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Dear Friends,

Toledo Pride is ALMOST upon us, and what a joy-filled weekend we have planned for next week!

There has been an incredible build-up to this moment. The Beauty in Being event was a huge success—thank you to all who made it possible! And can we talk about those tie-dyed Pride T-shirts? They look absolutely fabulous—I’ve loved seeing the pictures rolling in from all corners of our community.

As we head into the big weekend, a quick (and bittersweet) note: our final Pride Committee meeting will be this Sunday after the service. We’ll need all hands on deck, so even if you haven’t been part of previous meetings, we’d love to have you join us. If you signed up to help at any of the events, this is the meeting you should attend. All are welcome!

Here’s what’s coming up:

🎉 Pride Family Picnic – Friday, August 14th from 5 – 8pm
Join us for a joyful family BBQ with hamburgers, hot dogs, and all the sides you could dream of! We’ll have story readings and performances by Toledo’s finest drag artists, Juicee Strawbooty, Stevie Phoenix, Eugenia & Giovani J. Jackson, plus arts & crafts, games, a dance party, and our first-ever gender-affirming clothing swap. It’s going to be a magical evening for all ages.

🌈 Parade Waystation – Saturday, August 15th – Trinity doors at 10 am, Parade at 12 pm
We’re opening our doors as a welcoming stop during the Pride Parade—a place to cool down, use the restroom, and soak in the beauty of our sanctuary, adorned with Pride flags and banners. We’ll also be marching with other local faith communities with Better Together, and Trinity will be well represented at the Promenade in the Episcopal booth. We also have some GREAT Trinity swag this year! Big thanks to our incredible volunteers!

🙏 The Big Queer Service – Sunday, August 16th at 10 am
Our Pride weekend culminates with a truly special service—full of joyful music, thoughtful liturgy, and a Baptism. You won’t want to miss it.

✨ Still Needed:

Bottled water
Hard candy
Gently used clothing
Ice (Day of Parade)
Coolers

The last day to drop off donations is this Sunday, August 10th.

On behalf of the staff, the Pride Committee, and myself—thank you. We can’t wait to celebrate with you next weekend. Let’s make it unforgettable!

Happy Pride!
Michael Kidney
Pride Committee Chair

Dear Friends,

The church – like the rest of the world – changed in some significant ways during the pandemic. One of those changes that brought strength and growth to us as the Body of Christ living in the world is that we moved away from being so isolated from one another. There was a time when congregations operated like entirely solo entities. With that wild world change we all experienced, all across the church, we’ve started to recognize that we actually do need each other!

Honestly – it really does make sense. We are people of the Jesus Movement; the Body of Christ; the people of God’s incarnation in the world. So much of how we understand our faith is through our relationships with God and with each other. Of course being in relationships in our common life in the church would bring us closer to realizing the vision that we understand from God!

This week we have an opportunity to put that focus on relationships into action in a very small (though not at all insignificant) way. Since Jeep Fest is going to be keeping us from worshiping in our usual manner here in our beautiful downtown campus, we’ve decided to join our neighbors at St. Michael’s-in-the-Hills in Ottawa Hills. You may remember, some of them came to worship with us on the day of the Glass City Marathon – when they couldn’t get to their church.

We all benefit when we deepen our relationships with each other and when we learn about the ways that we’re the same and the ways that we’re different.

I do hope you’ll make it a point to worship with us at our neighbor’s place this week! It should be fun!

Blessings,
Jon+

Please join us on Sunday, July 27 as Jon blesses the newly renovated Sacristy. Now, what the heck am I talking about??

The Sacristy is the sacred space where beloved and dedicated members of the Altar Guild prepare the Lord’s supper every Sunday and at other special services throughout the year. Our TAG Team (TAG is the acronym we use for Trinity Altar Guild) is composed of Scott Dibling, Kyle Grefe, Brian Ingman, Sue Smitley, and Kelly Termin. Trinity is so blessed to have such a wonderful group of people prepare and clean up after Eucharist each Sunday.

Before the renovation of the Sacristy, our beloved TAG team worked in an old, dark, and worn-out space—the Formica countertops were cracked and ragged, the walls were a dark olive green, and who knows when that carpet had last been cleaned! With outstanding help from Heather, we made magic happen: new counters, new floor, new sink, off white paint, and lots of new lighting. We’ve created a space that truly feels sacred.

A few weeks ago, Chelsie sang a hymn at the Offertory called Mothering God, written by Tom Trenney. This spoke to me so richly of the feast offered each week by Jesus.

Mothering Christ, you took my form
Offering me your food of light
Grain of life and grape of love
Your very body for my peace

After the service on Sunday, please take time to thank TAG members for the great work they do in providing a meaningful Eucharist for you. After that, stop by the Sacristy to see our sacred kitchen. If you are feeling called to join us on the Altar Guild, please let us know!

Kyle Grefe, Altar Guild & Junior Warden

Dear Friends!

Chelsie Cree here, Chief Joy Officer, reporting for duty! It is my pleasure to share with you a little bit more about our upcoming event called “The Beauty in Being: an Evening of Music and Activism.” The inspiration for this event was born out of a desperate need for a glimmer of hope and joy, grounded in the reality of our life’s circumstances. Sometimes, people think that activism can’t be fun. Well, I say, TRY ME.

The purpose of this event is simple: it’s to celebrate The Beauty in Being. We’re delighted to say we’ll do this in a couple of different ways.

6:00 pm: Tie-Dye Prelude Palooza (Pick up your pride shirt, choose your design and colors, and make your Trinity Pride t-shirt truly unique!)

6:45 pm: Snack Time (Have you ever experienced a popcorn bar? There will be others too!)

7:00 pm: The Beauty in Being: Live Concert and Stories (Members of our community and friends will share some stories about the joys of coming into their identity.)

8:00 pm: Phone calls to representatives following a call to action.

There will be protest sign-making, button-making, and a whole lot of community face time. We are not alone, and we’re ready to wrap this incredibly difficult time in our lives with a hug. We are grounded in reality and not afraid to celebrate the full diversity of God’s love in the world.

Chief Joy Officer signing off – see you July 31st!

Chelsie Cree
Director of Music and the Arts

Dear Friends,

This week during my devotional time I came across James 1:4. The New International Translation quotes it as, “Let perseverance finish its hard work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking in anything.” After reading this, I thought about all that has happened locally and nationally this month. How much more perseverance can people take? I thought. Alone, who knows, but we have a strong community here to lift each other up.

We are living into a time where we must lean on one another to persevere and engage in that hard work worth doing. In his book, The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence writes, “[God] isn’t impressed so much with the dimensions of our work as with the love in which it is done.” The impact we have, because of the love we share as we show up to be the hands and feet of God in our little corner of Lucas County, does not have to be mighty in numbers. But like Brother Lawrence says, radical in the love we do it in.

This week for the first time the Community Engagement Committee met, and I am so excited for the new ways to engage with our surrounding community are on the horizon. All of which will be driven by our love, not concern of doing “enough”.
For a teaser, we all know about The Beauty in Being. At the end of this month, we will have the opportunity to use our voices and be heard with The Beauty in Being: An Evening of Activism and Music. If you attended Big Love last June on our plaza, you will be familiar with it. Keep an eye out for next week’s Topics where our beloved Chief Joy Officer and Director of Music and the Arts will be writing more about it.

I am so proud of you all and honored to do this work with you.

Grace and peace,

George M. Benson
Director of Community Engagement

Dear Friends,

On Sunday, if you were in church, you heard me talk a bit about my experience last week in learning more about Toledo through Leadership Toledo’s Focus 419 program – a three-day deep dive into the history, resources, and future of Toledo and our wider region.

This week, our parish staff took a little field trip across the Maumee River to tour the National Museum of the Great Lakes – an amazing resource, right here in our back yard! These waters that we so often take for granted are an integral part of what has shaped this region we love.

It’s important for all of us to take some time every now and then to shift our perspectives from what we see in our regular, day-to-day lives.

As you make your way through summer – if you have a chance to get away or to take a break from your regular schedule, think about how that shifting perspective impacts your relationship with God. Are there things you can do that can help you to see the world in a broader way? Are there ways that you can see things and people and perspectives that had eluded you before?

One of the things that I believe to be true about God, is that God – in seeing and understanding all things and all people – can best be understood through the efforts we make at broadening our own perspectives. We can never reach the breadth of perspective that God has, but in trying, we can move closer.

Of course, we can do this anytime during the year. We’re not limited to summer, or to vacations. But those can be times for us to intentionally refocus ourselves. When you have such times in your own life – whenever they might be – try to imagine how seeing something new in the world helps you see the world a little more like God sees it. The newness you encounter – the new angles you see – puts you a tiny bit closer to understanding God’s perspective; God, through whom all things are always being made new.

Blessings,
Jon+

Dear Friends,

Since I set foot on campus here at Trinity for the first time back in December, one of the things that I have heard about again and again is what a joy people have in sharing the Fourth of July fireworks together on the Plaza. It has been so much a part of the conversation around here for these months, that Michael and I have even planned our vacation around it. Now, it’s hard to believe that it’s already next week! There’s more information in our Trinity Topics email, but I hope you’ll be able to join us. Joy and fun are an important part of what it means to be a community! And, as I’ve said so often, things like this are a great opportunity to invite friends to join you at a church event. It’s a pretty gentle way of sharing the joy of all the wonderful things we do around here with the people who mean the most to you!

Also – as I alluded earlier, Michael and I will be taking a couple of weeks of vacation coming up just after the Independence Day weekend. Thanks to Fr. Robert for stepping in to keep things going while I’m away! Mostly we’ll be sticking around close to home, diving in to more of the fun things that Toledo and the region around us have to offer. We’re looking forward to spending some time doing some of the fun things that day-to-day life leaves us too busy to do. Of course, we know about the museum and the zoo – we love those things! – but if you think of anything quirky and off-the-wall that you love about Toledo and our surrounding community, let us know! We’re having such a great time learning more and doing so many of the things that make this such a wonderful home.

Of course, our favorite place in Toledo is Trinity. Thank you all for continuing to be so loving and supportive of me in this ministry and us in our lives.

See you Sunday!
Jon+

Dear Friends,

This week, the staff at Trinity has been doing a deep dive into the coming program year (generally centered around the school year). This was a part of what we expect to become our first annual staff retreat.

We gathered at the 577 Foundation in Perrysburg for two days of praying, laughing, systems analysis, and planning, planning, planning! We did a deep dive into all sorts of things that get lost in the shuffle of day-to-day office life. Things like refining our communications systems (both internal and external), clarifying our understanding of our desired tone and voice as a communicating organization, developing a sense of our “brand”, exploring what systems in the parish were working well and what needed more direct guidance from us as a staff (and identifying which of those issues were most pressing), improving our social media presence, and of course, concentrated planning for specific events as we launch the program year this fall!

Our guiding questions throughout these exercises were: what committee is responsible, what specific staff person will offer support, what people are needed to execute an event or an idea, how does this align with our 2030 Vision, what specifically needs to be done to promote an event, and finally (and most importantly) how can we do it (whatever it is) cooler and more creatively than we’ve ever done it before?!

You should know that the staff of this church – while small, considering all that they do – is full of energy, and they are deeply committed to embodying our parish’s ideals of being a progressive, inclusive, and creative Episcopal community for downtown Toledo and all the areas and people that we serve. You should be so proud of the work that they are doing. I know I am!

Know that we are grateful for your support and eager to keep working alongside all of you as we run hard into 2025-2026!

Blessings,
Jon+

Dear Friends,

Happy Pride Season! 🌈

My name is Michael Kidney, and I’m thrilled to introduce myself as this year’s Pride Chair at Trinity. It’s such an honor to step into this role within a community that lives and breathes love, inclusion, and celebration—not just during Pride, but all year long. As Jon reminded us in last week’s sermon, Pride at Trinity is more than a season—it’s a year-round expression of who we are. That’s something truly special, and not every community can say the same. We are so lucky to have each other.

You may start noticing some exciting changes happening around the building in the lead-up to our full-swing Pride celebrations this summer! The beautiful banners from Gun Violence Sunday and Pentecost? Those are just small pieces of a much larger project we’ve been working on. We’re building momentum for something meaningful—and colorful!

Speaking of colorful, we’re so excited to roll out this year’s new Trinity Pride t-shirts! This time around, we’re keeping it simple: a clean white shirt with the Trinity logo and our descriptor words. But here’s the fun part—we’ll be tie-dyeing them together at our Big Love event on July 31st! Join us for an evening of art, advocacy, and joyful community on The Plaza. More details will be coming your way soon.

To kick off Pride weekend in August, we’re bringing back our beloved Friday Night Picnic—also on The Plaza! We’re expanding this into a wider community Pride event, with family-friendly fun for everyone. Expect a Drag Queen and King story hour, a clothing swap to support our non-binary and trans siblings (thanks to the creativity of Erin Brooks!), and so much more. Erin has amazing plans in motion and will absolutely need volunteers to help make it all happen—so stay tuned!

This year, we’re also joining forces with Better Together, marching alongside other faith communities in the Toledo Pride Parade. In a time when division is too common, we want to embody unity. What better way to show the world that God’s love reaches everyone than to walk proudly, side by side, with fellow people of faith?

And don’t worry—we’ll still have plenty of ways to show off our Trinity Pride! We’ll be spending time at the Episcopal Church booth at the Promenade, alongside our Episcopal friends and neighbors. Whether you’re marching, tabling, or just waving your rainbow flag from the crowd, there’s a place for you.

If you’re unable to attend our Pride events in person but still want to get involved, we’ll be sharing opportunities to volunteer or donate supplies. Keep an eye out for sign-ups and calls for help—every bit of support makes a difference.

Have ideas? Questions? Excitement to share? I’d love to hear from you! Catch me around the building or join us at our next Pride planning meeting—this Sunday after church—if you’d like your thoughts and ideas heard or if you just want to hear firsthand what we have planned. Let’s make this the best Pride Trinity has ever seen—together.

With joy and love,
Michael Kidney
Pride Chair, Trinity Episcopal Church

Dear friends,

This Sunday we will be offering the ability to participate in a bit of activism. During coffee hour, a table will be set up captained by our incredible tenor section leader, Steven Sloan. There, he will be accepting signatures against Ohio Senate Bill 1. SB1 goes after higher education, specifically attempting to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in universities, which could lead to the elimination of DEI scholarships.

Over the past few years, we have been wading into the water of activism by advocating for the world we want, not the one we live in. Looking at our values as a progressive, inclusive, community of faith, it makes sense to use our voices to speak against a bill that will “stifle scientific discovery by driving away students, teachers, and staff” (ohsb1petition.com). The Ohio Capital Journal has a great article written in March of this year which you can read here (it is also where the image for this Dear Friends comes from).

We ought to have a say in how the future of our state teaches our kids, and cares for our teachers. I ask you to use your voice and sign the petition against SB1 this Sunday during coffee hour.

Grace and peace,
George Benson (he/him)
Director of Community Engagement

Dear friends,

Next Friday, June 6 is National Gun Violence Awareness Day and the kick-off of Wear Orange Weekend. Trinity will observe Wear Orange Sunday this Sunday, June 1, because next Sunday, June 8, we’ll celebrate Pentecost. So please wear orange to church this Sunday! Why orange? Because it’s the color of safety for hunters, chosen to honor 15-year-old Hadiya Pendelton, who was shot and killed on a playground in Chicago in 2013. Dr. Yolanda Dawn Waller will be our guest preacher. Dawn is a gun violence survivor, and I have learned in doing this work that it must be victim and survivor-centered. The voices that need to be amplified are those closest to the issue. Survivors are the leaders of the movement to reduce gun violence. They need and deserve our support. They welcome us to walk with them as allies. Read about Dawn’s background here, and come hear her preach on Sunday!

I became involved in gun violence prevention in Toledo two years ago when I marched in the Old West End Festival parade with Moms Demand Action and met Mike Linehan, a parishioner from Olivet Lutheran Church. Mike and I had a brief conversation about how our two faith communities were wrestling with the issue of gun violence, and exchanged contact information. Later in June, we began to work together to form the Multifaith Coalition to Reduce Gun Violence. We have hosted five public forums on topics including survivor testimonies, legislative advocacy training, safe gun storage, and updates from the City of Toledo’s Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE). About 250 people from more than 50 northwest Ohio congregations representing many faith traditions have participated in at least one forum, including an impressive 40 Trinity parishioners. Thank you for your commitment to help reduce gun violence!

Several members of the Multifaith Coalition to Reduce Gun Violence engaged over the past year and a half in MONSE’s community-driven process to develop Peace in Motion, the City of Toledo’s five-year plan to reduce violence, which was approved by City Council earlier this month. The City’s dedicated efforts have reduced homicides, from 65 in 2022 to 37 in 2024. 2024 saw the lowest number of youth (under age 18) homicides since 2019. The City’s Save Our Community (SOC) program has built up a caseload of young people who are at high risk of experiencing gun violence. SOC staff provide mediation, de-escalation, and connection to services, opportunities and support to help meet their needs. The Peace in Motion plan contains actionable recommendations, such as the launch of the Healing & Compassion Fund – United Way of Greater Toledo to provide immediate financial support after the unfathomable loss of a loved one from gun violence (application and more detail here). The process to develop the Peace In Motion plan has helped to eliminate “silos” within the community around efforts to address gun violence. We can accomplish far more working together than we can in isolation. Partners like the Multifaith Coalition to Reduce Gun Violence bolster this work and ensure a community-oriented approach to addressing gun violence.

This Sunday, we will remember recent victims of gun violence, and honor the bruised and broken, strong and resilient survivors that are leading the movement to prevent gun violence. Free gun locks will be available for anyone who wants them. Here are many resources to explore for more information on how to reduce gun violence: organizations, safe gun storage, books and more. Please email me if you’d like to receive email updates from the Multifaith Coalition to Reduce Gun Violence. See you Sunday with your orange on!

Peace,
Deacon Meribah

Dear friends,

As I write this to you, I am on my way to the annual Diocese of Ohio Clergy Conference (thank goodness for speech-to-text tech!). It’s about a 3 hour drive from Toledo to the conference center.

I’ve always enjoyed long road trips, even as a young child. My family would often take long road trips. My mom and I, in particular, would regularly drive from Louisiana to Iowa to visit my aunt and her family. I came to treasure those times because they were some of the most important times when mom and I could really get to know each other better. Our relationship would deepen as the miles ran beneath us. Now, as an adult, Michael and I also enjoy taking long road trips. As much as we both love music, we often find ourselves riding along with the radio silenced – just to talk with one another; to spend some quality time together.

Road trips are about building relationships. Certainly, it’s about bringing people together from one place to another; but the relationships can also be built on the trip itself as we’re riding along. Nowadays, when I’m alone on the road, I often use this as time for intensive prayer. Prayer isn’t always with your head bowed, and your eyes closed. A lot of times, prayer isn’t much more than deep thoughts. It’s about talking to God like you talk to your loved one in the passenger seat next to you. Again, it’s about building relationships and about deepening bonds. Our relationship with God needs that as much as any of our physical relationships do.

Soon it will be Memorial Day – a day that many people think of as the sort of beginning of summer (even though the summer season is still weeks away). If your summer calendar has you taking a road trip sometime this year, I invite you to turn the radio off for a few minutes and listen to the people around you. If you’re fortunate enough to be alone for a while, spend some time deepening your relationship with God. Talk with God just like you’d talk with a dear friend or a treasured loved one. God wants to hear what you have to say. And, if you embrace the silence long enough, you might just hear what God has to say.

Blessings,
Jon+

Dear friends,

Over the past few years, something that has made me smile is seeing the number of children and families joining us at Trinity. Watching and listening to these kids in service whether it is during the procession, in their clubhouse, or in the nursery has been a source of great joy. This weekend we can share in this joy as we plant the children’s garden on the Trinity Plaza. Saturday morning at 9:30am, Melanie Schell will be leading the way and helping our kids with this endeavor. I look forward to joining them and invite you all to do so as well.

Looking to the future, I wanted to also let parents know that the last week of Sunday School in the Club House will be on June 15th, Trinity Sunday. For the summer season, our elementary kids will join us throughout all of worship, while the nursery will still be open for littles. This past year has offered us some great opportunities to continue to look at how we include our kids in the service, and what we provide for them. So stay tuned as we continue to work on this ministry.

See you all Saturday at 9:30 on the Plaza!

Grace and peace,
George Benson (he/him)

Dear Friends,

There are a few spiritual disciplines that I’ve discovered in the course of my life that have had a legitimate role in shaping me and helping me to become a more mature and genuine practitioner of the Christian faith. One of those disciplines is a conscious commitment to looking for reasons to be grateful.

A truth I’ve come to know as a person growing into Christianity (we’re all growing – no one has it figured out. Not even priests!) is summarized in Jesus’ simple teaching, “seek and you will find”. And I’ve learned that if I seek occasions of gratitude, I will find them. And when I find them, life feels better, and the Christian faith is more meaningful. So, I try to set aside some time each week to specifically look for reasons to be grateful: grateful to the people around me, and grateful to God for the blessings I might otherwise overlook.

The Vestry and I are practicing this search for gratitude as a part of our monthly meetings. We set aside a few minutes near the beginning of each meeting to specifically think about reasons we’re grateful and people for whom we are grateful. We say the names and the reasons out loud for each other and we record them, because we want to begin sharing this gratitude with all of you.

This is the list from our last meeting:

• For all the people who assisted with Holy Week services and preparing for it
• For Grace Mauk coming back
• For the music on Easter
• For police officers who have been assisting with breakfast incidents
• For Michael Kidney for being involved
• For Heather Meyer, specifically for the Toledo Grows connection and learning about pollinators

Look for more lists like this in Trinity Topics each month after our Vestry meetings. Of course, this is an incomplete list – they always will be. In a parish like Trinity that has so much going on, it takes a lot of people and a lot of passion to make this ministry happen. So, we hope that you’ll join us in seeking out these occasions of thanksgiving. If you notice something or someone that deserves our thanks, send me a quick email or text to let me know.

I hope you will find, as I have, the ways that being intentionally thankful enriches our lives every day!

Blessings,
Jon+

Dear Friends,

On Tuesday morning Becky Koskinen, Phil Skeldon, Mark Dubielak, and I will be driving out to Washington D.C. to meet with a few congressional reps, as well as dropping in to see our senators. During that time, we will also be delivering letters the Trinity Response Team wrote expressing frustration with the current administration and asking for support.

This trip will include a meeting with members of the Office of Government Relations. With the advocacy work Trinity members have been working on, we feel it is important to start a relationship with them and those who work in the Episcopal Public Policy Network. This visit that the four of us are taking on behalf of Trinity is hopefully the first of many. Please keep us in your prayers as we drive to and from our nation’s capital and for the conversations we will have during our time there.

If you are feeling compelled to write a letter for us to take to our congressional reps, please feel free to bring it on Sunday. I will be happy to add it to the pile and look forward to letting you all know how it goes!

Grace and peace,
George Benson

Dear Friends,

Happy Easter! I hope you were able to take part in some of the many worship opportunities we had throughout Holy Week and on Easter Day.

This week, the members of the staff at Trinity have been taking a well-deserved time of slower schedules and a bit less intensity at work. I hope you’ve been able to do a bit of that here and there, too – to take some time to really reflect on what it means to embrace this new way of knowing and experiencing life that the Christian experience offers.

And remember – Easter wasn’t just last Sunday. We will be celebrating Easter at Trinity for a whole season! So, keep this joyful worship as a part of your Easter discipline in the weeks ahead. There’s simply too much joy for us to try to contain it in just a single Sunday! We look forward to sharing it all with you.

Blessings,
Jon+

Dear friends,

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of composting. I toyed with starting to do it in New Jersey, but we were afraid that the smells of food waste outside might attract our neighborhood bears. We saw enough of them without putting out bait!

I know – it seems like a weird thing to be fascinated by. But I’ve always been drawn to the idea of not only reducing the waste I generate by living through my daily routines, but even more by the idea of finding new value in that waste. What was waste – through a process that, because of my ignorance, seems to me to be mysterious – gets transformed into something new that is beneficial in new ways.

As I write to you this week, we are in the final, waning days of Lent. And by the time you read this, we will be deep in the heart of the Triduum – those holiest days from Maundy Thursday, through Good Friday, and into Holy Saturday that give us our last moments of preparation for Easter and Resurrection joy.

It’s a strange time to write and reflect, because our practice of faith is sort of in a time that’s like mid-compost. Our old and used-up ways of looking at the world are, through a mysterious process, being reformed and transformed into something entirely new – something with new, profound value; something that will feed starving souls.

As we make our way into this, our first Easter together, I invite you to consider that. Consider the idea that God is actively working within you to break down the useless leftovers of hurtful faith traditions that you may be holding; and consider that God can, through the power of resurrection and love, transform them into something new and powerful.

That is the Easter hope and that is the promise of Resurrection.

Blessings,
Jon+

Dear friends,

This Sunday, we begin our journey to Holy Week by celebrating Palm Sunday. This entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem on a donkey is full of expectations on his followers’ behalf. From the zealots, an over throwing of Rome’s power in Palestine, from his disciples perhaps the kin-dom of heaven establishing to earth, and everything in between. The story of Jesus’ last week of ministry this side of death is something Christians all over the earth have celebrated for almost two millennia.

It is impossible for me to prepare for Holy Week without thinking of the humanitarian crisis happening in the Middle East. For over 100 years, the Presiding Bishops of the Episcopal Church have taken up a Good Friday offering in support of The Episcopal Church in Jerusalem. This year’s offering will go to support specific ministries in The Episcopal Church in Jerusalem, look to the Easter appeal letter for more information.

For the past 18 months in our Noon Prayer Service, we have been praying for those in Palestine and Israel, and this Easter we can pray with our actions. We are inviting you to commemorate this holy season by making a special gift, beyond regular giving, to partner in this Easter offering appeal. Every cent that goes above our budgeted amount will go towards this offering.

We will continue our local direct missional support offering for the Christmas season. With everything happening in our world, we want to embrace our larger identity as Episcopalians and join the larger Episcopal Church in supporting those in the Middle East.

Thank you for your continued support of Trinity Episcopal Church and we look forward to seeing you Sunday.

Grace and peace,
George Benson (he/him)