SEPTEMBER 2023
CENTENARY UNITED METHODIST CHURCH
Widening the Welcome, Expanding the Embrace
J
ust two months ago, our stirring festival worship service - "Then Sings My Soul" - filled our sanctuary with an unexplainable energy and spontaneous expressions of praise. This was a bold and fitting conclusion to a year finally free from the grips of COVID-19, a year filled with broad and deep growth for Music & Arts at Centenary, some expected and some downright surprising: the birth of our Atrium Gallery and an 'Art in the Atrium' Series, a more-than-double increase in Children's Music & Arts Camp attendance, a well-attended Lenten Noontime music series, a Community Kindermusik Collaborative which now averages nearly 30 children and families each week, and a Chancel Choir whose roster is exploding. These are not the marks of a community strapped by the fatigue of COVID, but of one "eager to walk in God's beauty, beauty that soaks our sanctuary beauty that sets our hearts ablaze beauty that spills into the city streets beauty that heals our broken world." I shared those thoughts about beauty in an edition of Centenary's now inactive publication Through Centenary Windows soon after my arrival in August 2019. And as we embark on this new program year, I believe deeply - deeply - that we are on the precipice of widening our welcome, expanding our embrace, offering profound expressions of beauty, and co-creating with God a community and culture beyond our imagination. CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE