Healing Community

This is the fourth in our five-week sermon series on the vows we make to support the church by “our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness,” and today’s theme is “service.” The reading is from Acts 9, where Peter revives Tabitha, a woman who has died. Preaching today is Katie Minnis, who has been a staff intern as she went through the program at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and this past year has been a Pastoral Fellow on our staff. In July, having been ordained an elder in the UMC, she will become the senior minister for a UM church in Paducah, KY, so this is a culmination and farewell for her. The story tells of some of Tabitha’s work in the community and the gathering of women to mourn her death. In her sermon Katie examines Tabitha’s experience in the darkness of death and her revival. As a parallel, Katie relates her own “dark night” experiences and her own revival, and she says that people often have to go through that dark night to realize their calling to service.