At Grace, we are called by God to be in the city for good! For those interested in volunteering this summer, we invite you to attend the orientation held in the North Room of Hope Hall on June 9th from 11:30a.m. - 1:30 p.m. Lunch will be served. Please RSVP at outreach@graceinthecity.com or call Clottee Hammons at 602-817-8996 if you plan to attend. View PDF flyer.
At the center of our religion, love. What heals us, love. What heals our communities, love. Also, the stated motive of most religious people, regardless of actual outcomes, love. I agree with the Beatles: “All you need is love.”
As we expectantly wait for Christmas, one persona dominates the church world, another persona our culture at large. These two prominent figures both speak of how we should act, what we should do—and the consequences if we do not. The persona of our culture at large? Who can we find everywhere at malls and on cards and sung about in songs during the month of December? Santa Claus.
How about the persona of the church world? Who is it who dominates our Advent stories? Right. John the Baptist.
One Sunday during my first call, I woke up crabby. I woke up grumpy. I woke up disillusioned. I had regularly worked 65 hours a week and led worship and visited people in the hospital and led and planned youth activities and worked and led Bible studies and volunteered in the community and gone to meeting after meeting and had difficult conversations with critical people and worked and worked. And on that particular Sunday morning, it all seemed for naught.
n our reading from 2 Corinthians, the apostle Paul speaks of a rival group of Christian missionaries. According to Paul, these were the “super-apostles.” He actually uses this phrase in 2 Corinthians 11:5. But he meant it tongue in cheek because they were, apparently, violent, arrogant, moralistic, and power hungry. In our reading, Paul describes how these Christian missionaries boast, how they puff up their chests, how they number their own accomplishments, how they share their exceptional relevations with the world.
Morgan Visnaw and Kim Caputo from Trinity
An eleven member LWLM team from Trinity Lutheran Church (Fountain Hills) recently purchased supplies for 220 sack lunches that included ham and cheese sandwiches, potato salad, bananas, cookies and a soft drink. Team members included Amy Heuer, Ann Seward, Christine Colley, Diane Arnett, Debbie Olson, Grace & Darryl Kahl, Jan Visser, Kim Caputo, Linda Swanson and Morgan Visnaw. Funds for this program were raised from a successful garage sale at the church. The team prepared the sandwiches at TLC and a group of five delivered and served the meals to the hungry that visited Grace Lutheran Church in Phoenix that day. There were enough sandwiches for second helpings for everyone. It was over 100 degrees outside and our gift was most appreciated by all. We toured the facility and visited the beautiful church (the oldest Lutheran Church in Arizona) as well as their clothing room where all donations are sorted and made available to those who need them. Most items desired are men's jeans size 36 or smaller, t-shirts, personal care items, games and books.
Grace Lutheran Church opens their doors during the summer Monday to Friday from 8 to 5pm to provide a cool place for rest and relaxation. A breakfast, lunch and afternoon Snack are served, cool water is always available. Volunteer groups provide most meals and the church fills in gaps from cash contributions when needed. It was a rewarding experience to assist in this worthy effort.
"Grace Lutheran Heat Respite Program’s mission is to provide a space for heat relief while building community through the sharing of community resources, meals, water, and ourselves in a place of being, belonging, and becoming."
-- Submitted by Christine Colley, TLC
Week 3
The third week of Heat Respite is complete. This week our team served nearly 1,000 people, approx. 200 per day. We gave out more than 1,500 bottles of water, served over 2,000 meals (breakfast, lunch, snacks) -- a big Thank You goes out to our amazing kitchen crew: Marlene, Lori, Devlin and Frank -- but we can't do it alone. We also had volunteers including Anne Gardner, Brent and Sarah Smith, and volunteers from Trinity Lutheran Church in Fountain Hills. This was Trinity's first service at Grace, so a special thanks to them for bringing 225 lunch sacks, 225 servings of potato salad, and 228 bottles of soda!
What does 'Heat Respite' mean to our participants (some names changed)?
Moon: “It’s a place to get out of the heat and to hydrate and rest. People who help here are amazing. They make coming here meaningful.”
Zoey: “The love the staff shows -- Paul & Sven put in so much to provide a safe place! I can not say how much it is appreciated! Grace Lutheran Church is such a sanctuary!”
Glennis: “Heat Respite means to me that people can take a break and get the rest that is needed, to escape the heat. Respite comes from the latin word respectiv -- we almost always use respite as a time of relief, not a place of relief.”
If you think you can help out in some way to support this program, want to donate, or just spend some time with our participants, there are many opportunities to do so. Just give us a call at (602) 551-9234 (Sven) or (480) 388-0225 (Paul), or email us at outreach@graceinthecity.com.
4th of July Celebration
Many of you celebrate the 4th of July with friends and family and barbeque. For many of our participants the people around them are their family, so together with Trevor's Vision, a non-profit organization from Peoria that hosts a meal every Thursday evening in our Hope Hall, we're planning a family-style B-B-Q for our community. The menu includes bratwursts from 'The Proper Beast' (a local Gilbert business), vegetables & salads, drinks. If you want to help out, have any time to spare, or have chips or other easy to hand out items, anything would be appreciated. Also, if you want to swing by and listen to a harmonica solo, or short comedy routine, please join us!
Gift Card Drawing
We're sponsoring a drawing at the halfway point of Respite (Friday July 20). We're looking for much needed bus passes (full or reduced fare), gift cards (Circle K, Subway, McDonald's, Einstein Brother's, Safeway, etc.) -- please help if you can! Maximum $10 cards.
Grace Room Update
With the amount of people we're serving, and the heat outside, we're running low on supplies for our clothing distribution room. Items most needed are:
T-shirts and tank tops (all sizes)
Men’s pants and shorts (30 to 36 waist)
Deodorant
Small toothpaste
Soap and body wash
Disposable razors
Small shaving cream
Men's and women's shoes and sandals, flip flops (all sizes)
Backpacks
Men's underwear (boxers, boxer briefs, briefs, all sizes)
Women's underwear, bras, sports bras (all sizes)
Socks (white and colored)
Books, Bibles, crossword puzzles, Sudoku, chess sets, etc.
Plastic shopping bags, reusable bags (you know you all have a bag full of plastic bags at home!)
Any donation is welcome, big or small!
Thank you and God bless you.
A new paragraph was written in history by the voting members of the Grand Canyon Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). From the perspective of the long history of the church, the paragraph is a brief one. For this part of the church, however, the paragraph is highly significant.
Weeks 1-2
At Grace, We Are In The City For Good and Heat Respite is doing that on a daily basis! For the first two weeks in June, we had 1,451 entries for our program, including 1,235 volunteer hours -- that’s almost double the volunteer hours from last year! We have had some great volunteer groups donating their time, meals, water, and financially supporting our program. We could not do this program without all of your help, so thank you very much!
We would like to thank the following persons for volunteering their time and hard work almost every day of the past two weeks:
We also had several groups donate food for lunches as well as volunteer their time with us. We are so grateful of their time and talents!
The program uses 3 - 4 cases of water every two hours, and we would like to highlight some very large recent water donations, including:
Also, thank you to Veteran’s Hands in Action, Phoenix, and Our Savior's Lutheran Church, Mesa, for donating snack items several times over the past 2 weeks.
If you are interested in volunteering or donating to the Heat Respite Program, please contact Sven Lenkewitz at (602) 551-9234 or Paul Hansen-Mitev at (480) 388-0225, or email us at outreach@graceinthecity.com to discuss opportunities available for you and/or a group!
We are in need of the following items:
Any donation will help and is greatly appreciated.
Thank you and God bless!
Jesus is out of his mind. That's what his family thinks. That's what the crowd thinks. Healing swarms of people and calling tax collectors and fishermen to follow him, Jesus upsets the expectations of those who know him and love him best. But more than being out of his mind, the scribes, who are part of the Jewish religious institution, believe that Jesus is Satan. They think Jesus is evil. Preaching, praying, cleansing lepers, healing people, teaching about fasting and the sabbath, and calling disciples, Jesus not only upsets familial and communal expectations; he upsets the heart of the religious institution of the day. He doesn't fit in the box in which the scribes place God, so they assign Jesus to an entirely different box. The scribes can't see what the readers of the gospel of Mark see—that God is at work in the life and ministry of Jesus, doing something new and unexpected.
Items most needed in the Grace Room include disposable razors, toothpaste, t-shirts, shorts, hats, baseball caps, body powder, boxers, tennis shoes, flip-flops and belts. With Heat Respite coming, we can use items like books, playing cards, and board games. Grace is taking the lead this summer; please reach out to Solveig or the church office if you are open to giving up some items or time toward this good cause. Thank you so much!
The space is called Garden of Grace: A Place of Prayer & Meditation. When you wander to the south side of our property, you will likely notice first and foremost the labyrinth created by white bags against small, dark gravel. Spiritual director Teresa Blythe teaches that the labyrinth “is an ancient prayer practice involving a winding path that leads ultimately to a center and then winds back out to the point where it began. It is not difficult to walk—there are no dead ends as in a maze. The path is symbolic of the journey inward toward God’s illumination and then outward, grounded in God and empowered to act in the world”
The church as we know it, including Grace, is changing. With a focus less on the institution of church and more on Christian community, our community building goal for June is for each one of us to ask the name of a person whose name we do not know each time we are here—as a way of truly learning the name of every single person in our community.
