Dear Friends,

We recently started incorporating a new phrase in some of our promotional literature:  “St. Nicholas Church… where Love rules!”  Perhaps you’ve seen it. Perhaps you’ve been wondering what it means.

Love is one of our “core values” at St. Nick’s.  I would even go so far as to say it is THE “core value” at St. Nick’s.  At St. Nicholas Church we have always believed that what makes us a Christian community is Christ’s love: not our love for Christ, mind you, but Christ’s love for us.  We believe that Christ’s love is the only force powerful enough to knit together fallen human beings into what the Apostle Paul called the body of Christ: a body that recognizes and celebrates the unique gifts of each its parts, and yet in the midst of that overflowing of diversity somehow manages to move with a common vision of the whole.

And love is not just a core value for us, it is our primary operating principle – summed up in our credo “A Place to Belong! A Place to Become!”  Being “a place to belong” means being a people that offers acceptance and compassion.  We accept each other unconditionally, just as Christ accepted us.  No “US-and-THEM,” no factions, nobody is more worthy or welcome than anyone else, everyone’s gifts are valued, everyone’s voice is heard.

Being “a place to become” means being a people that not only welcomes a diversity of voices, but actually listens to those voices for the truths God might be trying to speak to us, so that we might grow into the people God is calling us to be.  What that means in practice is that we say what we see (with our eyes and our hearts in each other) with both clarity and humility, both owning what we believe and recognizing the incompleteness of what we think we know.  And in the process of that clear and humble sharing we allow God to change (and possibly even transform) our hearts and minds and wills.

Sounds naïve, you say?  No doubt it is, from the world’s point of view.  But that’s because the world believes that love is weak and that evil is strong, and that if we don’t guard ourselves against that which is wrong (which for the world usually translates as “that with which we disagree”), it will infect us.

But that is not the way of Christ.  As followers of Christ, we believe that the most infectious agent of all is not evil, but LOVE:  Christ’s love.  It is an infection that incubated in Jesus Christ, that was released by his resurrection, that has jumped from person to person down through the centuries to infect us and that will keep jumping from us to others and from them to others still, until all of humankind has been transformed into the image of God.

Thank you for joining us on our journey through Holy Week. Extra special thanks to those congregation members who stepped up to help with our expanded service schedule, and to our staff members (including our seminarians) who have been working so diligently alongside them to get ready to make this a special week of worship.

In Christ’s transforming love,
Ken+