November is always an excellent time to talk about Stewardship. Even outside of the church walls, we’re planning ahead for next year even as we are giving thanks for many of the gifts we’ve received this year, and heading towards the close of the calendar year. Awareness of our blessings and planning for a new year actually make for a great mix—that simultaneous awareness of our responsibility and our giftedness is exactly how we should live our lives. So as you think about the grocery list for Thanksgiving and the gift lists for Christmas, take a minute to evaluate how you might help your church’s mission in the coming year, and please bring your pledge card on Sunday if you can. Many of them have already been received, and we plan to have a moment of blessing and celebration during the service.

As we move toward the end of this calendar year, and even as we rush headlong into the holidays, as a church we need also to be thinking about next year. We’ll be considering the budget—which is one expression of our goals and priorities—and making plans.

The tricky part of making plans, of course, is refusing to let the past hold back the future. And this is especially tricky when we liked the past. Maybe we preferred it to the present. Let’s be honest: most of us do, in this time after (we hope) the worst of Covid. We liked assuming that we were neither especially vulnerable nor likely to be a vector of disease toward someone else more vulnerable than we are. We liked the freedom and security we used to feel. We liked what things used to look like.

However . . .

In November, we often think of gathering. In our location, we don’t have the same agricultural rhythms that sustain farming communities, that daily awareness of bringing the harvest home while it is ripe and ready and before bad weather sets in, but we do still have some primitive internal response to the nip in the air and to the cold winds, sending us homeward. And we also have the annual rhythms of the calendar of our culture, prompting us to think about family and feasting and thankfulness.

I heard a talk last night on pastoring, from a professor of mine from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Dr. Owens always stretches me. I prefer to think of to-do lists and goals and tasks accomplished, and he invites me to take a little time to just sit in God’s presence. For me, and I imagine for some of you, it is very difficult to sit still sometimes.

His talk was about pastoring after the pandemic, and some of the things we should consider. I’ll be thinking about his talk for some time, but here’s one aspect I thought I’d bring to you this week; it’s time to step back from our ideas of the way things are “supposed” to be.

My current morning reading is for my clergy community, from Mindy Caliguire’s Discovering Soul Care. This morning’s passage started like this:

Transformation occurs through a joint effort between God, who supplies the power, the love, the knowledge and the vision, and each one of us, who bring nothing more to the table than our openness and willingness.

Caliguire wants to remind us that our relationship with God is not all about work and activity—it’s not all about us applying our efforts. We Methodists love to “do,” and while applying ourselves can be useful and effective for many things, and even for some aspects of our life with God, we also can be confident that God is always seeking us, always reaching out. So, sometimes, all we need to do is receive.

This past weekend I spent three and half days with other clergy, thinking and talking about church plants and revitalization—and it was good. Covid has forced churches from around the country to think and talk about what’s next, and while it’s difficult work, it’s also a blessing. We have a clean slate—a fresh start. And we can do the work to make sure it’s a good one.

I’m heading out tomorrow for an “immersion retreat” called Rooted. It’s a small, focused Methodist conference that D.S. Ackley-Killian nominated me for, about building the church from wherever we find ourselves. I’m looking forward to many conversations about what’s reaching different groups now, and how to build on that.

On the Sabbath, we remember that we receive, as well as work and give. We take time to remember and spend time with the God who created us, and who creates all things, including the food we eat and the air we breathe and the time we inhabit. Even though what we do matters, the world’s running does not depend on us.

What do we see in the world around us? What do we notice? This week’s scripture has me pondering this question.

This week we’re gearing up for the Meet the Pastor event on Sunday—we’ll worship together and then have refreshments after. I’m really looking forward to it, to meeting some people who haven’t been able to make it back yet.

In my reading and preparation for this week I came across this definition of community: community is people who know you and whose stories you know. That’s the kind of community we already have at McKnight, and it’s one of the blessings of a small-to-medium church: it really is possible to know your entire church community.

I started a new Parables class at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary this week. Theoretically I’m done with seminary—I do have my M.Div.—but I miss that particular challenge. Plus it was a chance to take another class with a favorite professor, even if I’m auditing this one in order to make sure that it only adds to and doesn’t take time from my primary focus on McKnight, where we’re starting to see some new things come together!

My office is in good order, and we’ve been quietly working on making the upstairs even more welcoming to families, because I heard your interest in including new families in our outreach efforts. 

I’ve been seeing the preschool teachers’ cars in the parking lot as I come to church each morning—I am so looking forward to hearing the children on the playground outside my office window! In our button-pushing modern world, very young children remind us that there is much to learn and much living to do outside of our (definitely handy and sometimes even fun) electronic devices: the sheer exuberance of movement, the uninhibited freedom to call out loud, and the immediacy of the small things worth noticing, like the ladybug or the strange caterpillar.

These, too, are blessings, offered to us quietly. 

As I prepare for worship this Sunday, I’m once again spending time reading and studying Jeremiah and some of the many things that people have written about Jeremiah. As I was reading this morning, I came across this: Walter Brueggemann says that Jeremiah “has the powerful capacity to cause us to re-discern our own situation, to experience our own historical situation with new liberty and fresh passion—liberty and passion that arise in and with faithfulness.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about church this week: what it is, what we do, why we do it, and, here at McKnight, where we are going. I’ve heard from some of you, puzzled as to why some (often younger) people now think they don’t need to come to church each week, or that they think it enough that they worship on their own. And we should spend some time exploring those questions, because in the Bible people worship together as well as pray individually.

From Prayer in the Night, by Tish Harrison Warren.

In the meantime, we do not stop asking our questions of God. He allows us to ask them when we need to because he loves us. And we bring our perplexity into the prayers and practices of the church so that they can shape and direct our own questions.

The guest speaker at McKnight for August 7 will be Ms. Cici James. Please help us give her a warm welcome as she leads us in worship this week!

A Blessing for Letting Go of the Things that Shine

Blessed are we, when the heart shudders to ask, is it me, Lord? Am I one who has chosen to follow a proxy? What does my life point to? When I look at the decisions I make and the ways I spend my time and my money, what is it that I love? What does the evidence tell me about the cause that I care for the most?

As we here at McKnight pray and plan in our coming back from the pandemic, it’s important that we think about what the church is. As we go on together we have a chance to do some thinking about why we are doing what we are doing, so that we can focus our efforts, and sometimes our budget, more intentionally and more effectively.

For the last few weeks, I have been alternating preparation for Sunday Worship with going through files and reorganizing my office. It has been a helpful activity as I learn more about McKnight’s history and the kinds of ministry that the church has been involved in.

Rebecca has been appointed to serve as McKnight's new pastor beginning on July 1, 2022. Please join us as we welcome her to our church family!

About Rebecca Konegen

Rebecca was born in Rome, N.Y., and lived in Massachusetts, North Dakota and New York while her father served in the Air Force, before settling in Santa Clara, California her senior year of high school.

Her undergraduate degree is from DePauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana. Afterwards, at the University of California, Riverside, she completed an M.A in English Literature, with a focus in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

When her husband's job transferred the family to Pittsburgh, she planned to finish her Ph.D. but wasn't able to find a similar program locally. Continue to the to read her complete bio on the link below.