By Pastor Phil
Lead Pastor

Dear Church Family,
One of the prayer practices that I have found to be very formative for me is the prayer of examen. This prayer practice involves reviewing the day in gratitude and confession. The effect of this type of prayer is an increased awareness of the way God is at work in our daily experience. As this prayer has become more of a rhythm in my life I have realized how much I miss or forget if I do not pause to reflect.

It’s been on my heart to find ways for us to facilitate a reflective posture at a communal level here at BCC. It is important for us to regularly look back and notice the ways we see God at work in our midst. Without this intentionality we can easily overlook what God has been up to or where God is leading us.

The Psalms model this for us regularly. These corporate prayers often lead people through the act of remembering God’s faithfulness in the past in order to encourage them in the present and lead them into the future. Just this morning I was meditating on Psalm 78 in the prayer room here at BCC. Here, the psalmist invites the people to retell the stories of God’s faithfulness, recognizing their tendency to forget (Ps 78:10).

To facilitate a more reflective posture for us as a church, we are launching a monthly publication called Together in Mission. This publication will involve a short pastoral reflection, highlights from a couple of ministry teams, interviews with people in the church, and information about upcoming events and ministry opportunities. You might see this as a way of practicing the prayer of examen together in community. The name draws on our Covenant roots. The early Covenanters called themselves “Mission Friends.” Core to our identity as Christians is that we are a people sent out on mission together in community.

We will be e-mailing this monthly newsletter, but if you would prefer a printed copy we will have some available at the church on the first Sunday of each month. I will also include a short video reflection to coincide with the newsletter. If you have stories you would like to share in an upcoming edition of Together in Mission, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our administrative assistant Charity at charity@bellinghamcov.org.

Thank you for the great privilege of being your pastor. Julie and I are grateful to have landed here at BCC and have come to love and appreciate this fellowship of believers. I’m excited to see where God will lead us together in mission in the year to come!

In Christ,
Pastor Phil

By Steven Shetterly
Director of Local and Global Missions

I need to know there is justice

That it will roll in abundance

And that you’re building a city

Where we arrive as immigrants

And you call us citizens

And you welcome us as children home

-“Citizens” by Jon Guerra

Hebrews 11 is a well-known passage that functions as something of a Who’s Who list of notable Old Testament characters, with a short description of how each one lived by faith. Smack in the middle of the list, though, is an odd insertion—an aside that the author includes, which seeks to explain the essence of faith.

They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth… If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had the opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. (Heb. 11:13b, 15-16)

In the biblical narrative, it turns out that faith often involves a whole lot of picking up and moving from place to place. God’s people are not just “foreigners and aliens” in some disembodied spiritual sense, but a great many of the Bible’s best-known names were quite literally sojourners, travelers, immigrants. The repeated refrain throughout Scripture is that God’s people must love the foreigner, because they were foreigners in Egypt and because God Himself loves and provides for the stranger in the land (Deut. 10:18-19).

It’s with great excitement, then, that I am able to announce that we are weeks away from having the opportunity to live out these Scriptural injunctions to love the foreigner and welcome the stranger in a special way here in our community. In coordination with the Christian nonprofit World Relief, I’ve been working with a team of volunteers to explore the possibility of opening an office for refugee resettlement in Whatcom County—an office that would receive referrals from the federal government for permanent resettlement as our new neighbors. In May of 2021, I was officially hired by World Relief to lead the expanding effort in Whatcom County, even as I continued to work for Bellingham Covenant.

In September, our final approval from the State Department was received and since then things have been moving at a blistering pace to get ready to welcome our first refugee families in November. As everyone is acutely aware, this process is unfolding in the midst of an international refugee crisis; with the fall of Afghanistan in August, 50-60,000 Afghans were evacuated and have been living in difficult, unsustainable conditions on military bases in the U.S. and around the world ever since. The effort to welcome and integrate this number of refugees in a short amount of time can only be compared in recent history to the Indochinese refugee crisis following the Vietnam War. It will be a monumental effort, and with the opening of a resettlement office, Whatcom County will have the opportunity to play a small but important part in this story.

We expect to receive 15 individuals in November and December, with an additional 60 arriving through the rest of the fiscal year. God willing, these will be the first of many that we will be able to welcome, befriend and walk alongside in the years to come. The work of hiring and training staff, mobilizing volunteers, fundraising, and connecting with churches and other groups will carry on as these families begin to arrive and settle in.

Currently, we have a variety of needs—financial, material, and housing-related. Our website is regularly updated with information about current needs, the progress of the project and resources for learning more about refugees. Feel free to contact me at sshetterly@wr.org with any questions you have about all of this. Above all, we ask that you would pray for God’s continued guidance and grace over this project, and that more of His people would hear and respond to his call to extend radical hospitality to the stranger. In doing so, we look forward in faith toward the day when God welcomes all of us sojourners into the city he has made for his people.

*Whatcom County volunteers from a number of local churches had an opportunity earlier this month to visit World Relief Seattle and experience their “From Home to Home” refugee simulation.*

By Megan Mattix
Children’s Director

This year, in our congregation, we have adopted a new spiritual formation curriculum for our children called Godly Play.

Some quick facts on Godly Play:

Godly Play is a creative, imaginative approach to Christian formation and spiritual guidance.
Godly Play has a Montessori foundation with 40+ years of research and practice.
Godly Play values process, openness, discovery, community and relationships.
Godly Play models the worship life, stories, symbols and rituals of Christian congregations.
Godly Play allows children to make relevant and personal theological meaning at their own level.
Godly Play nurtures participants to larger dimensions of belief and faith through wondering and play.

Each Sunday our children up to 5th grade are invited in to a rhythm of worship. We leave the sanctuary having blessed and been blessed with our “The Lord Be With You” ritual. We then walk to our classrooms with all our helpers. We prepare to hear God’s word by taking our shoes off and calming our bodies outside of each classroom. Each child is then welcomed by name, one at a time, into the classroom by a Helper. Upon entering the classroom the Storyteller invites the child to join a circle they are making on the floor. The Storyteller then tells a story from the Bible by memory using visuals. So, kids are hearing, seeing, touching and sometimes even tasting the story for that day. After hearing the story, they are invited to wonder about the story. “I wonder if it was really stinky in the ark?”, “I wonder why God made people in the first place?” In God’s stories, there is so much to wonder about. We then invite the children to respond to the story. We have response choices that are available to them. Some choices we typically have are: art supplies, legos, prayer journals, blocks, etc. They have about 30 minutes to respond independently and sometimes they choose to work with a friend or two. We then “feast” together. We take time to enjoy a snack and some play time in the gym before heading back to our classrooms to regather our circle, pray for one another and be dismissed as parents come, one at a time.
We are still learning and growing in this new curriculum. My hope is that it continues to be a nourishing worship experience for our children and also for every adult Helper and Storyteller.

By Jeff Grosskopf
Youth Pastor/Director of Worship Technology

Can you believe that we’ve been live-streaming our worship services for over a full year now? Amid the COVD Pandemic, our church had to quickly adapt to the technical demands of what was going on around us. This meant updating our sanctuary to allow for live streaming. Sadly, the little tech booth we had before COVID just couldn’t handle the demands of what was needed. So, the day after Easter, we decommissioned and demolished that little booth to expand the space. Not only did we double the space, but we also doubled the size of our tech team. On any given Sunday, we have 7 tech volunteers showing up early to make sure our online community has access to our worship services. So thank you, tech team!!

I wanted to thank you, church family, for sticking with us as we navigate these changes.

I also want to thank the following people for dedicating their time and talents to make this tech booth a reality: