Beloveds,
As we enter this new church year, I want to send you all my deepest gratitude. I can’t help but love you all these days. I love the spirit of welcome you offered our new Assistant Minister and our new Intern Ministers. I love your kind responses to my barrage of emails (mostly to leadership). I love the way you embrace my Ministry of Yes, honestly considering new ideas and partnering with me to move our mission forward. And as this year starts, I’m so grateful for the way you recognized that I can’t provide the oversight (and healing) that needs to be done internally while also creating a bold, public ministry, thereby welcoming Rev. Chris Long to share this ministry with me.
And what a year for a public ministry! The rise of white supremacy has been alarming for the last four years, but this summer has been particularly painful. It’s possible our grief and anger grow in proportion to the ways we are ignored, making each senseless killing of a Black man or woman even more painful than the last.
With the help of Rev. Chris Long and our Ministerial Intern Ministers Anthony Cruz, Meagan Henry and Carrie McEvoy, this year our church community will engage the deep and abiding questions facing our nation. We are doing this in light of our shared faith and with profound and necessary connections to each other and to Earth, the platform for our being. There is much at stake. But we are not alone. Even as we remain physically distanced, we are together.
I am grateful to be sharing this ministry with all of you and I look forward to the ways our revolutionary love will transform our society so desperately in need of what we bring.
I love you all very much.
In Peace and Love,
Rev. Peggy Clarke
Senior Minister, Community Church of New York
212-683-4988, ext 121
