January Update

Friends and Faithful Prayer Partners:

2012 is sure to be an interesting year if the pace of January is any indication of the months to come! I’m excited to share with you some of the wonderful things that are going on in my family as well as in The CityWell.

Many of you likely have heard that the May clan expanded on New Year’s Eve when 2-day-old Noah came to live with us. Noah is a beautiful and sweet baby boy born to teenage parents in difficult situations. He came to us as a foster-son with the hope that we might have the opportunity to adopt. This hope is now a dim one, as Noah will likely end up with someone in his biological father’s family. However, we are very grateful for the time we have with him; it is an amazing thing to love a child, whether or not they are born to you, and we have learned so much through this process about God’s heart toward us, His adopted children. So, needless to say with 2 boys under six months old in the house, life has been a bit nutty. We are profoundly encouraged, though, with the incredible support and love we receive from The CityWell family, friends from Moore County and our families. We are well loved and cared for!

On the second Sunday in January we had the joy of seeing The CityWell community baptize baby John… an awesome celebration of the grace of God displayed through the sacrament that, among other things, reminds us that it is our belonging to God through the death and resurrection of Jesus that makes it possible for us to come to faith! This is one of the driving convictions of our church; belonging precedes believing. You can imagine how such a conviction plays out in our practices of hospitality and welcoming others into our church family. Truly beautiful stuff!

January was also a month of deepening clarity for The CityWell, as the Formation Team has continued the holy work of discerning and articulating God’s vision for the church and our communal values. Mid-month we adopted four governing values that each have concrete corresponding practices; the CityWell longs to be a people who receive the ways of Jesus as our way of life by committing to lives marked by: Gathering, Listening, Offering & Welcoming.

The commitment to gathering comes as a response to the gift God gives of making us a community, a people, a family of faith. We gather to receive this gift; we gather to bear witness to it; and we gather to be transformed by it. For the CityWell, gathering has three formal expressions: Wells, Huddles, and Sunday Celebrations. Each of these serves unique purposes that all contribute toward the goal of our becoming a family and being formed as God’s people through deep relationships, an intentional discipleship process and the gifts of Word, sacrament and song.

Our commitment to listening is about hearing the voice of God through the Scripture, in prayer, through attentiveness to the Holy Spirit, and in listening to one another. Along with this, we long to be a people who love others and our city well enough to listen to them. Listening will require God to produce in us the fruit of patience, humility and gentleness.

Next is our commitment to offer ourselves to God, to one another, and to our community as a response to the incredible fact that God offers Himself to us without reserve.

Finally, we want to be a people committed to welcoming anyone and everyone into our community, because we believe this is the posture of Jesus and that it is in the community of the church that the Holy Spirit works most powerfully to transform lives into Christ-likeness.

So…. Gathering, Listening, Offering & Welcoming… We remember these commitments by the simple acronym G.L.O.W., and we believe that living into these rhythms and practices of life will lead us deeper into the life God created for us in Jesus. Please pray for us that it may be so!

For everyone who partnered with us financially in the last year, you can expect to receive a year-end contribution statement sometime in the next week. Once again, thank you so much for your support. In June of this year we will lose 1/3 of our Conference funding and will need your partnership all the more. If you have questions about how to become a financial partner in this ministry, please let me know.

I am reminded every time I write these updates of how faithful God is to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or think! What an amazing God we get to call Father! I pray that you rest in the knowledge of His love for you established and displayed in splendor through Jesus, our Lord.

Grace and peace,

Cleve