A Word from Pastor Nathan

Greetings from the Lone Star State! From Monday through Wednesday (today), I have attended Ministers’ Week at Brite Divinity School. While Ministers’ Week is an annual event at Brite, this is the first time it’s been in-person since February 2020, and my first time to attend since 2019. Before the conference began on Monday, my cup was already running over with joy from having participated in worship at Broadway Baptist Church and Galileo Church on Sunday. Ministers’ Week is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting for an extrovert.

The theme of this year’s Ministers’ Week Conference was Imagining the Future Church. If we happen to solve this riddle, I promise, dear church, you will be the first to know. When welcoming everyone to worship on the first evening, Interim Brite Divinity School President, the Rev. Michael Cooper-White, said, “If we definitively answer what the future church will be, centuries will recognize Ministers’ Week in Fort Worth, Texas, alongside Nicea, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome.” His joke received much laughter even as his statement was a bit of an indictment of our hubris.

Our minister for the week, the Rev. Dr. Cláudio Carvalhaes, has carried us through an honest reckoning of our past, a truthful assessment of our present, and a hopeful imagination for the future. On the first night, he used Ecclesiastes 7:10, “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” That stung. The next night, he reminded us of the promise in Jesus’ sermon on the mount: “Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Creator knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” I wonder what he’ll say tonight!

During Dr. Carvalhaes’ incredible sermons, he discarded the pages of his manuscript to the floor. Each piece flitted and floated to the ground, all of them landing in different places. Halfway through his sermon, the Rev. Dr. Carvalhaes descends from the pulpit to the center aisle with the remaining pages of his manuscript in hand. Now, pages fall in the walkway and slide underneath our feet in the pews. I wondered if the paper he discarded was a dramatic or purposeful act. Later, I learned he considers pages to be seeds… seeds scattered and sown.

“The seed within good ground will flower and have life.
Seed scattered and sown, wheat, gathered and grown,
bread, broken and shared as one, the Living Bread of God.” –Dan Feiten

At the moment of writing this newsletter, I’m sitting in the back of a packed hall listening to another keynote speaker, the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber. She, like the Rev. Dr. Carvalhaes, is scattering seed among us. I don’t know how or where these seeds will flower and have new life, but I promise to bring some of these seeds back with me to Elyria, Ohio. Together with you and God’s Spirit, we will scatter seed. We will sow. And slowly but surely, the future of the church will break through the ground.

See you Sunday,