Dear Westwood Family, I hope this pastoral note finds you all doing well! I am currently in New Orleans researching, writing, and visiting plantations to learn more about the indigenous West and Central African foodways that my ancestors brought to America. It is, perhaps, the Holy...
Dear Westwood Family, This past Sunday, I had the privilege of talking to Pastor Molly in The Loft about my identity and my understanding of God and myself. In our conversation, I referenced the “spiritual crumbs” my relationship with God subsisted on for years as I...
Dear Westwood Family, This weekend, we'll celebrate Promotion Sunday--honoring and recognizing how our young people are all becoming a grade older. We'll give Bibles to our new 4th graders, and celebrate our graduates. I know that our young people attend many different schools, and that the calendars...
Dear Westwood Family, Today, I joined a group of Westwood UMC folks on a tour of the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Craft, on the edge of Rancho Cucamonga. There, we were able to walk through the home that Sam Maloof built. With...
Dear Westwood Family, Yesterday, in Wildwood, New Jersey, the United Methodist Church reinstated Rev. Dr. Beth Stroud as a clergy member of the church. This was twenty years after the UMC tried her for breaking church law by being in a relationship with another woman. Twenty...
Dear Westwood Family, Last week, I attended LA Voice’s leadership assembly and found myself in a crowd of people committed to pursuing justice and equity for their communities, this city, and the world. Sitting in the plaza at Dolores Mission Catholic church, surrounded by people of...
Dear Westwood Community, Last week, at the General Conference of the United Methodist Church, we finally and fully removed anti-LGBTQ+ language and policies from our denominational Book of Discipline. This is a significant shift for the church: when the General Conference last met in 2019, we...
Dear Westwood Community, Recently, while getting lunch with one of my dear Westwoodian friends, he asked what I thought about how to hear God over all the noise- of our lives, our screens, this ever-louder city we all share. And truthfully, I think hearing God among...
Dear Westwood Family, Last month, a beautiful, old, big jacaranda tree on my parsonage lawn fell over. I'm not sure exactly what prompted the fall: it happened just before midnight on a still night. Certainly, the soil underneath was saturated with water from recent rains. The...
Dear Westwood Family, This week, we are finishing up the parent's reading group that I started a few months ago. We read and discussed Dr. Becky Kennedy's book, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want To Be. As a new parent and the parent...
Dear Westwood Family, Happy April! As I’m fairly sure none of you know about me, Easter is my favorite holiday. Partially for the birds and bunnies, partially because I love Spring, but mostly for the story behind it and the reminder it brings me each year...
Greetings Westwood Community, Peter doesn’t want Jesus to go to Jerusalem, and he lets him know. Jesus responds, “Get behind me, Satan.” Jesus knows that he must turn his face towards his own death; he has lived a life of dangerous, radical love, and this is...
Greetings Westwood Community, On Easter, we get to open our doors to welcome our community to share the joy that is at the heart of our faith tradition as we celebrate resurrection. In a world that's so often divided by age and race, economic status, gender,...
Greetings Westwood Community, During Lent, we've been on a journey--the Loft has been talking about Pilgrimage, the Sanctuary and our young people have been following Peter's Wandering Heart, and our children even walked a labyrinth last Sunday. Since a beloved undergrad comparative religion class gave me...
Greetings Westwood Community, Today, I have two things that I want to say: First, I want to affirm our deep commitment to interfaith cooperation and respect, and our persistent opposition to antisemitism and hate speech. I am grateful that our church campus is located so close to...
Greetings Westwood Community, This last weekend, during Sunday worship in both of our gatherings, we celebrated and blessed the Claremont School of Theology (CST), which is now located on our campus. (They are, I should note, still finishing renovations in the Lower Helms Hall area, which will be...
Greetings Westwood Community, I have always understood Lent as a time of preparation, a time to sit and explore the depths of my inner world. As Howard Thurman notes in his sermon The Sound Of the Genuine (a sermon from which I constantly draw!), Lent is...
Dear Westwood Community, Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. I want to invite you to worship, online or on campus at noon, in our Sanctuary. Please know that you can also watch via YouTube any time afterwards. On Ash Wednesday, our worship includes...
Dear Westwood Community, Over the past year, we've been sharing more about our church on social media--especially including using video clips from worship as Instagram and Facebook Reels. A few posts have gotten quite a lot of attention--and (even better) allowed us to get messages that...
The Grammy Awards are this coming weekend, which has me, again, thinking about music, and what a gift it is to my faith. Singing, it becomes an embodied experience of prayer, turning my breath and the vibrations of notes into divine communication. Listening, it wraps...