January 27, 2023

To Meet Well:
Reflections at the end of the day, January 24

Today was my first full day at the annual meeting of our Covenant Ministerium, affectionately known as “Midwinter.” For the almost four decades I have attended them, they have always been in late January or early February, hence its name. But from decade to decade, President to President, year to year they have different purposes, programs, and personalities. I thought I would reflect on my first day at this year’s Midwinter.

To begin with, today was a day of many types of meetings. I met with a staff member of Serve Globally to get an update on the Tangs. I had meetings to catch up with old friends, as well as meetings to get to know some of my new ministerial colleagues. All of those meetings helped me get to know the current expressions of our denomination better. The last Midwinters I attended, I taught courses there, so I mostly spent time with people who were interested topics I was interested in: ministry, worship, and spirituality. That was a select group of people and was some years ago now. The meetings I described helped me get to know the Covenant Church as it exists today.

The same is true of the two plenary sessions I attended today, but in very different ways. These were presented by our new president and her administration, and addressed the challenges facing the Covenant, past and present. The morning session was President Tammy Swanson-Draheim’s first annual update. It had three movements to it. The first movement echoed her offering in the Winter issue of the Covenant Companion, “Our Most Critical Need.” In both, President Swanson-Draheim promoted the idea that our top priority as a denomination is prayer: prayer for our churches, prayer for our world, and prayer for our denomination. The second movement was her overview on how we might restructure our denomination to be more efficiently and effectively organized to do ministry in our world. Her vision for the Covenant is not dissimilar from the vision we discussed last weekend at our Staff-Council Retreat: we need to clarify our mission, assess our resources, and then organize our ministries in ways that reflects careful and prayerful stewardship of our resources for our mission. This will be a process rolled out over time, inviting feedback along the way. Another similarity to our church.

The third movement was a shorter version of her presentation on human sexuality that she gave to our conference ministerium on January 11, which I described in a previous “Pastor’s Notes.” This was the subtext for the afternoon plenary “Retelling Our Story.” This session consisted of a series of four historical vignettes, each one focusing on defining moments in our denomination’s history, specifically four, decisive watershed moments. The first was the nature of our work in Alaska as a new immigrant church, and its integration of those ethnic people into our ethnic church. The second was our first half century of defining ourselves as a unique ethnic denomination that weathered the storms facing all churches in America in those years—but without dividing. The third was the consistent naming of, and resistance to racial and ethnic discrimination, from its condemnation of ongoing Naziism at the end of World War II in 1946, through the civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s. The last was on the origins of our embrace of multi-ethnic churches to our current state of being an emerging multi-ethnic denomination. This last vignette included founding the Urban and Ethnic Commission of which our own Jim Sundholm was a part.

All of these were meetings, not presentations. The two plenaries both had us sitting at tables discussing and praying together in response to what was being presented. This is true to our denomination’s charism, as the “covenant” in our name does not refer to our covenant relationship with God, but our covenant relationships with one another in Christ. Our unity in Christ is stronger than, at our best, those things that seek to divide us.

Now this Sunday, First Covenant Church will have a meeting of our own. We will have reports, we will have discussions, we will be invited to make decisions. We have some important topics and decisions on our agenda—so please come prepared by looking at the materials provided to you ahead of time. We may not agree with one another, but we will listen and honor one another’s opinions, because of our commitment to one another as sisters and brothers in Christ. And that is what will make it a good meeting. And I trust this prognostication is accurate because this is how I have experienced this congregation for the past two years.

In the end, I invite you Sunday to take three opportunities to meet well: by joining your hearts, minds, and voices together in worshiping our God, by doing the work of the church at our annual meeting, and by sharing our lives of faith together while sharing a meal together. May they all be opportunities for us to meet well.

~ Pastor Todd