HopeGateWay

Rev. Sara Ewing-Merrill, HopeGateWay’s lead pastor, introduces the new sermon series, “Counterfactual.” In her message she asks, “What does it mean to start over spiritually?” She adds, “I believe that living together in spiritual community is how we can be born of the Spirit. I believe that living as the body of Christ-connected to one another in meaningful, transformational ways, is the way we begin anew.”

Rev. Sara Ewing-Merrill, HopeGateWay’s lead pastor, introduces the new sermon series, “Audacity.”

Maine Needs is making a difference in the lives of people in the greater Portland area and throughout the 16 counties of the State. Located at 332 Forest Avenue, the organization, founded in 2019, strives “to help individuals and families…[to] meet their basic,mmateriao needs by providing donated clothing, hygiene products, household items, and other necessities.” Tara Balch, Maine Needs’s Communications Director, joins Dr. Art McClanahan to talk about how the focus is on “solidarity, not charity,” how the nearly 1000 volunteers have worked with “those starting life over from scratch” and how it “partner[s] with schools, caseworkers, nurses, and nonprofits.” To learn more about how to support its work, visit www.maineneeds.org. Suppoirting Maine Needs is HopegateWay’s 2022 Advent Conspiracy focus.

Remembering the life of Rev. Ruth Cail Williamson, January 13, 1930, to November 6, 2022. Rev. Virginia Fryer, Pastor of Bow Mills UMC, Bow NH, led the service that included readings and remembrances from family members and music from the choir of the New Brackett Church, Peaks Island ME. Highlights include: Poem of Love (begins at 15:26);

Family Remembrances (begin at 16:31);

Sermon (begins at 27:14);

Anthem: "The Storm is Passing Over" (begins at 51:31). [Recording Length: 55:01)

Remembering the life of Rev. Ruth Cail Williamson, January 13, 1930, to November 6, 2022. Rev. Virginia Fryer, Pastor of Bow Mills UMC, Bow NH, led the service that included readings and remembrances from family members and music from the choir of the New Brackett Church, Peaks Island ME. Highlights include: Poem of Love (begins at 15:26);

Family Remembrances (begin at 16:31);

Sermon (begins at 27:14);

Anthem: "The Storm is Passing Over" (begins at 51:31). [Recording Length: 55:01)

In this episode of HopeGateWay Conversations, Ophelia Hu Kinney, HopeGateWay’s worship coordinator, talks with Dr. Art McClanahan about a new way of co-creating worship together. She says, “we’ll be bringing back an old HopeGateWay tradition by gathering around tables for worship” at 509 and doing something similar in the virtual space of the Zoom connection. “I hope that it’s a chance for people to reencounter community in a pretty deep way…where we really get to encounter some of the spark of community…and see how the Spirit is moving,” she added.

“It’s precisely because we live in consistently, unprecedented, tumultuous times that our choices start to reveal our values. Our decisions are points of self-definition,” Ophelia Hu Kinney, HopeGateWay’s worship coordinator, observes in her sermon for October 23, 2022. “It is in this blessed everyday that faith gives us the opportunity to follow our values.”

“Hope is rooted in the belief nthat our actions on behalfof justice and restoration have implications beyond those we can see,” notes Wanda Stahl, in her sermon for October 16, 2022. Sharing in the “What Good is Faith” sermon series, she adds, “practicing hope is as much about changing us as it is about changing the rest of the world. The two are intertwined.”

Rev. Sara Ewing-Merrill, HopeGateWay’s lead pastor, speaks about community in this message, part of sermon series, “What Good is Faith?”

Ophelia Hu Kinney, HopeGateWay’s Worship Coordinator, in her sermon for October 2, 2022, says, “faith is good because through it we get to encounter ritual” and ads, “ritual forces us to slow down and to observe carefully.”