With Gratitude and Curiousity

With Gratitude and Curiosity

As my time as your sabbatical supply pastor comes to a close, what I feel most is gratitude. Thank you for trusting me with this season of your life together, and for letting me walk alongside you through the book of Acts this summer, learning to practice curiosity in the Spirit's movement.

I've been blessed in a variety of ways, by brief conversations around worship, by stories entrusted to me over coffee and zoom, by the honest wrestling I've witnessed in your leadership and in quieter, reflective one-on-one moments. In all of it, I've caught glimpses of something alive and struggling to become freer among you, not fully arrived, not finished, but genuinely underway—hope-fully emerging.

I keep thinking of an idea from Andrew Root's recent book, When Church Stops Working: that the Spirit's work isn't primarily about solving the church's problems. Rather, it’s about the possibilities found in the waiting, waiting for people to arrive in the fullness of who they are, and choosing to partner with them in that becoming, rather than rushing to fix or finish them, or even solely to recruit them into the predetermined church labor-buckets. I think that's what I've witnessed here, a community longing to be born anew in God, a people living the real struggle of being church in today’s world, and a God still forming, gently and unhurriedly, into who you're becoming.

That's true of me too. I don't leave Salt House as someone who arrived complete and is now departing finished. I leave still being freed, still becoming, grateful that you let me wait with curiosity alongside you for a while. I am grateful for your willingness to befriend me.

Thank you for this gift. May you keep noticing the Spirit on the move among you, with warmth for one another and endless curiosity about what God is still creating you to be.

With gratitude and curiosity,
Pastor David