Plymouth member Carrie Sauter has attended hundreds of births as a Certified Nurse Midwife. What does attending such a powerful experience with so many individuals and families have to teach us about the divine’s presence in the world? We sat down the day after Mother's Day to talk about community, transformation, pain, and the sacred.

There’s a new face here on the staff of Plymouth Congregational Church: our new Director of Spiritual Formation, Madeline Severtson. Madeline never dreamt she’d be working in a church. But a life of spiritual exploration and experimentation has led her here, to what she says might just be her dream job. We talked about her winding path and where she finds meaning in the pursuit of spiritual formation.

Whether we like it or not, change is an ever-present facet of church life. Clergy and community members come and go, buildings arise and decay, ministry priorities shift. But even when change is healthy and necessary, it can still bring anxiety. So the question arises: when the anxiety and disorientation of change comes up, how can church communities remain open to divine presence and stay true to their faith? Plymouth member Rev. Mary Kay Sauter has helped many church communities through times of profound change as an Interim Minister in the United Church of Christ. We talked about the difference between decision making and discernment, and the spiritual work of seeking God in the liminal space of change.

Referenced in the episode is Susan Beaumont's book, How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going.

The Plymouth Church community works collectively to welcome recent immigrants to Minnesota through the work of the Immigrant Welcoming Working Group. But individuals in our community are also at work. Plymouth member Toni Azad teaches English to adults from around the world, from Guatemala, to Somalia, to Ukraine, to Afghanistan. We talked about her path to the work, and the significance of providing life tools to this population.

As this episode hits the interwebs, we find ourselves early in the season of Lent: a special time in the Christian church for contemplating our own spiritual state in the time leading up to Easter and the resurrection story. We’re invited to follow the example of Jesus, who spent 40 days praying in the wilderness before starting his healing work. At Plymouth, our Lenten theme is “Embracing the Wholeness of Creation,” and it provides a lens through which to approach the season. Lead Minister DeWayne Davis and I discussed the concept of wholeness as described by theologians Frederick Buechner, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the competing forces that seek to disconnect and fragment us every day.

This past month, Plymouth Church has hosted Transfer of Memory, an exhibit of portraits of Holocaust survivors, accompanied by brief biographical sketches of each person’s story. And so you may have seen photos of this episode’s guest, Manny Gabler, hanging near the door of Jones Commons and read how his family escaped the war when Manny was a baby and spent nine years in Shanghai before immigrating to the U.S. in 1948.

We started our conversation talking about those nine years in Shanghai, through the lens of a trip he took in 1998, 50 years after leaving China for the U.S.

Host Chris Bohnhoff and Rev. Seth Patterson unpack the meaning of 'performance' and how it relates to acting, preaching, public speaking, and everyday interactions.

Today’s conversation partner is Jay Matre, who began a two-year term as church Moderator in the summer of 2022. In Plymouth’s system of governance, the Moderator is the chair of the Board of Deacons, who you could think of as the church’s board of directors. We talked about Jay’s relationship to Plymouth, about what he’s learned so far in his time as Moderator, and about the energy in the air as we enter 2023.