January 16
Beloved of Good Shepherd Church,
Grace to you and peace in Jesus Christ our Lord!
2024 has been yet another year of remarkable growth at Good Shepherd! For the first time in many, many years we have a full church staff. Our team is bright, loving, and eager to equip, empower, and enable all our members to work for the cause of the Gospel. This Sunday at our Annual Parish Meeting you will receive a wonderful summary of all the many ways our church is growing into full bloom. We’ve not only grown numerically, perhaps more importantly we’ve grown in love. I continue to sense and see a hunger for spiritual depth in each one of you.
Good Shepherd is increasingly becoming a contemplative parish. Contemplatives are people who know by their own experience that there is a deeper depth to go to in their faith journey. This knowledge leads us to cultivate an environment here at Good Shepherd which is conducive to the reception of the gift of a deeper, more intimate and loving union with God and each other. If I had to describe our fellowship in one sentence I would say this, We are a group of people who are hungry for the knowledge that only the love of Jesus can give us; and, we seek to love ourselves, each other, and God more fully as a means to spreading love and peace in our world. 2024 has shown me that we’ve clearly grown deeply into our core theme - Love is all - such that it has become a joyful and simple expression of the absolute ground of our identity as a Christian fellowship.
Our Mystics Reading Group is currently reading 14th century English mystic, Julian of Norwich. At the end of her majestic work, The Showings, Julian writes this after praying to Jesus for knowledge of God’s bottom line: “This is what I heard in response to my prayer: love is His meaning. Who revealed this to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why did he reveal it to you? For love. Stay with this and you will know more of the same. You will never know anything but love, without end.”
We’ve made such a good start and are growing increasingly deep roots in the soil of our Lord’s love, thus this question arises in the garden of our church: Where do we want to go from here as we chart a course into 2025?
One of the things we are going to look at and discern is whether or not we are called to grow our physical plant in order to better fulfill our call to spread the Good News of God’s love for all creation. The big ticket question that’s been hanging around Good Shepherd for 40 years or more is this: Are we called to build a parish hall? The Vestry is going to lead us in answering that question by Easter of this year. If we determine that we are called to build, then two teams of members will be formed to help us proceed. One team will determine which design plan we will proceed with, and a second team will determine how we fund our dream of a parish hall. Included in this work is the formation of plans to accomplish necessary repairs and improvements to our existing buildings including replacement of the sanctuary roof.
The primary question is this: How are we called to add to or renovate our church building so that we can more fully, joyfully, and lovingly respond to God’s call to spread the Gospel? On Sunday at our Annual Parish Meeting I am going to present to you a few more details about the discernment process including renderings of a parish hall proposal.
Our 2030 target is Every Member Engaged. This means that we seek to build a church both spiritually and physically in which members of the church can join together to easily and readily engage in the depth dimension of their own faith journeys. How do you want to engage God and each other through the marvelous modalities of Worship, Formation, and Outreach this year? Engagement will lead you to grow in love and go deeper on the path that leads directly into the center of God’s own heart where you will discover that you and God are not other than each other, you are One, in love. Come join us on the journey! All are welcome!
Please accept my invitation to come to the Annual Parish Meeting directly following the 10:00 a.m. service in the worship space.
Remember this always - God loves you, and I love you too!
Love is all,
Hendree+