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For eighteen months Hennepin Avenue UMC has been working with Cameron Trimble of Convergence to craft a strategic plan bold and spacious enough to catalyze a powerful future. You have answered questionnaires, attended forums and a futuring lab. The forming strategic plan will be shared June 8th after church and engaged with over the summer. By the fall we will have a shared sense of future.
In the meantime we read the news, smell the blooming lilacs and celebrate the anticipated delights of summer.
Cameron writes a daily substack article called "Piloting Faith". Her article for May 7th is powerful. I share it with you as encouragement and as a helpful naming of the energy and potential chaos presents.
"There are days—maybe today is one—when the world feels like it’s unraveling faster than we can respond. The systems we once trusted for order, safety, and meaning—governments, institutions, procedural norms, even long-held social contracts—are crumbling. Worse, they are being weaponized against the very people they were supposed to protect.
Many in our communities have known this betrayal for generations. But for some—especially those of us with historic privilege—this erosion feels newer, more shocking. There’s a sense of paralysis, a weight in the chest, a helplessness when facing change that seems too big, too fast, and too cruel. 1
But what if this paralysis is not simply fear or grief? What if it is also withdrawal—a spiritual and emotional detox from the false promises of modernity?
Modernity told us that if we played by the rules, contributed productively, and kept our side of the social contract, the ledger would stay balanced. We’d be safe. Respected. Protected. But the ledger is burning. What’s being revealed is that it never worked for all of us. It was never built to hold everyone equally.
This is not just collapse. It is disclosure. It reveals systems that were never just, never sustainable, and never sacred. In that revealing, a strange and holy invitation emerges:
- To stop seeking protection, fairness, or healing from systems that were never designed to care for us.
- To stop bargaining with systems that cannot love us or the planet.
- To start growing capacities in ourselves that cannot be outsourced or co-opted.
In the Jewish tradition, the creation story begins not with order but with tohu va’vohu—a formless, swirling chaos. 2 Before light and land, before sky and stars, there is only the wild, undifferentiated deep. It is there, in the chaos, that God speaks new life into being. Rabbi Arthur Green teaches that tohu va’vohu is not to be feared, but to be revered as holy raw potential. 3 Perhaps what we are witnessing now is not just the end of what was, but the beginning of something truer than we’ve yet known.
What if this moment is asking us not to fix the old machine, but to compost it into regenerative soil? Perhaps the invitation is to tend the decay and let it feed something more just, more beautiful, more alive?
To do so, we will need specific capacities like…
- Emotional sobriety—to feel what is real without running or numbing.
- Relational maturity—to choose interdependence over dominance.
- Interspecies accountability—to live as kin among the more-than-human world.
- Spiritual clarity—to see collapse not as failure, but as sacred disillusionment.
The burning of the ledger is not the end of the story. It may be the moment we stop measuring worth in credits and start practicing love without condition.
We are in this together,
Cameron
1 I was so saddened to see the ruling yesterday from the Supreme Court allowing the ban on transgender service people to stand while the case moves through appeal: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/06/nx-s1-5388507/supreme-court-transgender-military
2 https://www.thetorah.com/article/creating-order-from-tohu-and-bohu
3 https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300249989/judaism-for-the-world/ "
Hennepin Ave UMC, we are in this together. Let us love without condition.
Pastor Elizabeth
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