Back from annual conference in Corpus Christi, Pastor LyAnna Johnson flips a familiar Gospel passage on its head: instead of picturing ourselves as the disciples being sent out, what if we're the ones doing the welcoming? She traces that idea from the practical, life-or-death hospitality of the ancient world through last year's July 4th floods in the hill country, when the congregation raised $45,000 and showed up with flood buckets almost before anyone asked. The invitation she leaves the congregation with is small and specific: one hour, one day this week, to treat everyone encountered as someone God has sent.

Sermon date: June 28, 2026

On Father's Day, lay preacher and longtime church member Jay Brim opens with the surprising origin of the holiday itself (a Spokane woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, raising her five younger brothers after their mother's death) before turning to Jesus's words from the cross. He traces how Jesus related to God as Father throughout his life, from the temple as a boy to the crucifixion, and lands on a simple, personal challenge: naming who you still owe forgiveness, and actually doing something about it.

Sermon date: June 21, 2026

Preaching just days before Juneteenth, Pastor LyAnna Johnson holds up two translations of the same verse (justified by our faith versus made righteous through Christ's faithfulness) to get at a very Wesleyan point: it can be both. From there she moves through prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying grace into harder territory: the denomination's history with slavery, the church's own reckoning with wealth built on unpaid labor, and how recently women and queer clergy have been allowed to lead. She closes by rewriting Romans 5 in her own words, trading suffering for awkwardness as the thing that, with God's help, still produces hope.

Sermon date: June 14, 2026

As the church settles into ordinary time after a long stretch of Advent, Lent, and Eastertide, Pastor Margot Ann Perez-Greene turns to a shortened version of Jesus's wilderness temptation, skipping past the specific tests to sit with what comes before and after them. Weaving in the story behind the 1949 gospel hit "It Is No Secret" and the witness of gospel singers Joey and Rory facing terminal illness, she makes the case that testing isn't a detour from faith but a given, and that the only way through it is the same way Jesus met it: saturated in scripture, not self-reliance. It's a sermon about what surfaces in us under pressure, and why knowing what's true in advance matters so much when it does.

Sermon date: June 7, 2026

For Trinity Sunday, Pastor Margot Ann Perez-Greene opens with a children's reading from Rachel Held Evans's What Is God Like? and carries that same instinct for image over abstraction straight into the sermon. Skipping the dense "theological treatise" version of Trinity Sunday, she walks through centuries of art, from a 1210 medieval shield to a Celtic image of the Holy Spirit as a wild goose, to land on one central point: a triune God is inherently relational, and so are we, even when that means doing the hard, unglamorous work of staying in relationship with each other.

Sermon date: May 31, 2026

On Pentecost Sunday, the church's birthday, Pastor Margot Ann Perez-Greene takes on two questions: who the Holy Spirit actually is, and what the Spirit calls us to do. Drawing on voices from Thomas Aquinas to Tim Keller to her own years as a courtroom advocate for children, she makes the case that the Spirit isn't an impersonal force but a person, one who defends us here on earth the same way Jesus intercedes for us in heaven. It's a sermon about being fully known, fully defended, and never let go of.

Sermon date: May 24, 2026

Guest preacher Rev. Tina Carter looks at Paul's brief, personal words about Timothy in Philippians 2 and finds a much bigger idea underneath them: chosen family. Drawing on figures from Ruth and Naomi to Jacob to a present-day foster father who cares for terminally ill children, she traces how scripture is full of people who found family outside of blood ties, and makes the case that a baptism vow is really a promise to be that kind of family too. It's a warm, funny, occasionally pointed sermon (grandparents with red pens, beware) about what it means to love people well enough that they want to join in.

On Mother's Day, Pastor LyAnna Johnson pairs Jesus's farewell words to his disciples in John 14 with the surprising true origin of Mother's Day, a story that runs through abolitionist Julia Ward Howe and Civil War era organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis, not greeting cards. Both threads land on the same point: love isn't a feeling we keep in dreams, but something practiced in the hard, often unglamorous work of caring for one another. It's a reminder that the command to love God and love each other is simple to say and genuinely difficult to live, and that doing it anyway is the heritage we're meant to carry forward.

Continuing the Along the Way series, Pastor LyAnna Johnson digs into 1 Peter's call to be "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation," and makes the case that holy really just means set apart, a little bit weird. She traces that idea back to John Wesley's own eccentric discipline and the Methodist practice of works of piety and works of mercy, while drawing a clear line between being called to a higher standard and being tempted toward a higher status. It's an honest, funny look at what it costs, and what it's worth, to follow Christ differently than the world expects, and why none of us have to do it alone.

Sermon date: May 3, 2026

In this Eastertide message, Pastor Margot Ann Perez-Greene turns to the earliest days of the church in Acts 2:42-47, where a crowd of strangers from every nation somehow became inseparable. She traces what actually held such a wildly different group together (not shared background, but a common faith in Christ) through three simple threads: learning, loving, and liturgy. It's a look at what it means to belong to each other, not because we have to, but because something deeper has gotten hold of us.

Sermon date: April 26, 2026