One of MCCGSL’s core values is social justice.

One of MCCGSL’s core values is social justice. More and more, social justice is critical to achieving our mission, vision, and promotion of human flourishing in our congregation and within our extended communities.

We have done some amazing things with your support, urging, and generative impact and now we are excited to announce that we are formalizing and strengthening that support and impact by adding a Social Justice Team to help us have a stronger voice and bigger impact in our world and our communities. As more people, sister organizations, and community members look toward us to help bend the arc of justice, comes the need to add more "helping hands" to continue the work and grow our impact.  

With excitement and joy, we announce/introduce Julie Hurst who has agreed to serve as the leader of our newly established Social Justice Team! What a blessing to have her lead us in this new endeavor.

Below is a letter from Julie: 

“As a lifelong Christian, I have always embraced a personal mission to live like Jesus and I take that deeply to heart. To me, that means it is crucial to create a world where everyone has what they need to survive and knows they are loved exactly as they are. It is my joy to be part of a congregation which shares this passion.

I am thrilled to join in announcing the official launch of our Social Justice Team. This team will deepen and build on the work we have done and are doing.

Our goal is to move forward with greater intentionality, building a liberating movement both within and beyond our church walls.

The Social Justice Team will begin its work with strategic planning, collaborating closely with church leadership to ensure our efforts align with our broader mission and vision.

Our suggested plan is that each quarter, we will offer educational programming and advocacy opportunities. This may include book studies, movie viewing and discussion, guest speakers, testifying before elected officials, or letter writing campaigns. 

We will work with the pastoral staff to continue to deepen relationships with other community organizations. Prior to election time, the team will host a voter education forum and help folx develop a plan to vote. And through it all we will keep the congregation informed of upcoming social justice opportunities and plans. 

While our long-term vision is to create lasting societal change, we recognize that many in our community need help simply to make it through today. Therefore, we will also coordinate mission and charity programs to provide immediate support. These service projects will allow us to show up for our congregation and neighborhood in tangible and necessary ways.

These are lofty goals, and they require a dedicated team with a shared desire to transform community. 

So, if you are ready to help make MCCGSL and St. Louis a place where all people can thrive -- please sign-up to join the Social Justice Team today (or at least to learn more about our next steps)!”

Creating a Community Where ALL can Flourish, 
Rev. Lauren Bennett and Julie Hurst

All Things New

All Things New

I sense a need for a revival in the Christian church -- not just MCCGSL, but the church as a whole. For too long, violence, bullying, and bigotry have been used by the highest office in our country, passed off as an expression of holiness. Threatening genocide, allowing conversion therapy to continue, and stripping rights of trans people are just some examples of ways Christianity has been used as a front for evil acts. 

The name of God, the name of Jesus, and the practice of The Way has been co-opted by people who invoke their religion to do nothing but oppress, while gaining riches for themselves. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in predominately white Christian churches or people claiming to be Christian, who have clearly never opened a Bible. 

As a Christian pastor, I'm sometimes worried about claiming that place in the world too loudly. I don't want it to seem that I am behind these egregious acts done in my name as a Christian or an American. 

This week, I woke up in the middle of the night convicted that I need to claim my faith in a more evangelical way. If you Google "evangelical" the first things that come up are all about the evangelical movement -- one that claims to "follow the way of Jesus and is focused on scripture-study." The word evangelical comes from the Greek and means "Good news." I think it's time we reclaim this word - to offer Good News in our work, words, and study. Progressive Protestants are well educated in Biblical teachings -- let us claim our part in being well-versed in the Bible. It is time to claim where good news comes from -- in human flourishing, in doing our part to mend creation. 

Friends, it is time to get serious about our faith and claim it's impact on our hearts. To follow the way of Jesus with wide, expansive love and earnestness. To claim who we are in the world. 

Even though I may be hesitant to claim my Christian faith with the way "Christianity" is thrown around to bless hideous behavior, I often end up in long conversations after “coming out” as a Christian minister. Just today when getting a coffee, someone complimented my necklace. I told them about our church, and she said she has never met a pastor before. After saying more about us, she said she might have to come sometime — as we are doing something different than the Christianity depicted in the news — and that IS good news. 

This season, we will be exploring the theme All Things New, examining stories of beginnings, conversation, and fresh starts. How might we use this time to cultivate our hearts and create space for good news? How might be prepare our lives to embody a new way, a fresh perspective, a new Christianity. 

To help enlighten and prepare us, we have two opportunities to join in study and community: 

Join Faye Branum for a poetry writing class. You don’t need to be good at writing! Think of this as an opportunity to open your heart to the seeds growing in you. 

Join Pastor Tijuana for a reading of Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. This book will get you thinking about new seeds that need to be planted through a science fiction perspective.

Whatever you do, may this season be a time of exploration as we claim our role in showing the true side of Christianity -- one of kindness, love, and joy. 

Blessings, 
Pastor Lauren

Embracing the Gifts of the Dark Wood

This Lent, we are invited to embrace the Gifts of the Dark Wood. These are the moments when hope feels distant, when clarity fades, and when everything familiar falls away. These are not moments we would choose, but they are often the very places where something unexpected begins to grow. When everything else is stripped away, we are able to see what truly remains, what is unable to be taken away, and whose presence has been there all along. 

Lent reminds us that faith, wholeness, and even glimpses of heaven are not found in the absence of struggle, but in the very heart of it. This does not mean suffering is sent by God, is the result of inaction from God, or that hardship is something to be glorified. Rather, it means that when we find ourselves in those dark and tender places, we may discover what is most essential. We may discover what endures. We may discover a love that does not leave us.

And yet, if we are honest, it can be incredibly difficult to see God in the midst of heartbreak and hardship. It can be difficult to find any sense of meaning when we or those we love are hurting.

Rev. Lauren and I attended the Faith and Justice Rally on the Martin Luther King Bridge, and we heard countless stories of the fear and violence that is being done to our immigrant siblings and families. People who are human, people who have found a home in America, people who have children, people who have jobs, people who just want to live a happy life who are fearful and scared for their very lives. Tears fell down the faces of so many people as we heard and held these stories. 

And alongside that, we saw God in organizations that provide clothing, food, transportation, and safety to those who have been wrongfully detained by ICE. We saw God in voices lifted together in songs of resistance, in prayers of hope, in cries for justice. We saw God when our hearts broke open for one another instead of turning away. We knew standing there together, that God’s heart was surely breaking beside us all, crying out for all of us who were lost, uncertain, and exhausted.

We were a witness to something greater than our present circumstances, and being called to be courageous. We were being called to action. Called to be a beloved family. We saw hands reach for one another and refuse to let go. We saw courage rise in the face of fear and uncertainty. We saw people of different races, immigration statuses, and faith traditions stand together, united by love. I do not know if we can always see God in suffering itself. But I believe with my whole heart that we can see God in what rises from the ashes.

In this season of Lent, as we walk through our own Dark Woods together, in our own places of uncertainty, grief, and vulnerability, may we remember this truth: the dark is not empty. It is not barren. It is not the end of the story. It is the place where God meets us, holds us, and reminds us that even here, especially here, we are not alone.

In Solidarity,
Pastor Eli

Reverberations of Love in Community

I have to say, I am a sucker for the heart-shaped items that are prolific in the days leading up to Valentine's Day. This week, when visiting someone in the Heart Hospital, I delighted in the heart-shaped balloons that adorned the hallway while nurses sported hearts on their scrubs. While it's fun to think about St. Valentine and the revolutionary weddings he performed that led us to a weekend we celebrate romantic love, I was moved this way in celebration of the love of community. 

This week, at the Maplewood City Council Meeting, nearly 10 people spoke in support of an overnight prayer vigil that has taken place at Maplewood UMC during the coldest nights this winter. Maplewood, a city within St. Louis County, is a quirky municipality known for wholesome festivals, good restaurants, and a supportive community. So, it might stand out that there is a restriction that prevents an emergency shelter from being set up in the City of Maplewood. 

Maplewood UMC went into action. Knowing they couldn’t have a shelter, they set up an overnight prayer vigil for peace and justice to bring together anyone in the community who wanted to pray for their neighbors and pray for each other throughout the night. 

In the downstairs fellowship hall, adorned with twinkle lights and round tables, the room buzzed with sweet energy of communion when I came for my first shift at 4am. In our tradition, we celebrate communion as a sacred meal Jesus shared with his friends and disciples, a time to reflect, to mourn, to pray, and to prepare for the work of community away from the table. Communion does not need wine or bread, though. Communion is about sharing hope, delight, and space to be vulnerable. When I joined the table at 4am, I couldn’t tell who was a pastor and who a congregant; who a member of MUMC and who from the community. Surely some came to escape the physical cold, looking for warmth in the middle of the night. Others came to escape the chill of the heart reverberating in our news cycles, our fears, and our nightmares. At the table, we shared everything from very personal situations to national headlines. Prayer and communion were shared in the middle of the night, a time when most of us have to face our insecurities alone. Maplewood UMC made a way for us to share them on a night when vulnerability was felt even more acutely, when the thermometer read far below zero. 

Throughout the section for public comment, person after person (including our own Maplewood resident Deborah Sheperis) came forward offering loving support for such prayer vigils and told stories of love incarnate experienced in sharing a table, stories, and perhaps a nap in the middle of the night. 

As we celebrate the gift of love in our community, I am heartened by the city of Maplewood, whose residents and council members are finding a way to work within the system to support vulnerable people now while also trying to change the system for more substantive support later. 

How are you noticing the reverberations of love in your life? 

Blessings,
Pastor Lauren

How The Light Comes

I cannot say which I love best about the light:
that it gathers itself even in what goes hidden,
no stranger to the seed, the stone, the labyrinth of night,
or that it is wildly generous in where it lands, glad the same to
touch the face of the one in laughter, the one in tears, the one in trouble,
in fear, in pain.But it may yet be that this is what woos me most about the light: 
that it knows what to do with distance, how it arcs across the space between a heart
and a heart, illuminatingly that ache through which the farthest of stars might be seen.

⁃ Jan Richardson 

Last week as activists came together in Missouri, I was with activists in DC gathering together to coalesce around topics that breathe life into us, as others try to restrict that very breath. 

This year, we celebrated the 10th Anniversary of the Many Paths Gathering Space an interfaith center for contemplation, spiritual healing, and community at Creating Change, the nation's largest queer-centered conference. This space was created because of the ways religion has been a catalyst for reform, in ways that harm and in ways that heal. We know that in working toward freedom in the public space, we also have to work for freedom in the soul. And so, as a group, we held prayer vigils, we sung, we talked about the Bible, the Torah, and offered a space for daily Muslim prayer. We created walls to uplift queer saints who have shown us the way, and offered space for people to write down their prayers. On our altar, we had a station of dissolving paper where people could come and write something down to let go of, reminding all of us that we don't have to hold it all alone. Many people came right to this station and left, needing only to leave something behind, in which they could not carry alone anymore. 

As we consider what it means to be a people of daybreak, daylight, and, these days, as we often sit in the long shadows of evening, I’m reminded of the need for us to tend to the space between our hearts — to ache, to laugh, to subvert, and to release. 

Today, in the light of evening, what woos you about the light? What tends to the sighs of your heart? What binds you to the inner and outer work of a faith rooted in love but too often used for harm? 

With you in the shadows, 
Pastor Lauren 

For Such A Time As This

This past Tuesday, I traveled to Jefferson City to testify against the removal of the sunset on bills that could permanently ban gender-affirming medical care for trans youth in Missouri and permanently bar trans youth from participating in sports alongside their peers.

What happens in Missouri matters. Many states look to Missouri to see what is possible legislatively, so what gets passed here — and what does not — carries weight far beyond our borders.

As I’ve been reflecting on this week, I keep returning to our theme: By a Different Light. On Sunday, we will talk about day — about how daylight exposes what has been hidden, how it calls things out into the open. And that truth feels especially present right now.

There is a growing number of trans adults, parents of trans kids, and even medical professionals who are afraid to testify publicly against these bills. They are afraid of retaliation, professional consequences, harassment, and real harm. To speak in the light right now comes with real risk.

I am deeply grateful, and humbled, to serve in a role where I can speak not only as a faith leader, but as a trans faith leader, calling our representatives toward a deeper practice of justice, mercy, and compassion. To invite them into holy curiosity about the lives that are most impacted by these decisions. To ask them to truly listen to those who are being harmed.

On Wednesday morning, I also joined dozens of organizations from across the state at a rally in the Capitol rotunda. We linked arms and stood shoulder to shoulder, singing and chanting, reminding one another that we show up for one another. We show up for Black lives. For immigrant lives. For trans lives. For queer lives. For workers’ lives. Because together, our voices carry a deeply moving power.

That rally was deeply needed after the heartbreaking and exhausting hearing on Tuesday. Missourians have been fighting these anti-trans bills for years now, and at times it feels as though those in power have not heard a word, as though harm is dismissed in the pursuit of an agenda at any cost.

And yet, I remain honored to be one voice among many who continue to speak love into the hearing rooms. Love for trans youth who desperately need to know they are not alone. Love for parents doing everything they can to protect their children. Love for trans adults who are not only advocating for today’s youth, but also for the younger versions of themselves, the children who always knew who they were.

For such a time as this, my friends, it is urgent that we keep showing up. Each in the ways we can. Whether that looks like someone who knits blankets for trans folks who testify, wrapping them in warmth and protection. Whether it means traveling to Jefferson City, attending a rally, having hard conversations with loved ones, or choosing to hope even when hope feels fragile and distant and perhaps beyond our reach.

This work is not easy. But it is sacred. And it matters deeply. When we share our light and our love, when we refuse to turn away from one another, we participate in bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice, peace, freedom, and love for all. May we keep showing up. May we keep loving boldly. And may we continue to believe that what we do, as we link arm in arm, truly matters.

In Solidarity,
Pastor Eli