Love All, Serve All!

I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord!”
—Psalm 122

“I believe that home is Christ’s kingdom, which exists both within us and among us as we wind out prodigal ways through the world in search of it.”
—Frederick Buechner

To You, Who Are Reading This Letter,

Greetings, and welcome to the website of Yorktown United Methodist Church. If you’ve come clicking around here for the first time, then let me be the first to say “hello!” I’m Thomas, and I have the privilege of being the pastor of YUMC, which is what makes this a “pastor’s letter,” I suppose.

Being a pastor means a lot of things, one of which is that when there are overtly churchy things going on, I’m often one of the more conspicuous people around. Should you come and worship with us some Sunday morning, for instance, odds are you’ll catch sight of me right off the bat. It’s hard to miss the guy up front dressed like a first century Roman. In a way, this letter is meant to be the next best thing to the sight of our sanctuary as you walk through the door, and since I’m happy for you to find me there, I’m happy for you to find me here, too.

Once you’ve found me, though, do yourself a favor: keep looking around, because what you’ll find next is a thing far more beautiful and holy in its way than any one person—pastor or otherwise—could ever be. First and foremost, you’ll find a roomful of searchers. That’s what all of us who do our best to follow Jesus Christ are: people searching for home. Not the kind of home that has four walls and a roof, or the kind of home you might find in the heart of a loved one, though I’m not knocking either of those. The kind of home we’re searching for when we get together to worship or study Scripture or collect winter coats for area schoolchildren or assemble flood buckets for victims of faraway natural disasters is not a static place, like our church building, or even a preferred state of mind. Home is wherever we figure God is calling us to go next, so we can love whoever we find there with all our might. We believe that if love is there, God is there, and if God is there, then for the moment, at least, we’re home.

Searchers, by definition, don’t find what they’re looking for every time, and don’t always go looking for the right thing, either. We’re no exception, and that’s why we gather, when you get right down to it: because the search for home isn’t easy, and we need each other to get there. It’s because we have one another that we’ve become the roomful of folks we are today: blessed with a variety in backgrounds, gifts, passions, and needs, and excited to celebrate that variety; welcoming and affirming of anybody who comes through our door, whatever your age, race, gender, sexual orientation, or ability may be; eager to serve both the Yorktown community and the wider world with generosity and integrity. Some of these things have more-or-less always been true of us, but others took longer to find. That’s what it means to be searching for home together: sign by sign, day by day, you help each other find the way.

That’s who we are, and if you’ve made it to the end of this letter, my guess is that something about us has piqued your interest. If so, please do drop us a line, or better yet, drop in on a Sunday morning—or whenever or wherever else the search for home takes us. If you think we’re an interesting bunch, just wait until you get to know the God who got us into this! We can always use another searcher because when it comes to God’s love, we believe there’s always more to find.

See you on the way home,

Thomas
Pastor