Pastor Chris' Letter May 2018


Dear Trinity,
I wanted to take my time to share with everyone something awesome that happened at the church. This year for Good Friday we celebrated Good Friday in a different way. We worked with our denominational partner in town, Faith UMC, to present the East Noble Ministerial Associations community Good Friday service, but we also did a special service in the evening. Now being a new thing our attendance was not amazing, but for those who were there it was an amazing experience.
This year in response to our “For Kendallville” series we wanted to make an effort to get to know our neighborhood. So this year for Good Friday we took a windshield tour. Now I know your first question is what is a windshield tour? A windshield tour is traveling around the community, in which you live, to see what is around us. This was a perfect way  to reflect upon Christ’s sacrifice for us.  You see Good Friday celebrates the amazing gift God has given us in Jesus Christ. In particular, we remember the great sacrifice that Christ made for us. Many times we only see the personal aspect of this. What did this sacrifice mean for me? So this year we took a journey together that helps us to see the scale of this amazing price that Christ paid for us all.
In Luke’s Gospel (Luke 19:41-44), as Jesus stands about to face his last week on earth, He mourns for the city of Jerusalem. A place that is so close to seeing the love that God has for them in Jesus Christ but yet misses the greatest gift ever and crucifies Jesus. So God’s heart is broken by what is around him. Our Conference Superintendent Rev. Dave Neckers has encouraged us as a district to pray for our hearts to be broken as God’s heart is broken for our community. This is one of the things that led us to the “For Kendallville” series. This series helped us to think about how we can be “for” our community. And one of the best ways to be “for” our community is to pray God break our hearts as we look around our community. So this is what we did. We drove around our community and prayed that God would break our hearts.
To accomplish this we started quite simply. To be for our neighbors we need to know them. This started with the great help of Pastor Angie who did a great amount of research using her personal knowledge of the non-profits and also using our denominational (Indiana UMC) resources. (We have access to great data about our community that is provided for free to local churches by our general conference that is paid through our tithe to the annual conference) So we learned that Trinity Church sits right in the middle of Census Tract 9718. (I have included some of the details Pastor Angie prepared of this Tract as an attachment in our newsletter.)
The path we chose then to drive was the guidelines (or as close as we could get safely) of the Census Tract. Then we stopped at several places where we prayed for those who were linked to these places in our community. We prayed for our non-profit partners, all those that teach and serve our children, all of the churches and pastors, our first responders, our government leaders, the businesses, and many other things in our community. I encourage you if you were not able to join us to pick up a booklet at the ministry center and take the drive for yourself and join together as we seek to be a church “For Kendallville.”


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