By Rev. Eugenia Gamble –
We are delighted to offer the Summer 2025 Issue of the Virtual Voice to you, your congregation, and your presbytery! If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please send your request to the Synod office. You can always find current and past issues on the Synod of Living Waters website.
This issue celebrates the amazing connections that bless of all of our lives. These connections include the ah-ha connections within our own hearts, across all of our relationships, congregations and ecumenical and global partners. Every person and experience in our lives changes us and those with whom we live.
My mother died in February. Recently, going through her things, I came across an old handwritten recipe book that had belonged to my grandmother as a young bride in 1903. I found familiar recipes that brought a smile to my face. I also became aware of how much nutrition advice has changed over the years. So I am taking my favorite recipes and reworking, updating, rearranging or, with sadness, deleting some so that I can carry the best forward and live a new and healthier lifestyle.
That is much like where we are as a church. We cherish the deep things that have bound us together. We carry with us the fundamentals of our historic yet living faith. And yet we find that some ingredients no longer serve us well. So we adapt and change. We trust in the Spirit. We look around us, and within us, to find the best and most delicious paths forward. Perhaps a pound cake becomes a half pound cake. Perhaps old spices have lost their flavor and old boundaries and structures have to change to hold together and live in joyful expectation of what God desires yet to do with us. Perhaps we try new ingredients that we once pushed to the periphery and find an explosion of new energy and flavor in our lives and congregations.
This issue shares stories with you, from all over our synod, of creative new expressions and collaborations in ministry and mission. I hope you will be as inspired by these stories as I continue to be.
Finally, our Fall Gratitude issue will publish on September 15th. If you have celebrations or ideas for an article that you would like to write, please be in touch with my before August 12th when our team will meet to plan the issue. I hope to hear from many of you! eugeniaagamble@gmail.com