A Word with the (Newly Minted) Pastor

Dear First Church,

This past week we celebrated and honored the last of this season’s goodbyes. Most notable was Drew’s last Sunday with us as Director of Children, Youth, and Family Ministries. If you missed worship this Sunday, you can join here: youtube.com/@firstumcpdx

After worship, the Staff Parish Relations Committee presented Drew with a very meaningful parting gift: artistic recreations of a digital triptych he designed in seminary. Here are Drew’s reflections on this gift and the meaning behind his original artwork.

From Rev. Drew:

Vocational Triptych

I’m so grateful for such a meaningful gift from Staff Parrish. This is something that brings me so much joy to have and I look forward to hanging it in my new office at Tabor Heights UMC as I begin my appointment and keep close my vocational identity and call to ministry.

 I created this as digital art accompanied with three spoken-word pieces as part of my capstone project from Claremont School of Theology that was intended to capture all that I learned from my time in Seminary (which largely parallels my learning and ministry at Portland FUMC) and capture my heart of my call to ordained ministry.

 These three panels focus on expansive-inclusiveness, liberation & justice, and beloved-belonging.

 Thank you for being a community of grace and love, a place that was nurturing and affirmative for me, and gave me the space to explore and live into my call.

Dear Dictionary, why did you hold out on me…

[A piece on learning and expanding (and sometimes editing) our language and the language and stories given to us in the world and in our faith.]

Dear Dictionary, why did you hold out on me?

The words given to me were greater than I knew and now I know the words of what is deeply ingrained – INGRAINED (adj.) to be firmly fixed or established – because those words my mother gave me, they were fighting words that blessed me with compassionate scars.  

Some people call you a Bible, or maybe they treat the bible as an exclusive dictionary. I can’t tell.

 But, dear Dictionary, still there are times that we’ll always come up short,

when we had only one written history,

when I ponder the tapestry of my ancestry,

when we talk about the trinity,

and approach the holy mystery.

Bless the papers now stuffed within your pages and within my 3rd-grade bible.

These stories help me wrestle – WRESTLE (verb)… we’ll take the 2nd definition, here – help me WRESTLE to share these voices and present the tension and harmony with ALL of creation.

 Help me WRESTLE with the joy and grace that is riddled in this gray space, because these pages create safe and brave space.

I was taught perfectly posed and poised bibles look good on Instagram, but my pages of womanist and indigenous voices stained with tears and blood look far more beautiful stuck within my little blue 3rd grade bible.

There are still pages to be added that will stretch your spine because your entry for inclusion could barely contain Freddy’s smile - and without braille, your definition for inclusion and this church is too frail. 

Take the pages in the in-between, dear dictionary, help me hold onto them, to not to forget to unfold them, and always wrestle with them.

Dear Dollar Store Posterboard…

[A piece on lamenting and living into our call and heritage of solidarity, ministry with, and prophetic pleas for peace and justice.]

Dear Dollar Store Posterboard.

Your 3 words written in sharpie, decorated in rainbow, or black, or glitter, or sacredly sexualized puns has loosed my tongue and redeemed the 4-D battery powered bullhorn that summons your community from four-ty years of wandering beyond pew-lined walls.

God has been there, Emmanuel. Because that was Isaiah’s prophesy and the words you say are prophesy, oh you wilting and crinkling dollar store posterboard that was crafted from a tree that leaves a stump on sacred land and now stumps the privileged.

It is my privilege to struggle to help others read your words and hear your chants, oh you lonely billboard in the desert of injustice, but this is the root of my ministry and my identity that summons my ability to walk with those doing the breaking and those being broken.

And when those broken and cracked hands that hold you up become tired, may I reach out and prop up those weary arms like Moses, and work to build a place of the kin-dom that may be lined with pews but is built for the gathering and resting of radicals that crossed the Red sea and in the wilderness heard that lonely plea.

Dear discarded pronoun card…

[A piece on mourning for the diverse beloveds that struggle to find true belonging in our world and faith communities; and a celebration of the overwhelming all-embracing grace and love of God through the Spirit that meets us in our baptism.]

Dear discarded pronoun card.

You look like the sign in sheet that sits in familiar pews that would allow me to be in community with you.

Yet here you lie, thrown out by someone who refused to stop saying bro, sis, mister and miss, by someone who didn’t care to see you in your vibrant non-binary-belovedness.

Instead, you’re here in the street as tears stream down from heaven in this sacramental rain that is now rushing over you, and I can’t help but remember your baptism: you beloved child.

You, who owns these pronouns, who was told you’d be held by the bodies in that sanctuary when the water streamed down your head and across your face, who will celebrate your belovedness?

I don’t know what skeletons lurk in your faith story, but I want to be a witness to your gifts and make the space where your you can tell the bigger story that cannot be held by this discarded piece of paper that you’ve been reduced to.

I’m sorry for our dated databases, thick hymn books, and thick-skulls could not make room for the fullness of you, just as we didn’t make room for Jesus, or his KIN-dom, and maybe it’s because we’re still caught in the patriarchal poetry of Royal Jimmy.