Westlake United Methodist Church

Continuing the Social Holiness series, Pastor LyAnna Johnson traces how Methodism went from the 1908 Social Creed to today's Social Principles (through a string of denominational splits and reunions, and an eight-year, globally-sourced rewrite completed in 2024) before diving into the first section: Community of All Creation. Reading Genesis 1 in the Common English Bible, she pushes back on "dominion" being read as domination, reframes stewardship through a friend's habit of calling her own house "the home we steward," and draws on the Haudenosaunee teaching of considering the seventh generation before taking any action. She holds up practices already happening locally, pollinator gardens, solar panel grants, church walking trails, as small but real expressions of the principle. It's a sermon that names hard realities (environmental racism, climate change, ecosystem loss) without stopping there, landing on the case that creation care isn't abstract politics once you actually love the specific patch of it you're standing in.

Sermon date: September 27, 2026

Continuing the Social Holiness series, Pastor LyAnna Johnson jumps from 18th-century England to turn-of-the-century America, tracing the child labor, sweatshop conditions, and industrial-era suffering that led five Methodist pastors to draft the 1908 Social Creed, the first time a denomination put its social convictions in writing. She profiles the five men behind it (a hymn writer, the founder of what became UMCOR, a pastor who gave up a wealthy Madison Avenue pulpit for social service) with real affection but no varnish, including the fact that one of them also held eugenicist views. Rooted in James's blunt claim that faith without works is dead, it's a sermon that closes by asking what today's version of that creed would need to say.

Sermon date: September 20, 2026

Opening a new series on the church's social principles, Pastor LyAnna Johnson goes back to 18th-century England to introduce the "weirdo" at the root of it all: John Wesley, shaped by a mother who drilled her children in Hebrew and Greek, a childhood fire he narrowly escaped, a failed mission trip to Georgia, and a storm at sea that left him unnerved while a boatload of praying Moravians stayed calm. From there she traces how his theology (free will, grace available to everyone, a faith meant to be lived out loud rather than kept private) turned into action: prison reform, opposition to slavery, education for the poor, and a distinctly Methodist refusal to separate personal holiness from social holiness. It's both a history lesson and an invitation, asking what it would look like for this congregation to be as boldly, inconveniently faithful as its own founder.

Sermon date: September 13, 2026

Closing out the summer series on love, Pastor Margot Ann Perez-Greene turns to Paul's prayer for the church in Ephesus and asks whether "God loves you" has become so familiar it barely lands anymore. Drawing on voices from Thomas Long to C.S. Lewis to Rowan Williams, she traces the story of God's love not from "God loves everyone" outward, but backward, to a God who first fell in love with Abraham in particular, arguing that being loved specifically and by name means more than being loved generically. It's a sermon about a God who doesn't love from a distance, but pursues each person, however far off, all the way home.

Sermon date: September 6, 2026

Family Ministries intern Morgan Garrett builds this sermon around a childhood neighbor, a pastor named Paul who Morgan knew only as a warm, playful presence, never once talking theology, until learning after his death that he'd led a Gulf Coast diocese through the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. From there, Morgan turns to 1 John's claim that no one has seen God, and asks how God's love becomes visible anyway: through the body, through incarnation, and through a children's book about a village with no windows, where God turns out to live in the space between people. It's a gentle case for the old phrase "preach the gospel at all times, use words when necessary," landing, unexpectedly, by way of Dolly Parton.

Sermon date: August 30, 2026

Pastor LyAnna Johnson takes Psalm 139's meditation on being searched and known by God and pairs it with something almost nobody tells new parents outright: you cannot spoil a baby with love, and you cannot spoil a person with it either. Drawing on her own experience of unconditional family love, a Sesame Street book about a monster who turns out to be lovable, furry Grover, and a story about God opening a nail salon, she makes a simple, repeated point: nothing anyone has done, or hasn't done, changes how fully they're known and fully they're loved. It closes on one of the gentlest lines in the series so far: when God looks at you, God says beautiful and means it.

Sermon date: August 23, 2026

For the Blessing of the Backpacks, Pastor LyAnna Johnson swaps her usual sermon for an extended, fully conversational kids' time built around the two greatest commandments. She walks through the Greek word agape, a love that costs something, and stretches the idea of "neighbor" from the solar system down to the person in the next seat, landing on a simple definition: whoever we can reach out and touch, as long as they say it's okay. It's a warm, practical send-off into the new school year, full of small, doable ideas (learning names, sharing a pencil, saving a seat) for loving the people who are about to become new neighbors and classmates.

Sermon date: August 16, 2026

Pastor Margot Ann Perez-Greene closes out the summer lectionary with the ending of Matthew's Gospel, walking through three things that make it significant: the gathering of the disciples, the mountain setting, and the Great Commission itself. She lingers on one small but pivotal detail, that the disciples "worshiped and doubted" in the very same breath, to make the case that faith with doubt built in isn't a lesser kind of faith. Drawing on scholars from Mark Allen Powell to Tim Keller, she argues that the church has always been made up of worshiping doubters, and that Jesus sends us out anyway, promising not success, but his own presence.

Sermon date: August 9, 2026

Pastor LyAnna Johnson takes on the story of Jacob wrestling an unnamed figure until daybreak, refusing the tidy, well-lit religious art version in favor of the real one: two bodies in the dirt, all night, ending in a limp and a name change. She reframes Israel, literally "wrestles with God," as a kind of blessing on the struggle itself, arguing that some of the hardest, most honest encounters with God don't look peaceful at all. Drawing on her own therapy work and the idea of the "wounded healer," borrowed from Nadia Bolz-Weber's line about preaching from scars, not wounds, she makes the case that healing has to come before helping others, and that only the person who lived through something gets to decide whether it becomes beautiful.

Sermon date: August 2, 2026

Family Ministries Director Caasi Grove starts with a piece of acolyte symbolism that's easy to walk past every Sunday: carrying the flame in signals Christ's light entering the room, carrying it back out signals what the congregation is meant to do next. From there, she draws on a flood relief trip to Burney, Texas, where a group of students and adult leaders chose to stay and help even as a second storm rolled through, to make a direct case for what loving your neighbor actually costs. It's an unflinching call to bring light into hard, uncomfortable places rather than staying safely inside, and a reminder, borrowing from both Martin Luther King Jr. and John Wesley, that silence is its own kind of choice.

Sermon date: July 26, 2026