Trinity United Methodist Church is a dynamic community of people who, through their trust in God’s faithfulness, strive to provide an inclusive, joyful, loving, and caring environment.  In this community, people can find spiritual nurture and growth, mutual support of individual needs, and a sense of family.  Reaching out through vital and creative worship, people-centered programs, and social and environmental stewardship, this congregation serves the local and global communities.


Trinity is a congregation that welcomes and affirms all people inclusive of Race, Nationality, Age, Gender, Gender Identity, Marital Status, Sexual Orientation, Physical Ability, Mental Ability, Economic Class, or Educational Class. Trinity has been a Reconciling Congregation since 1992.


Trinity supports Creation Spirituality, a movement that draws on ancient spiritual traditions and contemporary science to awaken authentic mysticism, revitalize Christianity and Western culture, and promote social and ecological justice. Creation Spirituality teaches that God permeates all things and that humanity is created blessed, not tainted by original sin. In this paradigm, Christ is God's liberating and reconciling energy, transforming individuals and society's structures into conduits of compassion. As we embody God's love, we become the Creation that God intends. Creation Spirituality draws on the earliest traditions of the Hebrew Bible and has been celebrated under various names over the centuries, most notably by the Rhineland Christian mystics of medieval Europe. It is an eclectic tradition that honors women's wisdom and the cosmologies of indigenous cultures around the planet. Creation Spirituality seeks to revitalize contemporary worship by asking what would happen if, instead of requiring artists to conform to established worship practices, Christian worship adapted to the creativity of artists.

Trinity offers three dynamic worship celebrations in our sanctuary each week. The 9:15am imprints Celebration is an alternative, contemplative service that includes Taize chants, body prayers, and guest artists. The 11:15am weave Celebration blends alternative and traditional elements and features our Celebration Choir. The 12:45pm earthbound Celebration is a playful mix of Nature-based and Christian elements.

Trinity also offers a variety of fellowship groups.  In addition to United Methodist Women (UMW) and Trinity Triangle Fellowship (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, & Straight Allies Fellowship), we offer COTS (Care of the Soul) groups, Adult Sunday School, TrinityNet (a neighborhood-based, grassroots communications network), and a Women’s Spirituality group, with short-term classes offered at various times of the year. If you would like more information about any of these groups, please contact the church office.


 

If you have a Facebook profile, we invite you to join our shiny new Facebook group to receive occasional event announcements and updates!

Trinity UMC is a congregation that welcomes GLBT folks (and everyone else too!) and affirms the natural world through creative worship.

Sunday, Dec. 21 - Winter Solstice celebrations at 10:30am (alternative Christian service) and 12:45pm (earthbound, a Nature-based and Christian fusion)

Wednesday, Dec. 24 - Candlelight Christmas Eve services at 5:30pm (with Austin musicians Christine Albert and Chris Gage) and 7:30pm. Outdoor Labyrinth Walks follow each service.

Find us in Hyde Park, Austin, Texas at 600 E. 50th St.

For more info, see http://www.tumc.org.

Join Trinity United Methodist Church (a congregation that welcomes LGBT folks and everyone else too!) for a special Samhain celebration.

Where: Trinity UMC, 600 E. 50th St. (1 block off Duval)
When: Sunday, Nov. 2, 12:45pm
More info: http://www.tumc.org

This celebration is part of our weekly earthbound service, which combines progressive Christian and Pagan elements. Join us to honor our ancestors, the elements of life, and the Spirit that moves through all things.

We invite you to bring a drum or other percussion instrument, pictures of your beloved dead or other mementoes for the altar, and a brief story about one of your departed loved ones.

CHILD CARE PROVIDED.

Where do I find the words to say?
How do I teach him?
What do we play?
Bit by bit, I've realized
That's when I need them,
That's when I need my father's eyes.
My father's eyes…
As my soul slides down to die.
How could I lose him?
What did I try?
Bit by bit, I've realized
That he was here with me;
I looked into my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

--from Eric Clapton, “My Father’s Eyes”



Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”



When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.

--Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

pride, n. A strong sense of self-respect; a refusal to be humiliated, as well as joy in one’s own accomplishments or those of a person, group, or object with which one identifies.


“Frog Prince”
For D.

She swore she'd change me,
and she did. Unzipped
the old skin and hid it,
somewhere, ripped out
the webbing between my fingers,
snipped off a few inches
of my too-long and sticky tongue.
And she had the swamp
behind the house drained,
convinced her dad that
I was just like him, her mom
that I wouldn't return
to my old ways, herself
that she could make it work,
that she would make it work.
Perhaps I'd thought she could,
perhaps I'd hoped.
But now this new skin,
itchy and dry, wrinkled
when wet, and always hot.
And there is this new face
I wear like my own.
And the ring on my finger,
the gold hoop I couldn't jump through.
So now I see us everywhere,
trapped in these bodies
and these lives, our frantic
gray-green eyes like fires
banked into coals, nostalgic
for other places, other desires.

--Ed Madden


Pride enters when my spine aligns and I stand tall, when I speak my piece and my chest opens to the resonance of my voice. Pride enters when I am fully immersed in the dance of life: proud to be human, proud to be alive, proud to be about my work, proud to know you, and proud to begin to know myself. Pride emerges when our will is engaged and we stand upright in our truth.

--T. Thorn Coyle

Unlike previous General Conferences (GC), where there was a direct downward spiral legislatively on LGBTQ inclusion, this Fort Worth's Future With Hope was mixed.

* GC kept the original basic membership language that was
misinterpreted in JC #1032 (49%-51%), but strengthened open
transfers of membership and later by a 2/3rds vote replaced a
"list" to include with the words "ministry to all" in the UM
Constitution section on Inclusivity.
* GC maintained "the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with
Christian teaching" (45%-55%) while it added "loving caregivers"
and "same-sex couples with children" to the definition of family.
* GC kept a funding ban on "promoting homosexuality" but stressed
that it could not be used to "reject or condemn lesbian and gay
members and friends" and further passed anti-homophobia,
anti-heterosexism pieces that mandated providing resources to
educate and reduce harm.
* Finally, GC gave us two peaks to celebrate: 1) the election of
moderates to the Judicial Council who hopefully can tell the
difference between "may" and "shall" in the eligibility section
for membership and 2) the refusal to discriminate against
transgender persons -- lay or clergy.

What smoothed the ride out on this roller coaster was the consistent spirit presence of the One Family Tree witness from the Parent's lunch, Young Adult drumming and rally, Reconciling Worship at First UMC, Good Friday "die in" and "Were You There?" floor witness, to the Easter hope wedding of Sue Laurie and Julie Bruno. We started with family and ended with family. We can't create One Family Tree by human means alone, but God can with and through us. Remembering our long-haul mission, planning for 2012 in Florida has already begun.

–Rev. Troy Plummer, Reconciling Ministries Network


( Trinity at General Conference )

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead.

--Albert Einstein




Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done, in whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

--Martin Rinkert (1663)




“1DER”

--seen on a license plate in Hyde Park this week




Let us praise God. Oh Lord, oooh you are so big. So absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you. Forgive us, O Lord, for this dreadful toadying and barefaced flattery. But you are so strong and, well, just so super. Fantastic. Amen.

--Michael Palin in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

--Henry David Thoreau



A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger father with a bigger fist. If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it's taken personally. Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about his power. His fairness. His very existence. But if a world mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple. She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says -- go raid the fridge. Go play outside. Go get a job. Or, better yet, lend me a hand. I have no time for idle whining.

--David Brin



Opie, you haven't finished your milk. We can't put it back in the cow, you know.

--Aunt Bea Taylor, The Andy Griffith Show

It is an enlightening excursion, this wandering into the spiritual insights of other whole cultures, other whole intuitions of the spiritual life. It depends for its fruitfulness on openness of heart and awareness of mind. But the journey is well worth the exertion it takes to see old ideas in new ways because it can bring us to the very height and depth of ourselves. It can even bring fresh hearing, new meaning to the stories that come down to us through our own tradition.

--Joan Chittister, Welcome to the Wisdom of the World



“Tell us what you got from enlightenment,” the seeker said. “Did you become divine?”

“No, not divine,” the holy one said.

“Did you become a saint?”

“Oh dear, no,” the holy one said.

“Then what did you become?” the seeker asked.

And the holy one answered, “I became awake.”

--Sufi story