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 two worship celebrations each Sunday morning.  The 8:50-10:00am celebration is informal and regularly features guest artists, ranging from musicians, to dancers, to poets.  The 11:10am-12:15pm service is a blend of traditional and contemporary elements.  The Trinity Choir sings at this service.  Child care is provided during the services, although children are certainly welcome to remain in the celebration.

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, Disciple Bible Study, and the 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 make a note on the registration pad or contact the church office.

 

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

Celebrating motherhood is a historical tradition dating back almost as far as mothers themselves. A number of ancient cultures paid tribute to mothers as goddesses, including the ancient Greeks, who celebrated Rhea, the mother of all gods. The ancient Romans also honored their mother goddess, Cybele, in a notoriously rowdy springtime celebration and the Celtic Pagans marked the coming of spring with a fertility celebration linking their goddess Brigid together with the first milk of the ewes.

Here is some news from the General Conference.  Our own Anita Privett and Susan Sprague represented Trinity in this demonstration.

----
By Linda Green *
May 1, 2008 | FORT WORTH, Texas (UMNS)

In an act of witness in front of delegates to the 2008 United Methodist General Conference, more than 200 people declared that the denomination's policies and practices against homosexuality are "sinful" and that "sexuality is a gift from God."

Modern scribes write, “In Jesus Christ
Everyone is free”
And the doors open wide to all straight men & women
But they are not open to me
And who is teaching kids to be soldiers
To be marked by a plain white cross
And we kill just a little to save a lot more
The philosophy of loss...

Whatever has happened to anyone else
Could happen to you & to me
And the end of my youth was the possible truth
That it all happens randomly
Who is teaching kids to be leaders
and the way that it is meant to be
The philosophy of loss.

--The Indigo Girls, “The Philosophy of Loss”




The church is standing in the way of God’s grace. The United Methodist
slogan of opens minds, hearts and doors continues to be the salt in the
wounds of gay Christians who refuse to leave the church and the faith
they love. For thirty-six years the church has ignored the unconditional
love of God by rejecting our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

--Monica Swink, Board Chair of the Reconciling Ministries Network (last Wednesday evening after the vote in Fort Worth)