For You!

Imagine a place where you are greeted by welcoming signs that read "For You"; your friends are already gathered waiting for your arrival; friends and strangers alike clap you on the back and offer hugs of encouragement; the music is familiar and the decor is exactly what you like most; and when you are asked to share with the room -- always an intimidating moment -- you are offered witty scripts to choose from and a cadre of friends ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you. Could we be in Narnia?

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Rev. Dr. Jennie A. Harrop
A Little Frightened

Saturday evening closed with a peaceful worship service buoyed by the sounds of Clear Creek trickling across the rocks below, a light breeze through the forest, birds chattering in the limbs above, and laughter from distant campgrounds. We listened together to C.S. Lewis' opening chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, pondering the tenuous situation of the children who have been displaced from their homes in wartorn London as Lucy steps tentatively through the fur coats of the wardrobe with her fingertips stretched forward:

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Rev. Dr. Jennie A. Harrop
Beauty & Rhythm

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and a bit of a tortured soul who became known after his death in June of 1889 as one of the Victorian era's most influential writers. Hopkins was compelled his entire life to describe the beauty of God's creation through the rhythm and imagery of poetry, although when he converted to Roman Catholicism and joined the Jesuit priesthood in his 20s, he burned all of his poems in a bonfire and did not write again for many years.

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Rev. Dr. Jennie A. Harrop
Christian Church in the Secular World

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor, theologian, and writer who spent a foundational year studying and serving in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem when he was in his mid-20s. Bonhoeffer later wrote that it was in America’s Harlem that he began to see things “from below” – empathizing with the oppressed and recognizing the church in the United States was doing little to encourage integration.

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Rev. Dr. Jennie A. Harrop