July 19, 2026
• Rev. Mindie Moore
Greetings From: Connection
Isaiah 43: 18-19, 44: 6-8
July 19, 2026
Intro Rachel
Pray
Re-intro series (stories from my renewal leave)
Besides rest and travel, I knew that I wanted to use some of my time away this summer to connect with people who I wouldn’t normally have the ability to meet with in person. I wanted to spend time with and learn from people who are doing really interesting ministry so I could bring some of those learnings back to St. Luke’s.
One of the questions I was holding as I went into my time with these folks was a version of what the scripture we read today says. I was wondering: (SLIDE) What new things could God be up to? What hope might be happening and what is there to get excited about when it comes to the future of the Church?
So, I met with four people who gave me some really incredible examples of some of those new things. In Michigan, I met with Jake and Tom. Here in Indy, I met with Abby. And in the UK, I met with Olivia. And as I get ready to tell you about them, what delights me so much about each of these people is that they are ALL SO DIFFERENT. Their contexts are different, at least some of their theological understandings are different, the kind of ministry they feel called to is different, they live in different states and even different countries. And the differences, the diversity of these folks...it still holds space for the consistent faithfulness of God.
That’s why connection matters. Because through each of these people, and their stories, and the work God has called them to do—I saw hope for The Church. I got the gift of witnessing how God is working. And each of these interactions reminded me of something that I believe at my core, of something that I think might be the foundation of how I pastor. And that’s the belief that (SLIDE) Building connection builds hope.
Because so often, the first place we start to see glimpses of God’s work, is through each other.
So the first person I’ll tell you about is named Jake Mulder (SLIDE). He works with Fuller Equip, an organization out of Fuller Seminary that works with churches on leadership development for staff and volunteers. I’ve known Jake for awhile through different cohorts that I’ve been part of, and it turned out that we would be passing through the town he lives in on our way to Traverse City. So Zack and I got breakfast with him and got to hear all about the ways that he and the team at Fuller Equip are investing in the people who make up the church. The way that they care about people’s spiritual and emotional health, not just growing churches numerically. The way that they have, even in an incredibly polarized world, found a way to truly be a resource for a WIDE expanse of theological perspectives...that in itself gave me so much hope. It almost seems like an impossible task, but I’m watching Jake and his colleagues be deeply committed to serving the diversity of the Church and this commitment that goes deeper than denominations or other dividing line and tries to really serve people where they are.
Once we got to Traverse City, I met with a UMC pastor named Tom Arthur (SLIDE). Tom is the lead pastor at Sycamore Creek Church in East Lansing, MI. They are a multisite church, and one of the things that makes them unique is how DEEPLY connected to their community they are. One of their campuses has a “black box theatre” layout, and so it is a regular thing that there are performing arts groups using their space. He told me their motto for community engagement is “we make new friends and share our stuff.” They show up for their community in these really generous ways because that’s their theology of what The Church should be: a place that knows their community and then creates spaces and opportunities for the community to thrive. There were a few moments in our conversation where I found myself exclaiming, “wait, you can do that?!”
And both of those conversations not only inspired me but challenged me too—because they both made me realize some of the limitations I had subconsciously put on what I believed God could do in and through The Church. They illuminated a couple of places in my ministry where I’ve been considering things and the first thought I have is “well, this won’t work because___”. I don’t even think I realized I was holding that until I spent time with Jake and Tom.
That realization reminded me of these words out of Isaiah that we read today, where God says to the Israelites: (SLIDE)
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?
It’s such a great question at the end of that, that God asks the people in that moment, and it’s a powerful question for God to ask us. “Do you not perceive it?”
Because that implies, very directly, that something important is happening in our midst! That the Spirit is doing exciting and beautiful things. It’s easy to miss, but if we make some time, give some energy and attention to PERCEIVING it...we might just find some hope.
We need this prompting, because as powerful as hope IS, it can also be the easiest thing to miss. We all know that so often, the anti-hope stuff does everything it can to be so much louder than hope. All I have to do is scroll for 2.5 minutes and I will be confronted with an ABUNDANCE of anti-hope. And when I see all of that, especially when I witness people use faith to harm other people or the world, often using “the church” as a tool for that harm...it’s not super shocking that, no, often I do NOT perceive what God is doing in my midst! And if you relate to that, I don’t think that makes us cynical or that our faith is weak. It just reflects the challenges of the reality we live in.
But even with all of that, we can remember these words. And we can anchor ourselves to them and what they say about God’s faithfulness. We can remember that God says, “I’m working and I want you to see it. I want you to know I haven’t given up on what my people can create and what this world can be. I want you to know that good, healing hope is still possible...and that it’s happening all around you.”
The third person I connected with was Abby Lietz (SLIDE). Now, full disclosure, Abby is one of my very best friends and someone who I do see quite often. But! I never get to see her in the context that I got to during my leave—as a preacher at her church! She’s one of the pastors at Plainfield UMC, and she specifically leads the service called “New Day Praise” which is a contemporary, relaxed worship service. I brought Rhys with me that morning and he was VERY EXCITED that one of the seating options was a couch and that there were granola bars.
Abby’s sermon that morning was all about believing in possibility and in what God can do, even when we can’t see it or even understand how it could be possible for God to work in those ways. And one of the things she said was along the lines of: “Jesus does not wait for a more opportune time to show up with something new for us.”
Basically—Jesus is at work. Whether we think it is the best time for him to be at work or not, he’s on the move. I might suggest, given what I’ve experienced in life and what I know about the bigger story of Scripture that we root ourselves in, that Jesus is actually pretty uninterested IN cultivating “the most opportune” time to do really anything. And the good news for us is that (SLIDE) God’s Spirit cannot be confined by the current conditions.
This is one of the most important things we get to know about God, and it shows up all over God’s story. All throughout Scripture, from beginning to end. And if we go back to these words in Isaiah, and we let ourselves understand their context a bit, then what we quickly discover is that when these words are spoken to the Israelites, the conditions are absolutely NOT ideal for hope or something new to spring up. By this point in their story, they’ve experienced tragedy and exile and the loss of almost everything they believed was true about how life should be. It would make absolute sense, the natural response would be to just throw up their hands and say, “it’s a lost cause! We have no hope. It’s over.” It would be today’s equivalent of “we’re cooked!”
And we can all relate to that feeling. But here’s what I don’t want us to miss: that feeling is REAL, and it’s not where the work of God gets stuck.
God is always able to do something new. Something beyond what we’ve seen before. Something that takes the WORST things and makes them right; something that takes the BEST things and goes even further.
God is always urging God’s people towards living like we believe that. In the second half of the Scripture we read, in chapter 44, we see this expectation that God has for Israel that they are to live their lives like a witness to just how unique the work of God can be. They are to live and worship and exist like God can do things that no one else can. There is imagery of a rock, there’s this idea of a hope that is so much deeper than any of the struggle they have been through or any of the struggle that can come in the future.
One of my favorite seminary professors, John Goldingay, is an Old Testament Scholar and he talks about how this section of Isaiah shows God’s urging that the people have “A robust understanding of God.” And that it’s THAT understanding of who God is and how God works that shapes how we view...basically everything...but especially the places where we might struggle to see a future or find hope.
Because the truth is, our circumstances are going to change with the seasons of our lives. We are going to live through moments of disappointment and injustice. Institutions will fail us, people are going to fail us (this is the bad news part of the sermon), the things we hold so dear might be completely upended. And when that happens, it’s so painful. It’s a real grief that we have to navigate through. It’s nothing to discount.
But here’s what I know—those moments of pain, the seasons where hope feels out of reach, those aren’t the baseline for the story that we’re living. The baseline is God’s faithfulness. And when we draw from that faithfulness, and when we do that together with other hope-seekers, that’s how we create a future. That’s how we see God’s work around us.
The last person I want to tell you about today is Olivia Rathbone (SLIDE). She is a doctoral researcher at the University of Durham in the UK. Olivia has written a book based on hundreds of interviews with people around the world who have deconstructed their faith. I was so excited to meet with her to learn about her research and what kinds of trends she’s seeing in The Church in the UK.
And when she looks at the landscape of The Church in the UK, coupled with the research that she has done, she told me that one of the unique things happening in the UK is the overall openness to try something new. Certainly, there are a LOT of people who are not involved in the Church at all in the UK. But of those who are, what she’s seeing is this creative spark, this curiosity, a willingness to experiment and not be confined by what HAS been. Whether what “has been” is good and just doesn’t work anymore, or is harmful and needs to be done away with.
But she’s seeing people eager to explore what The Church could be. And that it’s ok if it looks really different than it has before, it’s ok if it pushes some boundaries, it’s ok if it takes old and new and sort of merges them together to make something that hasn’t yet been done. Despite the fact that The Church in England has these deep roots that are intertwined with tradition and political systems and power...there’s this openness in what’s emerging, that has even deeper roots in God’s faithfulness and possibility. And I just think that is SO hopeful and SO exciting and it makes me wonder what that could look like here and how we could be part of creating that in our context. What does it look like to be people who keep surfacing a fresh vision for how The Church in America can be an instrument of healing and new life and really good things?
Now, we had this conversation over lunch, and after lunch, we toured the Durham Cathedral. Durham is a pretty small city, but the Cathedral (SLIDE) is MASSIVE and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It also served as the courtyard for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter Movies, which was pretty cool to see!
I think Durham is not really a hot spot for American tourists, so it felt like every time I opened my mouth, someone from the Cathedral was excitedly running over to meet the American and tell me all about things. Which, I love people so this was just fine! One man told me, sighing very dreamily, that “Indiana sounds so much more glamorous than here,” and I did not know how to break it to him that the city where HE lives has a university that is housed in a literal castle and in Indiana...we do NOT have that.
But it was all very kind and welcoming, and one of the volunteers there, when he learned I was a pastor, got so excited to show me something on the Cathedral floor. It was this line made of black stones that you can see in this video I took (play clip while explaining).
He told us that they originally put that line in the floor as the boundary of where women could and could not go within the Cathedral. They couldn’t get close to the altar, they had to stay back. In fact, the places women that could be were so limited that they actually built a separate chapel FOR the women to pray and worship. There was no leading from the front being done by women, definitely no preaching!
And it really hit me as he was showing us this, just what God could do. Because here we were, two women who were studying religion and pastoring and this man is showing us, with glee and delight, where things had been...and then how much things have changed.
I only got such a concrete visual like that because of connection. Because I met Olivia, because she took me to see this place, because we made time to meet all of these people...I got a glimpse of how God has worked. Through the other conversations and experiences I had on my renewal leave—it was through the stories, it was through witnessing someone else’s reality that I got to witness what God is doing.
I’ll say it one more time: Building connection builds hope. There is so much hope for us to find through God’s Spirit working in each of us. And when we see that hope, when we live like we believe in that hope and possibility...that’s when we as people who make up this thing called The Church get to use that hope to make this world more like God would have it be.
Let’s pray.