Pastoral Ponderings—Trunk or Treat!

Pastoral Ponderings—Trunk or Treat!

I must confess, I was one of the skeptics this year. When we had done Trunk or Treat on rainy nights in the past, our turnout has been as dreary as the weather, so when the forecast for Sunday night when Trunk or Treat had been scheduled had been nothing but rain all afternoon and all night, I was voting for a postponement. But we didn’t, and that’s my God-sighting for the week!

Our Twin Falls church still held Trunk or Treat despite the rain, but moved it inside, and had more than fifty participants at best count, with half of them being folks from the neighborhood who are not a part of the church. For an outreach event, that’s a wonderful turnout!

For churches eager to connect with young families in the community, there’s not much better than a trunk or treat type event that kids and adults can look forward to and eagerly explore a place even as scary as a church! But when we can welcome catacorns (that’s a cat unicorn-didn’t even know that was a thing!), alicorns (that’s a flying rainbow unicorn), skeletons, giant pizza slices and “Ice, Ice Baby” all at once, that seems to both alleviate the intimidation factor, and add to the fun factor. The event, fueled by the warmth of our inviting church folk, was a great way of demonstrating the breadth of the welcoming nature of God’s grace!

If this sounds like a great way to be the Church, but you weren’t able to make it, it’s not too late! You can join us at our Charlestown Church on Sunday afternoon at the park next door at 2 for their community Trunk or Treat, where the church is an integral part. Looks like it will be dry, but cooler—so you could try a warm and toasty marshmallow costume and have a great time putting skin on the Body of Christ! Will we see you there?

Keep being a blessing—I’ll be having a ball this time and making a racket, if you’d like a clue to what should easily top my “fork in the road” failure!

(see more about the event on our facebook page- https://www.facebook.com/TwinFallsUnitedMethodistChurch# )

Pastoral Ponderings- Weird Spirituality

How might an accordion, a dancing Darth Vader and Storm Troopers, and some perhaps slightly offensive song lyrics give us a glimpse into the Kingdom of God? Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Or it at least sounds like Weird Al Yankovic. I have no idea about Weird Al’s personal spiritual life, and that really doesn’t matter. But when the God who made the universe is often known to work in mysterious ways—wouldn’t it be simple enough for God to work through a weird concert?

Karol and I were blessed to be a part of one of his concert experiences recently, at an outdoor venue (Blossom) where you had to get there early, so we took a picnic to start our time. The first weirdness was when I dropped something on the way to the picnic table, and before I could reach down to get it, a perfect stranger dashed over from a table fifty feet away to help out. That’s strange.

Then I first started to sense something deeper when walking with the crowds from the picnic area—I’ve never seen so many “Hawaiian shirts” in one place before, or such a collection of very interesting people—all basking in and embracing the mutual weirdness of the event. Then, when Al came onstage (not that I’m on a first-name basis with him, but he did say/sing, “You can call me Al”), while singing his opening song, “Because I’m tacky…” and wearing the clothes to prove it, he was winding his way through the crown, “pressing the flesh” as politicians say, to connect with the people.

Several times through the concert he went out of his way like this to connect with the people. And throughout the concert, through the songs and the micro-culture of the event, both he in his performance and we in the crowd, thoroughly enfleshed a celebration and acceptance of all, from the most ordinary to the most eccentric of revelers (it was a Weird Al concert, after all).

It was almost like someone went out to all the highways and hedges to bring in all the people who are too often excluded and pushed off to the margins, almost like one brief shining moment of living in the Kingdom of God as Jesus described it.

Years ago when we were in seminary, our seminary president, Len Sweet, who described himself as a “futurist,” preparing us to serve the Church in decades to come, told us something like “though the Church is struggling to reach our communities, I’m completely convinced that God will still be pouring out His grace and proclaiming the Good News to our communities—even if it might not be through our churches.”

I hadn’t realized it before, but I think God is a fan of Weird Al as well, since I certainly experienced enough clues of His presence at the concert too! It was really weird, but a profoundly grace-filled experience that felt a lot like a glimpse of the broadly embracing arms of the Kingdom of God. –Pastor (“Weird”) Jim