Christ the Servant Vadnais Heights

June 7, 2020 – Pastor Chris Steubing “Mission In Crisis” Beloved, we are living in a crisis. The world has changed over the last three months and it will never be the same. In fact, the world is changing and the crisis evolving so rapidly, that many of the ways we are used to being church are either unavailable to us or irrelevant at the present moment. While our world is in crisis, the very mission of the church seems to be in crisis as well. How are we supposed to be church and carry out God's mission in this moment as our Intern Pastor Katie emphasized last week that “we are out of breath” and the world is on fire”? The theme of our sermon series this month: "MISSION IN CRISIS," we’ll be exploring our understanding of God’s mission for the church, to “Encounter God, Love One Another, and Reach the World” within the context of a crisis. Today, I want to get some helicopter footage of the situation, to look broadly at the crisis we are in as a human race, as a nation, ...

Here is part 1 of my interview with Pastor Riz Prakasim. Here is part 2 of my interview with Pastor Riz presented as the 10th of 46 daily Facebook posts, one for each year of George Floyd's life, to uplift and centralize the voices of people of color in regards to racial equity and justice. In this episode, Riz and I discuss what it means to sacrifice for the sake of truly knowing, loving, and serving one another by coming close and becoming vulnerable as an expression of racial reconciliation. I ask Riz how we can help our predominantly white congregations to recognize the correlations between injustice within the biblical narrative and the social injustices of our day which disproportionately affect people of color. Here's a couple quotes from the interview: "The precursor to being courageous is being vulnerable...when you're vulnerable there's an amount of uncertainty...there's a risk that you take that folks should really initiate. And there's emotiona...

Greetings in the name of the great peacemaker and prophet Jesus Christ, I have comitted to posting daily on my Facebook page for 46 days, one post for each year of George Floyd's life, to uplift and centralize the voices of people of color in regards to racial equity and justice. I did an interview yesterday with Riz Prakasim who serves as pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Rosevile, MN. Riz also works as a manager for the Minneapolis restaurant Gandhi Mahal which was destroyed during the recent unrest over the death of George Floyd while in custody of police. Pastor Riz has a unique perspective on race in the U.S. as a native of South Africa, being of Indian descent, growing up in rural Minnesota, and now serving as pastor of a predominantly white congregation. He is a man of deep faith and offers a strong and compassionate call for spiritual unity and prophetic action influenced by his generational roots in the reconciliation movement of South African apartheid. Riz and I ...