Dear Members and Friends of Atonement Lutheran Church,

I want to begin by thanking all of you for your gracious welcome to me and my family. The support has been tremendous.  I also want to thank you for the backing up and the emotional and social support with the financial support to make it possible for me to receive professional training in intentional interim ministry.

You may have heard the expression, “The more things change the more they remain the same.”  As I listen to your stories I learn that change has been a regular way of life.  I hear the desire for stability, that we’ve seen enough change.  The truth is that change is a constant where God is concerned.

I begin by asking God, “Where are you in all of this?”  As soon as I ask the question, I hear the answers spoken through regular conversations.

One conversation was around the Mission Support Table of Pacifica Synod.  It is a forum where we ask people how things are going in the parishes of the synod regarding stewardship.  One pastor mentioned that it is more accurate to affirm that God will provide, rather than talk of God’s abundance.  In another setting, a chaplain remarked, “Who said that it was going to be easy, this following Christ.”  What I hear at Atonement is that God put us here for a reason.

The reason for the season of Easter is Jesus leads us through the transition from death to a new way of walking as disciples.  Easter is the greatest transition that ever happened.  The first apostles were the first interim ministers.  They left the confines of the Upper Room in Jerusalem and the safety of their prior lives as fisher folk because Jesus returned from the dead to show them how to live as if they had already died and could live fearlessly.

The Easter message begins with a death, works through the letting go of the previous way of living and opens into a new way of being the people of God, no longer tied to one city, one temple, one country, but moving out, trusting solely on the presence, though hidden, of Christ Jesus.  Now we get to live before God in the power of the Holy Spirit for the life of the world.  So many changes over the millennia, yet Christ Jesus, the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow is guiding us all into the future he has already accomplished for us at the Cross.

+In Christ Jesus,

Pastor James West