Trinity Blog

Our church has stepped out in faith in a number of ways this fall. We have started a new worship service, we have changed our sanctuary furniture, we have hired a new youth ministry leader, we have taken a big step into Latino ministry, and we have continued to work hard to serve those in need in our community. Every time a church makes major changes, we need to digest those changes and find out how God is calling us all to be the church of Jesus Christ together in a new way.

I would like to call us to a month of prayer. Let’s pray for each other. Let’s pray that each of us will grow closer to God. Let’s pray that our church will live out its mission.

I propose that we each take 10 minutes a day to do this. We can start by praying one of the Psalms.  In November, to make it easy to stay in sync, let’s pray the Psalm that corresponds to that day’s date. On November 15th, we would pray Psalm 15. In December, we’ll just keep going with Psalm 31.

Then let’s pray for these concerns of our congregation and community. Choose whichever one or ones seem appropriate each day - or some other concern you may be led to:

• Pray for unity in our church - “For we are all one in Christ Jesus” - Galatians 3:28
• Pray that we may grow in Christ - Ephesians 4:14-16
• Pray that we may become cheerful givers of our time and treasure - 2 Corinthians 9
• Pray this prayer of the Apostle Paul for us: “And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ-to the glory and praise of God.” - Philippians 1:9-11
• Pray that we may love those around us enough to care for them - Luke 10:25-37

Let’s try doing this for a month from November 10 - December 10 as we prepare our hearts for Christmas. I believe that prayer makes a difference. If we all bow our hearts together, God will heal our hurts, give us wisdom, strengthen our spirits, unite us, equip us, and send us out to be God’s people in the world.

“I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”  Ezekiel 36:27-28

Your brother in Christ,

Pastor Steve

Some History

As most of you know, Trinity has been doing outreach to the Latino community for almost two years now (since our first event, which was the Three Kings Day in January 2007). Well, the Sacramento Presbytery (the regional group of Presbyterian churches), has noticed! We realized that the Sacramento-area churches had no effective outreach to a group that is a large percentage of our population so, with the help of our own Arturo Jimenez and Kathy Trott of Woodland Presbyterian Church, we developed a Latino Ministry Plan. Our session jumped at the chance and approved both the Latino Ministry Plan and a grant application to help fund it. The plan, which was approved by the presbytery in September, creates a position to be shared between the presbytery and Trinity!  Most of the funding will come from the presbytery and the national Presbyterian Church. For only $500 per month, Trinity will have a half-time Associate Pastor of Latino Ministry.

The Position

In order to do this job effectively, we need someone who speaks excellent Spanish and excellent English. They must understand at least one Latin American culture really well and they must understand American culture really well. We need someone bilingual and bicultural. We also need someone who has completed seminary and can be ordained as a Presbyterian pastor. Needless to say, there aren’t a lot of people who can do that job. The position is still open for another week or so, but we have an excellent candidate, Tina Torres. Tina grew up in New York but lived for 14 years in Mexico City. She currently works as a court interpreter while looking for the right church position. Assuming that no other candidates appear, you will have an opportunity to meet Tina and eventually to vote on her as a pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in November so that she can be approved by Sacramento Presbytery on December 6th.

What Will This Mean for Trinity?

Tina will act as an associate pastor. Along with heading up our Latino Ministry, Tina will be part of the leadership of our church, helping out with worship leadership, preaching, teaching, and pastoral care tasks along withme and the rest of the staff. Her presence should make our Latino ministry much more effective, and she will also be a blessing to our existing congregation. She will initially be under contract for two years, starting this December, but the position can be extended or even converted to a permanent position if all goes well.

Please look for more information soon as the details are resolved. We also ask for your prayers for this ministry and for Tina, our top candidate for the position. God has truly been at work here, and we trust that this will be an exciting year!

Gracias,

Pastor Steve

“I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”   Isaiah 43:19

Pastors don’t get to make televised “State of the Church” speeches, but from time to time, I think it’s helpful to share some of the things I’ve seen God doing in our church. The theme in all of these things is that God is changing lives through the ministry of our congregation.

One of the most obvious signs that we’re making an impact is numeric. On November 2nd, between all three services, 280 people worshipped together at Trinity. And that was a regular Sunday. Last Call is really helping us to reach out, and it’s developing its own “personality.” There had to be at least 50 children between the three services! What a wonderful sign that God is at work. But people showing up wouldn’t
mean much if we weren’t all growing and serving together.

I have heard an amazing number of stories about how people have met the Lord in new ways as part of the Alpha Course. We look forward to another run of Alpha in January.

Our church is feeding the hungry! Our “Out of the Box Ministries” has grown from providing food boxes to a small group of people at a local school to distributing boxes from the church once a month.  We’re looking at helping an apartment complex as well.

Our children’s ministry is growing with new children’s classes at the Sunday evening Last Call service and two new preschool classes at 9 and 11. The Kids’ Choir and Drama Team did their first full-length musical this summer, and we now have two choirs - one for the little kids and one for the older ones.

Of course, we knew that as we added children to our congregation we would need to work on our youth ministry too. Hiring Dan Meyerpeter has been really helpful. Dan has made connections with the teens and is helping us to schedule regular fun events. Look for a new high school group Dan will run in partnership with the Collings West Sacramento Teen Center starting soon!

It’s not all about kids. We’re providing worship every month at Somerset skilled Nursing Facility now, and Debbie and the deacons are doing more visitation to those who are hospitalized or homebound.

We have also worked hard to reach out and serve our community - we connected with hundreds of kids on Halloween at Trunk-or-Treat, and we met community kids at Kids’ Day and VBX too.

There are new Bible studies, Wednesday evening classes, and small groups going now to give us ways to grow in faith. A weekly prayer group supports us all and gives people a place to go to ask for God’s help and healing.

And then there’s the growing Latino ministry.  We will soon have a much more effective outreach to
our Hispanic brothers and sisters. (See that blog post too.)

Does that seem like a laundry list? Maybe it would be, but each item on the list represents changed
lives - inside our church, outside our church, or both!  In this month of giving thanks, please take some time to thank God for working to show love to so many different kinds of people through our church. Please pray that God will provide the resources necessary to sustain our ministries. Please also pray that God will bring us all together to embrace our mission. The Body of Christ is made up of many parts, and we can’t live out our call without everyone.  I look forward to seeing what amazing things God will do through this congregation next! I am thankful for each one of you!

May God bless and keep us all on our journey together,
Pastor Steve

“For nothing will be impossible with God.” (Luke 1:37)

My wife Eleanor is planning to read one of my very favorite parts of the Bible at the prayer-a-thon (which will already have happened by the time you read this). It’s a vision that God gives to the prophet Ezekiel at a very difficult time in the history of God’s people:

Ezekiel 37:1-14 (New Revised Standard Version)
1 The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3 He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” 4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. 5 Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6 I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD.” 7 So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. 9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” 10 I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. 11 Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ 12 Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14 I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act, says the LORD”

I am grateful that with God, no situation is ever hopeless. These bones were very dry. They had been dead for a long time. But God - through Ezekiel - breathed life into them. As a pastor, I see a lot of painful situations. I don’t think I could do this job if I believed that they were hopeless. When God tells Mary that she will have a child born of the Holy Spirit, the angel says, “For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). As Christians, we rely on that.

We’ll see some examples of God doing the impossible in my upcoming message series on Joshua. But we also see examples of God breathing life into the dry bones of our lives and the life of our church again and again. And when we have nowhere else to turn, we turn to the cross - a symbol and a promise of God’s ability to bring life even from death.

Thank you, God, for being a God of miracles and hope from hopelessness.

Pastor Steve

“And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? …” Luke 18:7

I did some teaching on prayer on Sunday, and it created some confusion. I think that’s because I was teaching something different from what many of us have heard in the past. So let me take another crack at it.

You may have heard this saying, “God answers all prayer. Sometimes the answer is no.” I do not believe that statement is consistent with Jesus’ teaching on prayer in the Bible. Now here’s where misunderstandings happen. The idea that God answers all prayers does not mean that God will do anything we ask! Here’s some of what Jesus teaches:

“Ask, and it will be given you, search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”  - Matthew 7:7-11

But we know that God doesn’t give us everything we ask for. If I pray for a brand-new car right now, I’m not likely to receive it. Doesn’t that mean that God didn’t answer my prayer? Or that God said “no”? Not necessarily. In Luke 18, Jesus taught us to keep coming back to God asking again and again. Is that because God forgets what we asked for? Or because God is playing games with us? No way!

Here’s the deal. At the end of the Matthew 7 passage I quoted above, Jesus says that God’s not going to give us anything that’s not good for us. It’s very possible that a brand-new car - even if I really want one - isn’t what’s best for me right now and so God’s not going to give it to me. But Jesus tells me to keep coming back to God. Why??? Because as long as I keep coming back to God, I’m in a conversation with God. God has the chance to teach me. Prayer is a two-way street. In my life, I have often had the experience of coming back to God repeatedly with a request only to have God change my heart so that I either want something different or have a new perspective on the situation.

God answers all prayer - sometimes by changing the world around us (that’s what we usually think of as answered prayer) and sometimes by changing our hearts. God loves us too much to give us something that’s not the best for us. But we’ll never understand God’s response unless we keep coming back again and again. Eventually, God will answer our prayer by changing our hearts. So don’t give up on your prayers - even if they appear to be unanswered so far.

Pastor Steve

There is somebody new on the church staff that you should meet!

Dan Meyerpeter has been hired as our youth worker as of Tuesday, August 12th Dan comes to us after three years at The Discovery Church in Davis and he lives in West Sacramento.  He has a degree in History and is taking classes at seminary part-time.  In the coming months, Dan will be getting to know the Junior and Senior High youth who are around Trinity, and he will be looking for ways to reach out to youth in the community.  If you’d like to help with some youth events, or if you know of a teen that Dan should meet, please contact him by phone through the church office or by e-mail at Dan@TrinityWestSac.org

Dan’s position is made possible by my not being able to take on any more than my current fourteen hours per week.  (Personnel had budgeted for an increase to 20 hours this fall.) Through some prayer and creativity, Pastor Steve, the Personnel Team and I realized that we could reallocate those monies and we absolutely felt it was important to have someone on staff whose attention is focused on youth as our younger kids grow into the youth age.  We really saw God’s hand in how Dan’s path crossed ours, and Dan’s heart for reaching the youth in West Sacramento and outreach to the community seem to be a wonderful fit for all that is going on here at Trinity.  I know you’ll join me in welcoming Dan and supporting him in his ministry!

Watch for an announcement of a time when the youth will come together to meet Dan and to thank Mariesha Moreau, Hannah Metcalf and Jeff Chen for their faithful volunteer service with the youth over the past several years.

Sue Goodwin, Director of Children’s and Youth Ministries

Check out this YouTube video of Trinity’s Kids’ Choir and Drama Team singing at the Sacramento River Cats on August 3, 2008! They did a really nice job, and they even signed it in American Sign Language.

August 11 marks the end of our fifth year of ministry together and the beginning of the sixth! I started here on a two-year contract as a “designated pastor,” but since you converted me to a “stated call” position, there is no longer any time limit on our relationship. That’s good since we just bought a house!

I am so proud of our church. There has been a lot of change over the past five years as we have sought – together – to reach out to our community in new ways. Our church family is significantly larger, we are doing more, and people’s lives are being changed both in and outside our church. Thanks for a great five years! God willing, Eleanor, the kids, and I are looking forward to many more years together with you.

May God continue to bless our shared ministry!