poised to “go to print” with this resolution, one participant said, “What if we change the event to make it one day rather than an overnight?” Now, you may wonder why this option was not discussed before this point. I can only say that, “the way we’ve always done it” is to have it an overnight. Perhaps one or more of us had considered squeezing it all into one day but didn’t raise it, thinking “it couldn’t be done.” (Where have you heard these terms before?)

When Michael raised this, it was like a fresh wind blew into the room. (Surely that’s why the Holy Spirit is often described as ‘wind’?) It resolved the economic issue and the preciousness of time issue altogether. We now had the challenge of compressing the forum’s agenda, but that prospect suddenly seemed very easy to manage when weighed against the advantages of less cost money-wise and less cost time-wise.

My point here is this: What if we hadn’t spend that hour hashing it out this way until we got to IT? If we’d wanted to hurry it through, we would have settled on an option that we all knew in our heart and gut would be burdensome for ourselves and others. So we kept mulling it and mushing it. And then IT appeared.

This, I have experienced, is often how the best group decisions are made. IT appears often only after we’ve exhausted all our usual, easily thought of, within-the-box suggestions. From Friday’s meeting, I am reminded of three truths: to appreciate the process of good decision making in a group even when it seems tedious or boring or frustrating to me personally, to trust that IT is out there even if it seems elusive to me at the moment, and to try to think “outside the box” sooner!

When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth.
--Jesus, assuring His followers, in Gospel of John 16:13a

Pastor Michelle