Monday, September 19, 2005
First United Methodist Featured in the Santa Monica Daily Press
One of our 2005 Worship Renewal Grants recipients is First United Methodist Church of Santa Monica. First’s pastor, the Rev. Patricia Farris, was the subject of a lengthy article and Q&A in the Santa Monica Daily Press earlier this year. The article is linked from First’s website; it begins on the bottom of page 1 and continues on page 7. An excerpt:
How do you prepare for Sunday sermons?
“Sometimes people say, ‘Why can’t
you just pull out an old sermon?’ I could
never do that. I mean, I might take a paragraph
or something, but I could never do
that because the world is always changing,
whether it’s our immediate community
or the larger world. So I read a lot, I
watch the news a lot, and I try to just pay
attention to what’s going on out there.
And I try to have a broad range of interests
because, again, our congregation is
really diverse. Some of them love sports,
some of them love health issues, some of
them are in business, some of them are in
academia, some of them are really most
focused right now on their families and
their kids, so I try to pay attention to
what’s going on at all those levels. I do
take Thursdays as my day. I don’t even
come in here because it’s too distracting.
It’s my day for study and writing. I’ll do
some tweaking on Friday and Saturday,
and sometimes I’ll throw it out on
Saturday, luckily that doesn’t happen too
often, but it’s kind of scary when it does.
Every Sunday, it’s kind of a relentless
schedule, it comes around real frequently
— every week — there it is.”
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