The SPIRE Summer 2013 | Page 3

In this issue...

4 Emergence & The Loft at Six Months by Bo Sanders & Chris Spearman

6 Member Profile: Eloise Siskel by Bette Caldwell

8 The Good News is Bread by John Woodall

9 Wesley Foundation Serving UCLA by Barbara Dunlap-Berg

10 Food for the Body, Food for the Soul by Jan Gonder

11 The Psalm of Lament by Nancy S. Price

The Organ by Gregory Norton

Winds of the Spirit... When I attended my first national meeting of the United Methodist Association of Communicators last fall I was struck by how much of the presenters’ energy was devoted to claiming their work as ministry. It seems self-evident to me that communicating the good news to a parish, a region, a denomination and the whole world is at the heart of our task as Christians. But the institutional church has often regarded its communicators as little more than necessary functionaries.

I returned from that meeting with a vision for deepening our ministry of communication at Westwood, and this second issue of The Spire as a quarterly magazine is another step in that new direction. The ubiquity and cost-effectiveness of electronic communications like our church websites and mass emailings has made the facts of parish program announcements available to all of us whenever we want them. These data are also still delivered on paper in less frequent editions of the four-page version of The Spire and every week in the Worship Guide distributed at the 10:00 a. m. service. The vision behind the larger quarterly publication that you are now reading, then, is to go deeper than an announcement sheet can: deeper in the sharing of stories among our members, deeper in our understanding of what we believe, deeper in celebrating the writing talents of our members and friends.

My prayer is that this summer you will come back to this magazine again and again, and in each reading sense the movement of the Spirit among the people of Westwood Church.

Grace + Peace, GREG NORTON

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