Invite your friends and family to this fun event as we celebrate community and prepare for Ash Wednesday. We’ll have a few rounds of bingo going and you can decorate your own masquerade mask!

What is Shrove Tuesday, you ask?

Shrove Tuesday is the day before Lent starts: the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. It’s a day of penitence, to clean the soul, and a day of celebration as the last chance to feast before Lent begins.

Shrove Tuesday is sometimes called Pancake Day after the fried batter recipe traditionally eaten on this day.

But there’s more to Shrove Tuesday than pigging out on pancakes or taking part in a public pancake race. The pancakes themselves are part of an ancient custom with deeply religious roots. Read more from this article from the BBC >>

Shrove Tuesday pancake dinner | Tuesday, February 21 | 6pm | Location: Fellowship Hall

Ash Wednesday Service | Wednesday, February 22 | 7pm | Location: Sanctuary

Lent evening Taize meditations | Wednesdays at 6pm,  February 29 through March 28 | Location: Sanctuary

*no service on March 4.

Maundy Thursday | Thursday, April 5,  7pm | Sanctuary

Good Friday | Friday, April 6,  7pm | Sanctuary

Easter Sunrise Service: Sunday, April 8 | 6am | Location: Myrtle Edwards Park

Easter celebration worship: Sunday, April 8 | 9:30am and 11am | Location: Sanctuary

Auslander highlights some important stories that relate to our United Methodist and national history. History buff or not, you won’t want to miss this exciting talk!

Location: First Church Fellowship Hall | 180 Denny Way | Seattle, WA 98109

Date/Time: Sunday, February 5, 2012 | 12:30 pm

Please RSVP by Thursday, February 2 by filling out the form at the bottom of the page. For additional inquires, please contact Sophia Agtarap, Director of Outreach by emailing: sophia@firstchurchseattle.org or calling 206.622.7278.

This is a free lunch, with the opportunity to donate what you’re able.

> Listen to an interview with Dr. Auslander on KUOW from November 21, 2o11.

What others are saying about the book…

“The Accidental Slaveowner” is a beautifully written account of the complex ways in which family and institutional histories and memories of slavery are told and retold by blacks and whites in this country. At its heart is the important national story of the split of the Methodist Episcopal Church into northern and southern factions over the meaning of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. Mark Auslander has taken this institutional history and uncovered the personal stories of families and communities who felt and still feel the reverberations of that conflict down to the present day. With a detective’s attention to detail and a novelist’s love of people and their stories, Auslander has written a lucid, passionate work.

-Leslie M. Harris, Department of History/African American Studies, Emory University  (author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863)

This stunning book applies anthropological perspectives on myth and kinship to the pervasive legacy of slavery, which still dominates American understandings of race, humanity, freedom. Auslander’s skilled collaboration with the descendants of ‘Miss Kitty,’ sometimes called ‘the person who caused the civil war,’ brings the unexpected story of her family to light, forging firm links across separations of black and white, slave and master, past and present. In the process, haunting fallacies are exorcised, and nagging paradoxes of blood and betrayal find voice, making possible new lines of debate, and novel pursuits of understanding, even justice.

-Jean Comaroff,  Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago (author of Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People; co-author of Of Revelation and Revolution; Ethnicity, Inc.)

For more information about the book or Dr. Auslander’s work, please visit the following sites:

Accidental Slave Owner

Dr. Auslander’s blog, “Cultural Environments”

Follow Pastor Sandy, Dave and Jackie as they journey to Guatemala this week to meet with new friends at Salud y Paz–a U.S. based 501c3 nonprofit corporation/organization that procures new and used vehicles, equipment, and supplies for Christian mission projects throughout the world.

Why Salud y Paz?

Last month our Church Council voted to allocate 10% of the funds from our upcoming Capital Campaign to a suitable mission project somewhere in the world. The goal is to do more with our campaign than simply repay our mortgage and to make an impact somewhere in the world for people in genuine need. Our Capital Campaign Committee chose the “Salud y Paz” mission project near Antigua, Guatemala as its top candidate for our efforts.

“Salud y Paz” translates to mean “Health and Peace.” As a mission program of the United Methodist Church it partners with congregations in the U.S. and also with the indigenous Methodist church of Guatemala. Salud y Paz volunteers provide medical and dental services to impoverished people of Guatemala, as well as preschool and feeding programs for indigent families.

For more information on Salud y Paz, visit their website: http://saludypaz.org

What is Salud y Paz?

Salud y Paz is now a joint project of IHS, the Iglesia Metodista Nacional Primitiva de Guatemala, and the United Methodist Church in the United States. As a part of the UMC, the project is a designated Advance Special of the General Board of Global Ministries.

Where can I read more about the team’s trip?

Follow their blog, here.

The Future of the Bible

A conversation with noted author, professor of religion and SPU alumnus Timothy Beal

Monday, January 30, 2012
7:30 pm
Gymnasium
First Free Methodist Church, Seattle
3200 3rd Avenue West

Free and wheelchair accessible. Limited seating.

Join us for a lively and robust reimagining of the future of the Bible featuring Timothy Beal, Ph.D., the Florence Harness professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University and author of The Rise and Fall of the Bible.

With respondents Jeff Keuss, Ph.D., SPU professor of Christian ministry, theology, and culture; and Blake Wood, D.Min., lead pastor, First Free Methodist Church.

Bio

Timothy Beal has authored 11 books, including Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know and Roadside Religion: In Search of The Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s choice and one of Publisher’s Weekly’s ten Best Religion Books of 2005. He has published essays on religion and American culture in The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He received a B.A. (English) from Seattle Pacific University and a Ph.D. (Old Testament/Hebrew Bible) from Emory University.

An Interview with Tim Beal

On January 30, whom do you hope to see in the audience?

Seattle Pacific University students, for sure, as well as alumni, pastors, other church leaders, and friends. Undoubtedly, there will be a few former professors who know my story.

Can you give us a quick peek at what you’ll be talking about on January 30?

The popular, cultural idea is to think about the Bible as a kind of moral guidebook God wrote to give us all the answers. If we take this approach, we tend to experience a disconnect with God when our expectations of what we think the Bible promises aren’t met. What I want to explore and suggest is this: What if we could approach the Bible, not as an answer book, but rather as a “library of questions” that invites us, as an interpretive community, into the practice of learning to ask good questions?

What does that look like in a classroom discussion, or a church study group?

It can sound like a lot of noise. Encountering Scripture through good questions can generate lots of discussion, even arguments (the Latin root “arguere” means “to make clear”). Yet, this cacophony of many voices can actually be like a sacred hymn raised up to God.

Will you be sharing a few good classroom stories from your time as an SPU student?

Yes, I have stories to tell, and some of the names will be recognizable.

What should we be listening for as you talk about “the future of the Bible”? 

First, from a media perspective, our children and grandchildren won’t be reading Scripture in the form of a bound book we’re used to reading today. We’re in a media revolution right now. As we move out of a print book culture into a digital culture of social networking, hyperlinks, and blogs, we need to be asking the question, “How is the Bible going to change?” Jewish tradition and scriptural culture hold some interesting clues about how we can be rediscovering and receiving Scripture in our day.

Excerpts

The Bible creates community by providing space for community to happen. It offers storied words and theological vocabularies around which people can come together in conversation about abiding questions. It calls for creative, collaborative participation. This is true especially for Christians. It is “our” library of questions and pool of imagination, the place we gather to read again in order to find meaning and new situations. In its many voices, perspectives, and contradictions, it both embraces the diversity of voices among us and provides a context in which we can affirm unity within that diversity—not by agreeing about what it means but by joining in the creative, meaning-making process of interpretation that it hosts.

The New Testament literature likewise is shaped by rereading.

All its writings are fundamentally concerned with rereading Jewish Scriptures in order to understand the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Again and again, the Gospels quote Jewish Scriptures that they reinterpret as “fulfilled,” that is, filled out, by Jesus’s words and actions. Moreover, they ground Jesus’s authority in his own re-readings of Jewish Scriptures. Jesus is presented, first and foremost, as a biblical interpreter. We saw this very clearly in the story of Jesus reading from the Isaiah scroll in his hometown synagogue in the Gospel of Luke. Another good example is the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew (chapter 5), in which Jesus repeatedly quotes passages from the Torah and then reinterprets them in radically new ways. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’” he declares, quoting a line that appears three times in the Torah. “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.” Here and throughout the Gospels, Jesus does not simply cite Scripture as though it were a self-evident, self-interpreting source of authority. He rereads it, drawing out new, often highly provocative meanings,  “fulfilling” it in a way that gives it new form for a new day. What would Jesus do? Reread. The Bible tells me so.

From The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book, Timothy Beal, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Join us for the launch on Saturday, February 25 at 9am. 

Beginning Saturday, February 25 at 9am and the Saturdays following, we’ll be gathering in the Fellowship Hall of First Church for Pax Christi Yoga. Enter through the doors on 2nd and Denny Way. Not sure where we’re located? Here’s a map. All are welcome, and no prior experience is needed. Not sure what to bring or wear? Check out our Pax Christi Yoga page for more information! We hope to see you soon! 

>Download the flyer here!

“…do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?”

-I Corinthians 6:19 

What is Yoga and how is Pax Christi Yoga different?

Yoga is an ancient practice uniting the mind with the body, becoming a discipline of presence in each moment.

In Pax Christi Yoga we use Christian scripture to focus our thoughts as we move and breathe and align with the inner world of the Holy Spirit.

We welcome all individuals to participate in this communion with God through the moving prayer of yoga.

If we do not involve our bodies, …we may not be able to enter a true, attentive stillness because our posture frustrates it…The result is often a drowsy condition punctuated with ‘pins and needles’ and restlessness.  More than that, we remain inhibited in our self-expression….If in prayer we shut down all bodily gesture and movement and confine ourselves to a single position we cut in half our power to feel and own and express our devotion, our love and our needs…

–Martin Smith, The Body at Prayer:  The Contemporaries Meet the Classics on Prayer (2003)

For more information, contact Instructor, Janet Crawley:  Janet@firstchurchseattle.org

Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography

with Sue Sutherland-Hanson

Exploring and telling our stories feeds the soul and forms community.  We will “look at the past through the lens of adult experience, write about it from a holistic or spiritual perspective, and come to understand it differently in the process.”  (Dan Wakefield)  Adapting prompts from  Wakefield’s book The Story of Your Life- Writing a Spiritual Autobiography we will recall our childhood, adolescence, mentors, and influencing experiences. (No text is needed.)

Writing can be a spiritual tool used to bring all of your life into the light of grace often leading to transformation.  While we will be writing, this is not a writing class; a variety of levels and abilities are expected and welcome.

At the end of this day of exploring, writing, and sharing, participants will have enough material to create their 8-10 page (double space) autobiography. We will reconvene at a later date to share what always turns out be inspiring accounts of our lives.

When: Saturday, Janaury 28, 2012   9:00 a.m. to  4:00 p.m.  

Where:  First United Methodist Church Seattle            

Cost:  Session: $60.00

Sign up by emailing the following information to Sophia Agtarap, Director of Outreach [sophia@firstchurchseattle.org]

• Name
• Email address
• Phone number
• Whether or not you’d like to receive information about future classes/workshops

About our facilitator, Sue Sutherland-Hanson, MA-TESL,  M.Div.

Sue enjoys creating contexts for people to see the wisdom they embody. She has led workshops on spiritual autobiography, creative writing,  modes of creativity, and the spirituality of the body. An award-winning poet and essayist, Sue teaches English to students from all language backgrounds at Edmonds Community College. Her passion for diversity and her life-long connection to the Northwest infuse her art, teaching and spirituality.

For more information about how to be involved, visit Equal Rights Washington’s website.

To learn more about local efforts, click on the link below:

United Methodist Church hosts forum on marriage equality [News Tribune]