On Sunday, May 12th, we have the joyful opportunity for you to be Confirmed by our Bishop and welcomed as new Members into the Parish. This is a wonderful event that takes place only twice a year, and is available to all who have been baptized and attended our Foundations class! I thought I’d take a moment to share a few details about what it means to take this important step in your faith.
Good afternoon! A blessed Holy Week to you. I want to take a moment to ask you to consider attending the 7AM Sunrise Worship Service on Easter Morning. Now, of course not everyone is able to do this and we understand! However, if you are able to flex your schedule, here are three good reasons to attend the 7AM:
Good afternoon! Holy Week is nearly upon us. I want to take a few minutes to explain what it will be like to participate in the most important days of the year together. Please, if you can, read the following in its entirety.
Two weeks ago, we contemplated the Practice of Fasting and together we explored how this spiritual discipline has cultivated virtue in the lives of God’s people from Old Testament times through to the present. If you missed the sermon, you can listen to it here. While most of us are likely familiar with the concept of a private, personal fast, we may be less familiar with the concept of a corporate fast. Here are just a few (of the many) examples of corporate fasting in scripture:
Whether you are new to the practices of the season of Lent or have engaged them many times before, here is a helpful overview to how we observe and practice Lent at Redeemer.
Next week, you are invited to participate in two of the most important days of the year in the life of the church.
Every March Redeemer members elect two members to join the vestry—our parish's governing body—for a three-year term. Any member in good standing can be nominated to serve on the vestry. If you are a member of Redeemer, we encourage you to prayerfully consider whom you might nominate for these important roles.
A small group gives you the chance to practice belonging. Humans are made to belong to each other! Think of what a gift it is to walk into a room and have someone’s face light up because they’re so glad you’ve come. To return from a trip and have someone say they’ve missed your presence because life is not the same when you’re gone. It is a profoundly human thing to want to know who your people are and to spend time with them.
The middle of January might seem like an odd time to start talking about Holy Week (this year it’s March 24-31), but both public and private school systems have scheduled Spring Break to start immediately after Easter Sunday. This poses a temptation. If you are a family with kids that hopes to travel for Spring Break, it will be convenient to leave town on Friday (Good Friday) March 29th to get in some extra days of vacation.
From time to time, it is healthy to step away from our daily responsibilities in order to gain perspective, learn, rest, and grow. We do this so that we might return to our work refreshed by the Holy Spirit and re-engage our work with a renewed sense of purpose and energy. To that end, I would like to invite every single one of you (6th grade and up) to participate in one retreat (or conference) this Spring. College students, you are invited to the CCO Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh and you are invited to the Women’s and Men’s Retreats. Middle and High school students, you are invited to the Youth Fellowship Retreat. Adults, you are invited to attend either the Women’s or Men’s Retreats at Roslyn (on 20 minutes from Redeemer).
This coming Sunday, we begin the season of Epiphany, and we will kick off a 6-part series called Identity: Practicing the New Self.
I wanted to keep everyone in the loop as our children’s ministry shifts a little while I am away on maternity leave. I, Sam, and our two boys, Clark and Miles, are welcoming a third boy into our family very soon! The Lord has provided richly for our family during this season of change and we are so grateful to be part of this particular church community as our little family shifts, grows, and encounters the challenges that come along with it all.
The answer to this question has undergone a dramatic shift in the past few decades. For hundreds of years the answer was a quick and easy “church holiday.” What else could celebrating the birth of our Savior be? Of course, there were family celebrations that often accompanied Christmas church celebrations, but these were understood to be secondary.
One of my favorite traditions here at Redeemer is our J-Term. Every January, we close down our Small Group gatherings and encourage everyone to take a class taught by a staff member or lay parishioner. I absolutely love seeing the diversity of gifts and variety of passions that our people have! So many of you have fascinating areas of expertise and it is a wonderful expression of generosity within the body of Christ for you to share your gift with others.
If you're tripped up by the apparent false start of Advent you're in good company. Christians do New Years weird. We don't start with fanfare and champagne; we kick off with minor keys and cries from "lowly exile." Tish Harrison Warren notes that part of the usefulness of Advent is to "make Christmas weird again, to allow the shock of the incarnation to take us aback once more." I like this because the Incarnation of the Son of God is nothing less than an earthquake, and it should strike us as such.
As 2023 winds down and we prepare for the holidays, time off of work, and (hopefully) a time of rest with family - I’d like to invite all of us to consider a few different ways to think about giving before December 31.
One of the key features of city life (as compared to suburban or country life) is close, physical proximity to neighbors. We are all up in each other’s space all the time! Proximity has the potential to create either friction or blessing. Sometimes it is a gift to be close to others, but sometimes it’s a real pain! One place of potential friction or blessing is Redeemer’s proximity to the VMFA. Every Sunday we host our coffee hour on their lawn and we experience the blessing of the beautiful space they have cultivated. However, there are moments when we wonder if our proximity is a blessing to the VMFA.
A blessed All Saints' Week to you! We are in a special week of the year in our Liturgical Calendar. Tuesday was All Hallows Eve, yesterday was All Saints Day, and today is All Souls Day. This week, we remember the saints, martyrs, and all the faithful departed who have gone before us and whose lives serve as signs, pointing and inviting us toward become more like Jesus..
Every Tuesday morning, at 9:00 a.m., our staff meets for prayer, coffee, breakfast, and discussion. Often, what you read about in Parish Newsletters is coming from the discussion that is happening around the staff table. So today I’d like to invite you to pull up a chair and listen in to what our staff is talking about.
As we continue this series of articles on Gospel Formation for Missional Presence, I’d like to help us understand that word presence just a bit more deeply. So let’s think about what it means to be missional in regards to our own homelife.
On Sunday, November 12th, we have the joyful opportunity for many of you to be Confirmed by our Bishop and welcomed as new Members into the Parish. This is a wonderful event that takes place only twice a year! Since this process is new to many of you, I thought I’d take a moment this afternoon to share a few details about what it means to take this important step in your faith.
In this next installment of this series of writings on what it means to be missional, I’d like to make the case that Missional Presence is not one of many ways to be missional as a Christian, it’s actually the only healthy way.
Today I’d like to press in just a bit more into that word “mission.” It’s a word that nearly all Christians use, but that is often used to mean very different things. Often when followers of Jesus hear or use the word mission, they mistakenly assume that everyone agrees and means the same thing. This wouldn’t be a big deal if “mission” was something small and peripheral, like using the correct brand of shampoo. But it is enormous and central - it is the way in which we participate in what God is doing in the world. God Himself has a mission and we, His children, are invited to be a part of it. For a Christian, therefore, mission is not a side dish, it’s the whole meal. It’s not one aspect of life, it’s what your life is about.
Today I’d like to move forward to a different, but intimately related question, “What is missional presence?” One of the ways we talk about our life together is that the Church of Jesus is called to be a missional presence in the world. But what does that mean? “Missional Presence” sounds somewhat lofty, abstract, and vague. How can I tell if I’m doing it? How can I tell if it’s working?
Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself in numerous conversations about the first phrase in Redeemer’s Vision, “Gospel Formation.” As I’ve listened, I’ve heard some confusion on what exactly Gospel Formation is and is not. Is it something God does? Is it something we do? How can you tell if it’s happening?
What a joy to be back in the parish and to worship together this past Sunday! From the whole Marotta family to all of you - thank you! Thank you for the gift of Sabbatical rest and for the privilege of returning to shepherd such a wonderful parish. Our hearts are full with gratitude. What follows is a brief report of our time away:
Every summer we ask our Small Groups to take a break from meeting to create space for what we call “Redeemer Summer Book Clubs.” These gatherings are (hopefully) exactly what they sound like - groups of people who all agree to read a book together and gather a few times over the course of the Summer to discuss what they are learning from the book. If you would like to lead one this Summer, here are your next steps
From time to time it’s appropriate for us to pause and remember that our young little parish here in Richmond is part of a much larger, much older network of churches called the Anglican Communion. This history of this larger body stretches back 500+ years to the Protestant Reformation and presently includes more than 85 million members.
I have one very important action item for you this month—for every member and non-member alike. When new members join the parish, we ask you to take what we call Membership Practices of giving Time, Talent, and Treasure to the Lord Jesus through his body, the Church.
As our parish moves into the season of Ordinary Time and we find ways to practice our faith in, well, ordinary ways, this is a wonderful time to shift the way we teach our children spiritual formation for a season as well.