Anyone who asks, “Do you know who I am?” needs to be prepared to hear the answer, “No, do you?”  – Samuel Wells

We are excited to offer a new zoom educational opportunity at Bethlehem.  Pastor Laura and Pastor Sam will lead a 5-week study on the Enneagram as a tool to better understand ourselves, our faith, and the journey we share as community.

If you don’t know what the Enneagram is, do not fear, we will learn together.  The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system with some similarities to the Myers-Briggs, that aims at increasing self-knowledge and insight into what motivates us.

We will begin by exploring the identity we all share as beloved children of God.  Together we will discern our Enneagram types, and then begin to explore what this knowledge teaches us about ourselves and the faith journey that is uniquely ours, as well as the journey we share.

Join us for our first class this Wednesday, October 6th at 6 pm on Zoom.  Subsequent class dates will be: Wednesdays October 13th, November 3rd, 10th and 17th.

A Zoom link will be sent out in advance of our first meeting.  We hope you will be able to join us!

This three-week study and conversation will seek to look at ways we as Christians in San Diego County can respond in Love to what we have learned about the racism around us.  Specifically, we will explore how to be “antiracist.”  Each participant will be encouraged to discover their own antiracist path as well as explore paths we might take together as a Christian community.

We will focus these conversations less on new ways of thinking, and more on new ways of acting, trusting the axiom “We don’t’ think our way into new ways of acting, we act our way into new ways of thinking.”

There is no preparation required, beyond preparing your device for Zoom, for participating in the conversations.  Each week we will provide some suggested readings for those who want to prepare in advance.  As previously announced, some of the conversation will be based on Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to be an Antiracist, but that book will not be the only resource used.  You are welcome to purchase it if you would like to learn more, but you will not need to do so in order to participate in this class.

We will meet for three consecutive Tuesday evenings (1/19, 1/26, & 2/2) at 6 pm.  A Zoom link will be sent out in advance of our first meeting.  We hope you will be able to join us!

This is a continuation of the four-week adult education program called A Listening Space: A Conversation About Race from October. The conversations we had were incredibly powerful, holy, thoughtful, as well as thought-provoking. They were so good, in fact, we wanted to make sure they continued. We are pleased to invite you to two more powerful conversations, tomorrow Tues. Nov. 17th at 7pm and Tuesday, Dec. 1st at 7 pm. Contact the church office for the zoom link. The conversation will be led by members of the congregation, Ron and Sue Dwyer-Voss. Both have gifts and expertise in leading us. If you were not able to join us in the last conversations, we would love to have you join us tomorrow.

During this four-week zoom conversation in October 2020, we engaged with each other on the weighty issues regarding race. For this reason, we named the class, A Listening Space. Each came prepared to listen to others and to speak their heart. Furthermore, videos by Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Church were utilized as well as other educated voices to guide our conversation. There was ample time for small group conversation for learning and growing together. The list of questions from the weekly handout can be found here.

In this class we explored the ways in which we read and interpret scripture. Together we looked at important questions like: What is the Canon? How did it come to be? What do we do when the Bible contradicts itself? How do we understand the hardest stories in the scriptures?