Letters from Pastor Andy

Dear U Park family,  2025 is nearly one-sixth over, and around church it’s gone fast. Over the past 8 weeks,...

Dear U Park Family,  Have you ever felt like you couldn’t do enough to meet the demands of the moment?...

Dear U Park Family,  Last month, I had the privilege of spending a few days with a friend of mine...

Dear U Park Family,  We’ve probably all thought of the perfect retort in a disagreement –  two or three hours...

Dear U Park Family,  Since November, I’ve been providing updates on the pledge campaign for our operating budget in 2025....

I hope you’ve stayed warm over this past week. I’m glad that people stayed home and safe last Sunday, when it was so cold – but I have to say I was also pleasantly surprised at the number of people who did attend worship in person.

Because we expected low attendance, we rescheduled the dialogue sermon I had planned with my friend Logan Robertson for this coming Sunday instead. Logan is the Pastor at After Hours, an innovative United Methodist ministry begun by the Rev. Jerry Herships.

It’s hard to believe that the holidays are behind us. But now we’re setting off on a new year, and I hope that you’ve had some time to think about 2024 and what’s coming in the next 12 months. 

This week, I’ll send out a final letter to close out the 2025 pledge campaign for our operating budget. If you haven’t pledged your financial support to our ministry yet, I hope you’ll consider doing so.

After all the planning and gift shopping and holiday frenzy, I hope that you are enjoying a delightful day with loved ones. Gayla and I will be with family today.

This week’s letter is short, and its message is simple: thank you. On the church staff, we try to plan our programming about six months ahead. That means we have our first Christmas conversations in July or August. A little at a time over the ensuing months, we put our Advent and Christmas preparations in place. But none of it would be possible without your kindness and commitment to our shared ministry.

There’s a funny thing about end of the world predictions: they never seem to be wrong. Of course they’re never right either, so the people making those predictions often have to reinterpret them, or explain them differently, or revise. But preachers and self-appointed scholars trying to strike holy terror into our hearts by announcing the end times rarely if ever just shrug and admit they were mistaken.

I’m writing the day after the election, and so like many of us I’ve been thinking about the state of our country.

As I hope you’ve noticed, I make it a policy not to embrace any kind of political partisanship in preaching or worship. The church is not my personal political platform, nor should it be. At the same time, as Gandhi once wrote, the person who believes that religion and politics have nothing to do with one another does not understand religion or politics. I fervently hope that our votes and political involvement will be rooted in our faith. But while I always want people to take their faith into the voting booth, I don’t tell anyone how to vote.