Celebrations!

This week has brought a good number of things that we, as a congregation, should celebrate. First, we celebrate the marvelously good and tremendously pointed Youth Sunday this past weekend.  The youth allowed us to have insight into their lives and what they have been learning as they grow in their faith through the ministry of Western Hills.  The Seniors who formed a good deal of the leadership core for the worship service will be departing from us this fall.  However, if you attended worship last Sunday, you know there is great hope for the world as they go.  Congrats!

We will celebrate our graduating seniors this week in worship, hear about their future plans and see them off into young adulthood.  It is to the credit of this congregation that I see them leaving with a great Christian foundation for life, great relationships for the future, and a great church to come home to when the semesters are over.  We will see a number of them receive scholarships from Western Hills for their future education.  If you have loved, given time, talent and treasure, prayed or otherwise participated in their lives – Congratulations! We have accomplished what we hoped to accomplish with the help of all of you doing the works of ministry and the Spirit of God working with us and these young adults to move them to this point. If they were Baptized here, you kept the vows made at their Baptisms to “so order your lives after the example of Christ…and pray for them that they may be true disciples who walk in the way that leads to Life.”  Congrats!

If you were here on Easter, you saw a new class of Confirmands taking their vows of loyalty to Jesus, being Baptized into the faith and taking their vows of loyalty to the Church.  At the same time, students at The Ridge were also doing the same in their own worship service, even though they had been part of our class this year.  There is no greater validation of ministry than to experience the culmination of promises and vows taken seriously enough to see them to that point.  Can you imagine how great they will be as seniors?  Congrats!

If you were here in the last couple of weeks, you heard how our “Helping Hands” funds in the church treasury were utilized to send a representative from Western Hills to the Methodist Children’s Hospital in San Antonio.  Young Miranda, a four-year-old deaf girl who is part of Sidewalk Sunday School, was given cochlear implants for her ears.  Mary Bell Haney saw she and her mother through a whole variety of new experiences and places that will be unforgettable in their lives.  Mary Bell was by the family home in Westway this week, and Miranda is already hearing out of her right ear well enough to begin using the language skills she so desperately needed.  Already, she is beginning to speak in sentences.  It is miraculous for her to recover speech so far into her childhood.  So, if you have been or have ever thought about giving to that fund, just know there are a multitude of missions to do through the fund. And, if you have been giving to it, I hope you will celebrate with a quiet sense of satisfaction knowing your gifts are continuing to make huge differences for others.  Congrats!

The past two weeks we have welcomed into our midst two well-qualified candidates for the Director of Music Ministry position vacated by Paul Gamber last summer.  It has been a long and sometimes disappointing process to find candidates, however, both the Interview Team and the SPRC were committed to finding the person God was intending to bring to us, not just someone to “fill the slot.”  If we have indeed found the person in these two candidates, it will be a thrill to welcome them to an excellent congregation with excellent music opportunities.  Marshaling all of the financial resources we will need in an already tight budget year will take some intentionality on the part of our leaders. However, we know the investment will be worth it.

We have tried to discern God’s candidate through prayer and discernment.  We have used a “4-C” criteria, seeking to determine how well candidates we invited to come met with us through Chemistry (how well we believe they will mix with us and we with them), Character (observing and asking questions of they and their references about their Christian character), Competency (do they have the proper skills for a position such as ours) and finally, Contribution (what do we believe each of them can do to enhance what we do in music).  One thing I can tell you – you all deserve a word of congratulations for your prayers as we worked through the process and for presenting yourselves well whenever someone was in town for a visit.  Congrats!

Finally, we will be saying goodbye to Chrisie Reeves in about 6 weeks as she continues answering God’s call to her for the Ordained Ministry.  She will leave to attend United Methodist’s Duke Divinity School to complete her education, then return to serve in our Annual Conference.  We wish her Godspeed even now, and seek your prayers that God will indeed lead us to the next person He would have working with adult volunteers and children at the Thunderbird campus.

See you soon, where the comings and goings are constant, but so is the Presence of the One who calls us out of darkness and into His marvelous light.

Pastor Mark

I’ll Fly Away?

The notes and words of the old Hank Williams tune still ring in my ears.  We were in a prison and completing a three day weekend discipleship experience entitled Kairos with residents of the facility.  Our closing song was that one – I’ll Fly Away.

I am sure the song carried an abundance of meaning for hardened prison residents that I was unable to realize.  Just a few more weary hours and then, I was going home.  They were not.  They sang the notes in a “lustily” manner that would have made John and Charles Wesley proud.  Three days before, they would not even speak.  God and the members of our team had made an amazing difference in their world in just three short days.  They were ready to fly from the prison bars, yet, knew it might be a long time coming.  Still, they had solid hope in the God we had helped them experience.

If you have listened to the news or religious television, you probably know that the “rapture” as a Christian experience will come with the dawn of Saturday morning.  If it occurs as predicted, the Rapture of Christians to be taken up to heaven will begin with sunrise in the western Pacific and move across the globe with the sunrise.  Everyone who is a “true believer in Jesus Christ” will be taken up into the clouds so that the earth can be given over to the time of “tribulation” as described in John’s Revelation.  So, I wonder, if we see each other Sunday, what will that mean?

I suppose it should mean I would need to be fired – not something easily done in our system – however, it would seem I had not been a true believer or convinced anyone else to be one either.

I suppose it could mean that if we are here but several others are unaccounted for, they got it right and we didn’t.  We will be here to suffer while their belief has been rewarded with escape.

I suppose it could mean that we have been wrong in our current study of the Book of Revelation on Sunday mornings, which may mean, I should be fired yet again.

I suppose it could mean that someone was wrong about what is to really occur on Saturday and the calculations by Harold Camping are all wrong, yet again.

I predict our presence with each other will mean that we are to stay about the work of the Kingdom until we see Christ.  If in our lifetime we do not, we echo Paul’s words, “to live is Christ, to die is gain.”  To be about the ministry of God’s Kingdom until he comes is our mission, given to us by Jesus, it is not to sit idly by while the world goes to hell, just because I belong to those who will be rescued.  If you think about it, why aren’t the followers of Camping doing more to ensure as many people as possible are making the Rapture trip with him?  Don’t you think it is important enough information that the whole world should hear and be saved?  Should they not be beating down doors, talking their heads off, spending every available minute and dime for air time to get the word out?

Come to think of it, if we really believe the message of Christ strongly enough, shouldn’t we?   If we really believed that souls were eternally lost without the message of Christ being delivered to them, would we not be doing the same?  If we don’t believe faith in Christ is essential for complete joy and fulfillment in this life and the next, what God are we worshipping anyway?  I predict that if we saw someone about to commit a life-changing and egregious error, we would do all we could to prevent it.  I predict if we were to have input into the life of a mother, we would tell her not to inject her daughter with Botox.  Why treat the Gospel any differently?

I will see you Sunday, unless……

Pastor Mark