A Note from Pastor Bruce August 20, 2026
In the summer of 1977, I made my first trip to Washington DC. Traveling by van with a student group from Northwest Nazarene College in Nampa, ID, we lived and worked for 5 weeks in a condemned tenement in a part of DC still suffering the ravages of the 1968 riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Our stated purpose was to renovate a room that would become the worship space in what would become “The Community of Hope.” But the deeper purpose of our trip was to give us 19-20-year-olds a first-hand experience of the plight of the poor and suffering in our wealthy country, and to challenge us to consider the essential role of Christ’s followers and church in ministering with and to those on the margins of society. At the end of each day, we gathered with our hosts to talk about what we had experienced and the implications for our faith and service to Christ.
That trip to our nation’s capital changed my life. I will never forget standing on the roof of that hollowed out and roach-infested building one night looking over the DC skyline at the images of glory less than two miles away and being struck for the first time with the shocking irony of how such power and wealth could co-exist with the poverty and suffering I was witnessing for the first time in my life, and in what I believed to be “the greatest country on earth.” Through many encounters and experiences on that mission trip, the Lord began to reshape and expand my understanding of the scope and reach of the gospel of Jesus Christ in my beloved country and this world.
While in DC, our student group visited the Church of the Saviour, a vibrant community of Christ-followers in the city that was deeply involved in ministry to its impoverished surrounding community. The church also had a wonderful bookstore and coffee shop where I purchased a copy of Elizabeth O’Connor’s Inward Journey, Outward Journey. It is the story of how that congregation grew to embrace a life of spiritual growth/community formation (the “inward journey”) that provided the solid foundation for its mission to help meet the needs of the greater community with Christ-like compassion and wisdom (the “outward journey”). O’Connor’s book helped me to see the interconnectedness of the Christian’s life of faith and life of service, and to make sense of how my own growing life in Christ is necessarily tied to becoming a part of the Lord’s saving mission in the suffering world.
One of the images O’Connor uses to describe the Christian life is the tide that flows to the shore and back out again into the vast ocean. Like the tide, our life in Christ entails a rhythm of receiving the Holy Spirit’s nurturing life in us each day, that produces a holy desire to go out from ourselves to serve Christ and others in the wider world. Healthy Christian life involves this endlessly recurring pattern of deeper communion with God and deeper engagement with Christ’s mission to rescue the lost and “make all things new.” Writing from within a community striving to be faithful in post-MLK Jr. Washington DC, O’Connor extends a call to Christ’s disciples everywhere to recommit to the whole journey of Christian life—inward and outward—and so become a part of the Lord’s world-changing mission in our time and place. Such language is not foreign to Methodist Christians. From the beginning, John Wesley’s vision for the Methodists was “inward holiness” and “outward holiness” as the two essential and interconnected halves of the Christian life. It was that holistic vision and the practices that supported it that enabled the Methodists to be at the cutting edge of the Holy Spirit’s disciple-making and world-transforming work for over 100 years.
As I begin my fourth year as your pastor, I am grateful for the signs of the inward and outward journey of Christian life that I see in evidence at Pender UMC: a hunger to study the scriptures, to pray and worship, and to serve others inside and outside the church in myriad ways. As we move into the fall, you will soon be hearing about new opportunities to enhance your inward and outward journey of faith, in small group discipleship and faith-sharing. I am praying and believing that these will help us to grow together into the disciple-making and world-engaging community of Jesus’ followers that the Lord desires for us to be as his witnesses in 2026 Fairfax County, VA.
Pastor Bruce
From the August 20, 2026 edition of This Week at Pender newsletter
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