January 18, 2006

The Rev. Atsushi Nishimura, the associate pastor at Pine UMC in San Francisco since 1999, will be returning to Japan in February. His visa will expire in 2006. He wants his 5-year-old son to start kindergarten in Japan. However, the Japanese language ministry will continue, Pine's administrative council decided...Saia Fa'asisila is a full-time conference pastor as of January 1, serving half-time at Hillsdale UMC and half-time at Shoreview UMC, both in San Mateo...

Sonoma UMC will experiment in 2006 with a new Sunday morning schedule, which it thinks is consistent with growing churches. It will have "casual worship" at 8:30 a.m., traditional worship at 10:30 a.m. with church school for all ages between them -- at 9:30. The Rev. Pam Cummings says that Christian education is life-long, so she will encourage all adults to choose a class. Teachers will be able to attend a worship service, unlike before. The pastor will be better able to make connections. "Our plan is to live with this new schedule for a year, making minor adustments as needed," says Rev. Cummings. "At the end of the year we will evaluate"...

Eric Dale of Willits UMC will lead a United Methodist Volunteers in Mission trip to Uruguay from March 24 to April 8, to do repair work at the Aguada Methodist Church in Montevideo. The pastor of Aguada MC, Iris Moreira, is involving her church more with neighborhood, which may help in the effort...

Temple UMC in San Francisco wants to raise $5,000 to hire a part time music teacher to start a chorus in a school that has no music program. The Rev. Schuyler Rhodes says that it is part of an on-going effort of turning the attention of Temple "outward to the neighborhood and city in which we live." Temple's UMW wants to help provide school uniforms for children whose families cannot afford them. On Halloween, a Temple delegation strode into Jose Ortega Elementary School and passed out 250 popsicles and ice cream bars...

The Rev. Scott Wylie of Aldersgate UMC in San Rafael generally selects worship texts from the common lectionary ("readings") put together by a committee of biblical scholars. "Preaching from the lectionary is one of my personal spiritual disciplines," he says. "Weekly, about two-thirds of Protestant pastors use at least one of these texts. It leads me to preach from every book in the Bible, preventing overemphasis of a preacher's personal pet subjects"...The Rev. Rebecca Irelan of Novato UMC is starting a sermon series on the Apostles' Creed January 29. She says, "The Creed is so jam-packed with good stuff -- from heaven to hell and all points in between...My hope is to show how these seemingly archaic doctrines can still tell my story, your story, as 21st-century followers of Jesus the Christ"...

"We have come to understand, as a 21st-century church, that righteousness and justice have not come to us by acting in a certain reasonable way," says the Rev. Dr. James McCray, Jr., of Jones Memorial UMC in San Francisco. Dr. McCray interprets that, in Psalm 97, "the concept of righteousness has not so much to do with the ethical, and action, as with the sacramental and the worship of God...As the people praise and rejoice in the liturgy, righteousness is conveyed to them...For this reason [Jones has] elected to focus on Jubilee in 2006 -- on the worship, study, and service of God through faithful discipleship and stewardship, rather than on activities and fundraising"...