Pastor Note for
June / July / August 2022

Summer is a time of rest and recreation. Days are long and warm lending themselves to lounging and lingering into twilight in the company of friends and family. It seems that alongside our educational counterparts, all professional schedules slow while recreational schedules expand. Many churches change their time of worship while many corresponding opportunities beyond worship slow or suspend for the summer. Certainly, some unique events are held, but many of the typical meetings and studies are disbanded through the summer for want of participation. 

We have a jewel in our area which leaned into this slowed reality to foster, originally, an opportunity to gather and train teachers of Sunday School. This proved the perfect time for adults from the surrounding rural countryside to enrich their spiritual life and the Chautauqua Institute was born. Since that time Chautauqua has expanded to be a more general adult educational movement bringing speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers, and other specialists of the day together through the weeks of the summer. Unfortunately, to stay there and to participate in the events of the Chautauqua Institute have grown out-of-reach for many. Thankfully, however, over time this summer emphasis has also turned into a verb: to Chautauqua. So, to Chautauqua is not only a historical Methodist summer event of spiritual development, but something still available to all of us. Theodore Roosevelt called it “the most American thing in America” at one point. Woodrow Wilson during the depths of World War I saw it as “an integral part of the national defense.” And William Jennings Bryan deemed it a “potent human factor in molding the mind of the nation.” 

Let us use this summer as a time to feed our hunger for education, spiritual development, culture, and entertainment. Let us not lay aside our need to grow during these months, but seize the opportunity in this time to discuss, read, and participate in ways we are simply unable to during the rest of the year. It is summer and so it is time to Chautauqua! 

Yours in Christ, 

Rev. Daven Oskvig