Ministry on Epiphany Day

My small group which is actually a group of pastors serving 15 United Methodist Churches in the Common Cup shared ministry model prepared and served a meal at St. Paul's Outreach Center in Dayton, Ohio.

Our goal is to be involved in hands on mission outreach at least once every two months in addition to our twice a month gatherings for scripture, prayer, ministry planning, and sharing. We typically serve a January luncheon for those in need at St. Paul's each year and it's always a lot of fun to come together and shine the light of Christ.

Speaking of which, it's interesting that we served this meal on the Day of Epiphany, the final day of the Christmas season and a day in which the church recalls the story of the wise men following the star to the Christ child.

In celebration of Epiphany, we sang, "We Three Kings" while preparing the meal in the kitchen. At one point, we changed the verse to say, "We nine pastors from Common Cup are, preparing a lunch, we traveled afar." We received several compliments from the St. Paul's volunteers who said we sounded pretty good. We also sang "Go, Tell It on the Mountain" and then stopped singing when we couldn't think of any other Epiphany hymns to sing from memory!

The picture above shows how much fun we had in preparing this meal. My job was to serve the potatoes and macoroni and cheese, take this picture, and not get in people's way.

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Our next outing as a small group will be to go on a two day retreat at Maria Stein retreat center located in northwest Ohio in a couple of weeks. We use this time to do some ministry planning, but it's really meant to be a time to reconnect with Christ on a personal level.