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SPOT is a monthly Faith Formation offering that focuses on various spiritual practices we can use to grow deeper in our faith and relationship with God.
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Thursdays
7:30 am
Online
Find hope and grace when you are feeling cynical about the church and faith.
Are you struggling to connect with your church community? Do you find yourself questioning the core beliefs that you once held dear? Searching for Sunday, from New York Times bestselling author Rachel Held Evans is a heartfelt ode to the past and a hopeful gaze into the future of what it means to be a part of the modern church.
Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn't want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals--to her, it was beginning to feel like church culture was too far removed from Jesus. Yet, despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing Evans back to church.
Evans found herself wanting to better understand the church and find her place within it, so she set out on a new adventure. Within the pages of Searching for Sunday, Evans catalogs her journey as she loves, leaves, and finds the church once again.
Evans tells the story of her faith through the lens of seven sacraments of the Catholic church--baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, the anointing of the sick, and marriage--to teach us the essential truths about what she's learned along the way, including:
Faith isn't just meant to be believed, it's meant to be lived and shared in community. Christianity isn't a kingdom for the worthy--it's a kingdom for the hungry, the broken, and the imperfect. The countless and beautiful ways that God shows up in the ordinary parts of our daily lives
Searching for Sunday will help you unpack the messiness of community, teaching us that by overcoming our cynicism, we can all find hope, grace, love, and, somewhere in between, church.
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Thursdays
10:00 am
In person
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In a world fixated on outward appearances, discover the joy of cultivating an inward relationship with the Spirit, where virtues like love, joy, and self-control blossom naturally.
"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." – Galatians 5:22-23a
The apostle Paul paints a beautiful picture when he describes the fruit of the Spirit, but all too often we reduce this list of virtues into a checklist of attributes to pursue and strive for. Pastor and author Eugenia Gamble contends that this understanding is backwards. The Holy Spirit is the One who grows and develops those attributes within us as we pursue our relationship with God. By tending that relationship, the virtues of God develop and blossom as a fruit grows on a well-tended tree.
Tending the Wild Garden explores the true meaning behind each of the virtues in Paul’s list, guiding us to discover anew what it means to be a deeply loved child of God indwelt by God’s Spirit. Gamble helps us to move beyond the checklist mentality of traditional understandings of the fruit of the Spirit, to cultivate our relationship with God, and to uproot the "weeds" that could threaten the flourishing of the fruit in our lives. Let the fruit of the Spirit be more than just words on a page—they’re the living expressions of God’s love within you. Dare to cultivate a life overflowing with love, joy, peace, and so much more.
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Thursdays
5:30 pm
Online
In recent years, events such as the siege at Standing Rock and the Dakota Access pipeline have thrust Native Americans into the public consciousness. Taking us beyond the headlines, American Apartheid offers the most comprehensive and compelling account of the issues and threats that Native Americans face today, as well as their heroic battle to overcome them. Author Stephanie Woodard details the ways in which the federal government, states and counties curtail Native voting rights, which, in turn, keeps tribal members from participating in policy-making surrounding education, employment, rural transportation, infrastructure projects and other critical issues affecting their communities. This system of apartheid has staggering consequences, as Natives are, per capita, the population group that is most likely to be shot by police, suffer violent victimization by outsiders, be incarcerated, and have their children taken away. On top of this, indigenous people must also fight constantly to protect the sacred sites and landscapes that hold their cultural memories and connect their spirituality to the nation's mountains, plains, waterways and coastlines. Despite these many obstacles, American Apartheid offers vivid pictures of diverse Native American communities that embody resilience, integrity, and the survival of ancient cultures.
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