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Monthly Archives: February 2019

A Pastoral Letter to the People of Reveille United Methodist Church

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by Douglas Forrester in information

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Screen ShotFebruary 27, 2019

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,

By now, you have certainly learned that the General Conference, the highest decision-making body of the United Methodist Church, passed on Tuesday legislation known as the Traditional Plan. This plan reinforces existing restrictions against same-gender weddings by United Methodist clergy and prohibitions against the ordination of LGBTQ persons. These prohibitions against marriage and ordination have existed in our denomination since 1972. However, as a result of the passing of the Traditional Plan, the penalties for clergy who violate these rules are now swifter and more punitive than before.

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Why Church? — We Are the People of Eternal Life

25 Monday Feb 2019

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Seventh Sunday After the Epiphany—February 24, 2019 

1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50

“This is the greatest moral question now before our people…. Resolved, that the time has now come when the church, through its press and pulpit, its individual and organized agencies, should speak out in strong language and stronger action in favor of the total removal of this great evil.”1

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Why Church? The Church is a Place of Hope

25 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by Douglas Forrester in Uncategorized

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Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany – February 17, 2019

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Screen Shot 1On Sunday, June 16, 2013, I had just finished attending a district United Methodist Annual Conference orientation session in Charlottesville and was halfway home to the parsonage in Crozet, driving through the tiny village of Ivy, when my phone rang. It was my wife Tracy who informed me that I needed to come directly home, that her father had called with devastating news, and that she needed to immediately leave for Baltimore.

The news was that Tracy’s mother Nancy Crittenden was in Maryland attending a bridal shower for one of her great-nieces when she tripped on a step, lost her balance, and injured her head so severely that she was airlifted to the trauma center of the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where the following Wednesday afternoon, she would succumb to her injury less than an hour after life support was removed. She was sixty-five years old.

On that day, Tracy would remain with her father Jon, and I drove back to Virginia to pick up my two daughters Ellen and Claire from another family in our church, drive them to the parsonage, sit them on the couch in the front room beneath the picture window and break their hearts with the kind of news they had never heard before about a member of their family.

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Why Church? The More Excellent Way

06 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by Douglas Forrester in worship

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Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany (Year C) – February 3, 2019

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

monument

Monument Methodist Church, Richmond, Virginia, November, 1950

It was on a frigid night in late-February of 2019 when the fire ignited that would almost entirely burn Reveille United Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia to the ground. The enormous fire started in the heating system and quickly spread through all three worship spaces and the education wing. By the time the first responders arrived, the building was engulfed in what would later be described as the largest church fire in Richmond’s history, perhaps one of the most significant fires in the area since the city burned near the end of the Civil War.

The fire was so profound and burned at such a high temperature that news crews were forced to stand on the opposite side of Cary Street, which was closed for a mile in both directions. Fire Companies were called from Richmond, Henrico, Chesterfield, and Hanover. Yet by the light of day, it was evident just how devastating the fire had been, and just how little there was left. The sanctuary windows, including the stained glass nativity window, were all gone, blown out when the roof collapsed.

The organ pipes were twisted, melted in the intense heat, the bellows filled with soot. In a desperate attempt to stop the fire from spreading to Malvern Manor next door, the fire companies had to pull their engines through the historic boxwoods so that they could set up their defenses in the Reveille Garden. The water dripping from the ceiling of the chapel was already beginning to freeze into icicles as a morning breeze blew through what was once the the tall windows that filled the worship space with natural light.

For most of its history, Reveille United Methodist Church had been breathtakingly beautiful. Yet now it stood in ruins, a husk of its former self surrounded by early morning frost and a mile of yellow police tape, the elegant signature brickwork in a pattern of Flemish bond covered in scorch marks and soot. They would call it a miracle that somehow no one was killed or injured.

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