A few glimpses into Incarnation small groups!
Dear friends,
Happy Epiphany! It was wonderful to be back together last Sunday after scattering for holiday travels. And after all the upheaval of the past few weeks, I'm really looking forward to being back in our familiar space at Drew Elementary on Sunday, noisy HVAC and ever-evolving chair configuration and all. Children's Atrium will resume, we'll baptize little Noah, and we'll commission our 2025 vestry — a full and joyful Sunday!
Spring small groups will also open for signups on Sunday. This spring, we are particularly encouraging discernment around your small group involvement.
We know that your lives are full and your time is limited. Many of you are also carrying burdens, losses, job transitions, uncertainty, and big life questions in this season. So many of you have expressed a deep need for rest, which is an essential part of our spiritual life.
When the calendar is too full with church stuff, it's hard to rest. It's also hard to build and maintain relationships outside the church with neighbors, coworkers, and friends. But neighborliness and friendships outside the church are also an essential part of our spiritual life — these are the ordinary places we bear witness to Christ's kingdom. These relationships feel especially important in a time of great division, when "loving our neighbors" means listening with compassion across difference and resisting self-righteous superiority, when it's so tempting to retreat to our comfortable silos.
Small groups can be a wonderful place to grow in all these ways — to gather each week over a good meal to be refreshed, strengthened, prayed for, and encouraged by others who share our commitment to the way of Jesus. Most of our groups are really simple: just a meal and prayer together from the Book of Common Prayer.
But there are only so many days in the week, and we are limited creatures. So I invite you to consider: what kind of small group involvement will best enable you to love God and your neighbors over the next few months?
If small groups are a spiritual lifeline that help you be a better neighbor/colleague/student/parent/caregiver/employee/friend/disciple — wonderful! We'll have plenty of options across DC, MD, VA, and online, including a new one that I'll write a bit more about below. Signup on the small groups page, starting Sunday!
But if small groups feel like they are pulling you away from spiritual essentials like rest and neighborliness, consider taking this season off. This is your official priestly permission! There are no gold stars for attendance and no demerits for non-attendance.
If do you decide to take a break, I'd simply encourage you to do so with intentionality, asking God for a vision of how you might use the time differently. This could be as simple as going to bed early, instituting an evening walk (or kitchen dance party!), or inviting your neighbors for dinner once. It's okay to take a break. Really.
I also want to remind you that we still meet every Tuesday and Thursday at 12pm on Zoom to pray midday prayer, week in and week out, whether there are 2 or 20 of us (okay, there's never 20!) — login details on the website. And our midweek Eucharists continue every Wednesday at 12pm at Greenbrier Baptist. These midweek services offer quick spiritual refreshment (30 minutes or less) and also function a bit like drop-in small groups. Perhaps this is just the dose of community you need this winter — join us!
One of the small groups we'll be offering this spring is a Zoom group called "Life With God." Two years ago, we tried offering a group by the same name with similar-ish content but in a different format — in person, for two hours, once a month. This group grew out of our strong desire to offer catechesis (Greek for "instruction") in the faith for those who are discovering Christianity for the first time, deconstructing and reconstructing long-held beliefs, wrestling with doubts, or hungry to grow deeper.
That first "Life with God" group had lower enrollment than we'd hoped. Sometimes low turnout is an invitation to proceed with the original plan, but with smaller numbers and a more intimate experience — this happens a lot in church our size, and I appreciate the kinds of experiences it fosters. But sometimes it's a signal to take notice, step back, and ask God if the original plan needs re-imagining. Two years ago, Katie and I prayerfully decided to do the latter. We went back to the drawing board to rethink Life with God, and it's been Katie's back-burner, around-the-margins, passion project ever since. She's done some amazing work!
The result of that re-imagining is what we're offering now. Each week, we will gather on Zoom from 8-9pm to pray a liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer, pausing in the middle for a discussion of the faith. These discussions will build on themselves, week by week, in a conversational format that leaves plenty of space for wonder, doubts, and questions. It's simple and accessible: just small bites of nourishing theology each week in the context of prayer.
This is an experiment, so if you sign up, you'll be part of the guinea pig group, and I'm sure we'll learn a lot together and make some tweaks. But we think we're close enough to the mark to do what Incarnation does . . . try stuff! And if you're interested in Life with God, but taking a break this season or already committed to an in-person group — just hang tight. We're hoping to offer this on a regular basis moving forward. (We've also got a fantastic kids' version! Stay tuned.)
Praying for you all in this small group season — that no matter how you decide to spend your evenings, your life with God continues to grow.
With love,
Amy
p.s. Our outgoing vestry wardens, Grant Sung and Will Montague, have written an Epiphany letter reflecting on 2024 and looking to 2025. I love their emphasis on "quiet, rooted, sturdy, and ordinary faithfulness" for the coming year, and encourage you to read it!
p.p.s. Last spring, Nicole Gagnon led a group at my house focused on praying the Examen of St. Ignatius. In addition to practicing group discernment each week, a lively group text also emerged — in which people regularly shared prayer requests alongside photos of perilously close-to-empty gas tanks and absurd Spotify daylist names. A group member dubbed us "a fraternity/sorority of the chronically underfueled" — a poetically apt description of how life often feels these days! Here's a photo sampling from our chat, which I hope will serve as a lighthearted encouragement to find simple, ordinary ways to extend the connections of your small group beyond your weekly meetup!
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