Weekly Blog

Pastors: Why I Don’t Endorse or Denouce Politicians

It has been a crazy week (January 20-26, 2025) not only in the political world but also in the faith world. I want to take this opportunity, to tell you why I don’t make political statements or endorse political leaders either here in the pulpit or on Facebook. I am roundly criticized by both colleagues and church members for not doing so. It’s not because it’s not important or that I don’t have opinions about it.  I do. I am passionate about these things.  I am not shy about talking about it at home or with my family.  My extended family doesn’t all agree and sometimes we get into lively arguments.  But we love each other and so at the end of the day, politics will not affect our relationships.
 

I’m also not afraid to share what I believe or to speak the truth in love. If you want to ask me a specific question about what I believe to be true, I’ll answer.  I am well aware it could cost me members, friendships, and even my job because of the current political climate.  I don’t understand how this became our reality today.  If my convictions cause the loss of friendships or employment, I will be sad, but I will shake the dust off my shoes and move on. I much prefer to speak about theology than politics. That is my area of expertise, my passion, and my calling.

I don’t endorse or denounce political leaders for the following reasons:

  1. I have and continue to serve as pastor to republicans and democrats, libertarians, green party members, you name it. I love you all, as I have vowed to do.  If I denounce your candidate, you may assume I don’t love you and that is not acceptable to me.  You may think that I will not care for you or help you or value your gifts.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  I love you.  It’s not weak or a lack of principles.  It’s my calling to love and care for my whole flock.
  2. Facebook, or any other social media site, is not the place to have these conversations, so removed from other people, so unaccountable to who we hurt, so full of misinformation. These conversations need to be held in person, eyeball to eyeball, in an atmosphere of love and respect.
  3. As important as the political process is I follow Jesus, not a political leader. I won’t follow an influencer, or pop psychologist, or cultural icon.  My allegiance is not to any religious leader.  It is to Jesus alone I owe everything.  It is to Him only that I have pledged my soul, my life, my all.
  4. Jesus loves even my political enemies. And his love is the only thing that can or will change them. Not name calling or insults.  Not threats or persecution.  The love of Christ is the most powerful force in the universe. I will proclaim the love of Christ for all people with my words and actions, to the best of my ability, until my dying breath.  Yes, this has profound political implications.  We each must work those out.
 
Therefore, in 2025 I will strive to keep building on our progress toward our 2030 Vision: To celebrate and proclaim the all-encompassing love of Jesus Christ for everyone.  We do this as a church not only with words, but with actions, which speak louder than words.  Our actions must imitate and follow Jesus, whose agenda we heard in Luke 4:18 today: good news, release, sight, and freedom; Who said  blessed are the poor and the peacemakers, the meek and merciful; Who said that whatever we do to the least of these our brothers and sisters, we do to him; Who said, love your neighbor without qualification. Jesus insisted we love even our enemies. This is not weak.  It is the hardest thing we are ever called to do.
 
We will spend Lent this year focusing on The Red Words in our Bible, those words Jesus spoke, and measure ourselves and our church with them.  It will be uncomfortable because nobody measures up 100%, but Jesus speaks these words with both conviction and kindness and by the power of the Holy Spirit they will work to change us from the inside out, until we conform to the will of God.
 
Let’s do this together, Grace family, and we will become the church Christ is calling us to be.
 
Pastor Tracey


Mission: 2024 in Review

Grace Presbyterian Mission Ministry Summary for 2024

GPC Mission was busy during 2024 in its commitment to further the vision of our church as stated in our Vision 2030 document.

Serving as the hands and feet of Jesus in our community we sponsored regular Minnie’s Food Pantry workdays. We sponsored quarterly blood drives in conjunction with Carter Blood Care. Grace members served at Austin Street Center and we hosted refugees at Grace Place. Mission sponsored successful food, book and school supply drives for Minnie’s, PCHAS and Carpenter Middle School respectively. Throughout the year donations have been received, and members have volunteered to keep our Little Free Pantry stocked. All of these events relied on the wonderful generosity of our members.

Some of the City House Donations

Mission collaborated with the Women of Grace for a yarn drive and a household items collection for City House. With Children’s Ministry we supported Beaty Elementary. Financial support was given to our ESL and Prison ministries.

 

 

We even celebrated by having a Solar Eclipse party.

April Eclipse

To help tell our story, Mission launched a blog directed towards Grace members and the broader community. Other Grace ministries have joined in with their own posts

Unfortunately, we could not do everything we set out to do in 2024. We needed to cancel our Numana food packing event for budget reasons and were not able to go to Guatemala. For Numana, we are actively seeking a replacement in 2025. For Guatemala, we have established safety/training protocols for the trip and are seeking new underserved regions in the country to explore. Additionally, we are testing the effectiveness of in-country support for existing systems – as facilitated by our earlier Internet of Things (IOT) work. Mission remains engaged with Family Promise as they are becoming more active in 2025
 
Thank you Grace members for your continued support of our Mission ministry!
Bill Urech – Mission Elder


Mission: Saving Lives Through Blood Donations

One Mississippi, two Mississippi.  Two seconds.  That’s how often someone in the United States needs a blood transfusion.  There are so many lives saved through blood donations – an accident victim, a patient with a disease requiring a lifetime of transfusions, someone with a scheduled surgical procedure, or perhaps a family member battling cancer, like my brother.  It’s pretty straight forward.  When you donate blood, you save lives.

Carter BloodCare needs 1,500 blood donors each day to meet the requirements of the patients in the fifty-seven counties they serve in North, Central, and East Texas. According to Carter BloodCare, sixty percent of the local blood supply is typically collected at blood drives.  To keep up with the demand, at least 700 blood drives must be hosted monthly throughout our region.  I am so grateful to the members of Grace who have faithfully given blood during one of our drives or at another donation center.  In the past two years, we have donated enough blood to save more than 200 lives!

So, get ready to roll up your sleeve in 2025.  We will host 4 blood drives next year.  Mark your calendar for January 19, 2025, April 27, 2025, August 24, 2025, and November 9, 2025 to donate at Grace and give the gift of life. If you are unable to make one of the drives hosted on our campus, please share the sponsor number for Grace Presbyterian Church when you donate at a Carter BloodCare location.  The sponsor number is SPON105217.   Your donation will be recorded as a donation from our church and shows our commitment to saving lives.



Pastors: Exegesis and Bible Commentaries

Many of you have heard me use terms like “exegesis” and “bible commentaries” when I preach. The other day, I was thinking about how I need to further explain what I’m talking about when I throw around those terms in my sermons because someone approached me after worship to ask what “exegesis” means. When I led an exegetical study on Philippians last year, I defined exegesis in its most basic sense as a critical interpretation of our scriptures. One engaged in exegetical study uses history, culture, and language among other context clues in our canonical texts to discern their intended meaning. It’s helpful to have an awareness of this process because for many pastors this is the starting point for the sermon writing process. Usually, when I start exegeting a bible passage or forming my own understanding of a passage’s meaning through critical interpretation and study, I begin with bible commentaries. Bible commentaries help those tasked with preaching to begin to further explore the text. I have my personal favorites, but there are a substantial number of different bible commentaries that are put together by experts in the field of biblical scholarship. You can find all sorts of different perspectives in each commentary along with helpful facts about the original Greek and Hebrew, dating information on when it’s believed that a particular text was produced, and important context about who may have written the text and why they felt compelled to write in the first place. After that, I usually turn to the original languages and search to see if I can learn anything that the modern English isn’t communicating in our scriptures. One cool piece of information is that you don’t have to be a pastor writing a sermon or a world-class bible scholar to use these tools. They are helpful for personal study and many of them are available for free. We actually have the full set of the Interpretation commentary series in the library located in the parlor. This series is published by our denomination and is a terrific resource to use if you encounter a question about a complicated passage. Another fun place to explore is Biblehub.com’s interlinear tool. You can use this tool to see the precise meaning of each individual word in the Old Testament’s Hebrew or the New Testament’s Greek. I encourage you to check these resources out and see what new things God might teach you about our holy scriptures!

Interlinear Bible

 


Mission: Austin Street Center

Every year on New Years Eve GPC has fed the residents at the Austin Street Center (ASC) in downtown Dallas and this year will be our 38th straight year performing this mission. ASC has grown and changed fairly significantly; many of you may remember serving in the old location with the beds—housing up to 240 people-literally 50’ from the serving line and GPC members making a sloppy joe meal for the guests.
 
ASC center has changed dramatically and has relocated across the street from its original spot. ASC now has separate dorm areas for men and women, full commercial kitchen, training center, computer lab, and very large seating/dinner area for the guests. ASC’s capacity has increased as well; we now plan on serving 400+ meals. We also support the meal differently; for a very similar amount of money, we now cater the meal through Tejano Brothers catering who do a terrific job with the meal. This frees us up to serve and mingle with guests for a more interactive mission engagement.
 

Grace crew – New Years Eve 2023

 
We will officially ask for volunteers and donations for this event later in November; please consider at that time purchasing a meal for 1 or more ASC guests at approximately $10/person. And if you can, volunteer to serve, either as a line server or as a greeter to engage with the guests during the meal service. We hope to see you at Austin Street Center on New Years Eve!
 


Pastors: Building Church Community through Fantasy Football

Pastor Tracey was recently published in Presbyterian Outlook with an article about the fantasy football league at Grace. What follows is an excerpt from the article. You can find the full article at Building church community through Fantasy Football – The Presbyterian Outlook (pres-outlook.org)
 
Could fun be what we need to draw us closer to each other and the Lord? Tracey Davenport shares her church’s ministry of Fantasy Football.
 

 

I was raised on football. My father volunteered with some local high school teams and taught me, his oldest daughter, to run patterns and catch passes. He passionately rooted for Ole Miss, and, therefore, SEC football was our Saturday entertainment. Professional football was enjoyed as well — after church, of course! One of my most vivid childhood memories is watching Walter Payton break the single-game rushing record in 1977 against the Saints at Soldier Field. We cheered him on from our living room on the Naval base in Newport, Rhode Island. Football is in my blood.
 
Apart from a few sermon illustrations, my love of football had not crossed into the realm of my faith or ministry until last year. Our elder for member engagement (a.k.a. elder for fun) launched a church fantasy football league at Grace Presbyterian Church in Plano, Texas. I enrolled. Draft Day arrived and I noticed something wonderful at our tailgate lunch and draft event. The room was filled with people who were contemporary and traditional worshipers, evangelicals and progressives, Republicans and Democrats, men and women, gay and straight, members and non-members, ages 9-79, and held all levels of football acumen. Together, we ate and laughed; we schemed and strategized; we stressed over our time-based drafts and moaned when our favorite player was selected by someone else. I have rarely seen such a diverse gathering at our church…
 
 


Fellowship: I scream, you scream…

Our world is divided right now, our country is divided, our state is divided, and even our church is divided.  Around our country, things are getting ugly politically and we are all feeling it, no matter with which side of the aisle you identify. Finding things we can all agree on has always been difficult, but if feels almost impossible right now.  A few Sundays ago, we all agreed that ice cream for breakfast can bring us together.  You might think that cappuccino crunch is the best and I might think that cookies and cream is the best, but we can agree that ice cream, specifically Tongue and Cheek’s delicious, rich flavors, is scrumptious.  As I watched a line form and members chatting with other members, I couldn’t help but smile.  It was a beautiful, sunny day and I feel certain that God was smiling down on GPC’s east parking lot.  We put our differences aside and ate ice cream together.  

 

Many years ago, I participated in a Mom’s Bible study at GPC.  One of my favorite studies was focused on Christian hospitality.  I love to throw a party (and attend them too).  In fact, I am sure that love of hospitality is what landed me in this role as Fellowship Elder.  As I stood and watched brothers and sisters standing around outside, eating ice cream together, I was reminded of this verse: Romans 12:13 Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. May we as a church family continue to find new ways to show hospitality, even in these divided times. 

 

We all scream for ice cream! 

Ann Boles

GPC Fellowship Elder
 


Property & Grounds: Welcome

It’s time to introduce you to the Property and Grounds committee at GPC. We are a committee tasked with overseeing the maintenance, repair and improvement of the buildings and grounds of our church.
The committee is made up of approximately eight to ten church attendees and a moderator, who is also an elder in the Session. We meet on the third Tuesday of each month at 7:00 pm and our meetings last about an hour. The meetings usually deal with the ongoing upkeep of our facilities along with planning for future projects.
A big part of our ministry is keeping the plants and shrubs maintained as well as keep our flower gardens at both the church and Grace Place thriving. There are two church wide workdays a year in which we plant, trim and weed the grounds and we are always looking for helpers on those days. If you like to garden we would love your assistance.
 

2024 Property Committee

 
If you would like to attend one of our meetings or if you would like to volunteer to be on the committee, please contact Gary Ford at 972-824-3973 or at garycford@gmail.com


Adult Christian Formation: Growth

Regardless of my age, September feels like a new school year and a chance to realign my practices. Every year I ask myself this question:
 
What are you doing RIGHT NOW to grow your faith?
My biggest “growth spurts” as a Jesus-follower have come as I learned side by side with other people and one of the things I cherish most about Grace is how MANY opportunities I have discovered over the years to do just that. This fall, I am grooving on Pastor Tracey’s Blue Angels group (The Screwtape Letters) and digging into 1&2 Samuel with the Koinonia Sunday School class.
How about you?
 
Are you participating in a weekly Sunday School class at 10am in one of the 5 adult classrooms or working with one of the 6 classrooms of children/teens?
 
Have you considered one of the 6 weekly adult bible studies offered during the week? Or perhaps the men’s bi-weekly Saturday morning group or the monthly Women’s Tuesday Evening study works better for you?
 
Your schedule is unpredictable? What about a short -term study? Pastor Tracey is leading a 6-week study “The Path to Forgiveness” on Monday evenings starting September 30. There is a 5-week book study on Zoom beginning November 11 entitled “The Welcoming Congregation.”
Maybe you are looking for a spiritual energy boost? What about one of the many special conferences offered at Mo-Ranch in the Texas Hill Country or Camp Gilmont in nearby Gilmer, TX? Both of those Presbyterian camps are much loved by your pew-mates as the “thin places” where they have encountered God more clearly.
A North Texas Presbyterian Pilgrimage weekend retreat has ignited or rekindled the faith of dozens (hundreds?) of Grace members over the years. Are you available to participate or staff at one of the next retreats on October 18-20 or March 7-9?
 

So. Many. Options.

It’s September. What are you doing RIGHT NOW to grow your faith?



Mission: Clothes Closet

A Ministry Shared With Many Others
One of the great strengths of Presbyterians is that our churches are connected to each other so we can partner in our ministries. A good example is our Clothes Closet led by Jeanne Peck. The clothing you donate at Grace is delivered to First Presbyterian in Plano to be used by their Family Clothes Closet Ministry. There, on Thursday afternoons, these and other donated clothes are sorted for the best future uses. Your donated clothes may be given to people in need at First Presbyterian’s Family Clothes Closet on Wednesdays from 10 to noon or distributed using their trailer to support Streetside Showers on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays of the month. They may be distributed by Hope Restored Missions to their clients or provided by First Presbyterian to people seeking shelter on cold nights at the Plano Overnight Warming Station (POWS). Some donations may be picked up by Grace Bridge and resold with the benefits going to local food banks and others that cannot be reused may end up as rags sold by the Salvation Army.
If you would like to support this ministry please donate clothing at our Clothes Closet drop-off inside the west church entrance. (Men’s clothing is always needed, especially jackets, coats, and men’s casual pants with 30-36 inch waists). Or, donate money for the purchase of new underwear. (We will get your donation to First Presbyterian or you can give it to them directly).
If you feel like rolling up your sleeves to get actively involved, volunteers are always needed to sort donations or help distribute them. Please contact Bill Burnett and he will get you in touch with Ted McKown at First Presbyterian who will find a spot for you to help.