With the start of school and with Labor Day and football season fast approaching, Rally Day and the beginning of our Christian Formation programs for the Fall are just around the corner. There are opportunities for everyone – Bible studies, Sunday School classes, discussion groups, book studies, choirs, and more. While Christian formation takes place year-round, Rally Day marks a new season of options and possibilities to grow in faith and to wrestle with questions of faith and faithfulness. We hope that you will join in exploring and nurturing your faith through some of these opportunities, for to paraphrase Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Our faith is forged in the crucible of doubt. Faith does not grow by sitting back and not engaging with the doubts and questions. It grows through daring to wonder and to question and to learn from and with one another. This summer Rae and I have preached from the Confessions of the Church that span almost 1800 years. Each of those confessions took shape through reflection and thought, through debate and discussion, through assessment of the changing world and how faith might speak relevantly to it. In the midst of this Fall’s presidential campaigns (and endless political ads ad nauseum), it is a fitting time to consider how our Christian faith speaks to the issues that we hope the candidates will address and to the values expressed. Such reflection starts though with our assessment of those Christian values that we hold dear, that lens of faith through which we view the world. What values do you hold sacred? Are they the same values Jesus urges upon us – love of God and neighbor, humble service to others, self-sacrifice, forgiveness? Or are they values that the world says you should cherish – power, accumulation of wealth, retribution for wrongs done to you? To be a Christian is to continually wrestle with those questions and concerns in order to determine what a faithful response might require of you now. And in that regard, perhaps the prophet Micah says it best: What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. That walk continues this Fall. Come walk with us!
– John Peterson
