As this column comes to you, I plan to be in Greensboro with our youth group.  We will be at a youth camping/missions experience called Passport.  (passportcamps.org)  If you’ve been around Broadway long, you’ve likely heard references to Passport by people in our youth and children’s ministries.

Here is Passport’s mission: "With Christ as our foundation, Passport empowers students to encounter Christ, embrace community, and extend grace to the world."  

How do we partner with them in our ministry?  For years now, our youth and children have gone each summer to participate in the camps they run around the nation, and also in Africa.  Passport allows us to bring our young people to a structured week of Bible study, worship, service to the community, and fun!  Our youth spend a half day each day at Passport working on projects, such as painting homes for senior adults or entertaining children in special programs.  It also allows a time of intensive spiritual growth through daily Bible studies and worship.  Each year, around 2000 people participate in Passport camps.

Passport has been a crucial training ground for young ministers.  Susan Reed, Chris Liles, and Emily Holladay all worked with Passport back when they were young ministers!  We’ve also had 7 students from our youth group continue on to work at Passport Camps after graduating high school.

Broadway’s gifts played a key role in helping Passport to grow as a ministry.  Through your gifts to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, you helped CBF provide initial seed money to begin Passport 22 years ago.  More recently, the Missions Committee approved a grant of $5,000 to help Passport with a capital campaign.  For the past two summers, we have hosted Passport camps in our building as they worked at mission projects around Louisville.

We certainly do all we can as a local congregation to nurture the spiritual formation of children and youth, but it’s great to have partners like Passport to help us achieve our goal!

Pastoral thoughts on racial issues in our community and our nation
Rev. Chris Caldwell, June 24, 2015

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Last night at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a white man walked into a prayer meeting in a black church.  Initial reports say he remained in the meeting an hour before opening fire. I’m a white pastor, but this past Sunday was a vacation day, so I went to a black church where an African American friend is the pastor.  Having just made this visit, and having worshiped in many African American churches, I think I have some sense of how the young man would have been received. . . .

Our congregational discernment process is moving forward. Members of our discernment team, along with others who were trained to help, met in small groups with over 75 youth and adults in the church. They talked with them about times when Broadway has had special meaning for them, and they talked with them about God’s hopes and dreams for Broadway’s future.  The thoughts were compiled and discussed by the discernment team, and now the team has put a second conversation time on the calendar after church on May 17th.  On the 17th (as a part of the potluck luncheon) we will drill down a bit further by asking those present some more specific questions that grew out of the initial feedback from the small groups.

Once we have had this second conversation, the team will work on distilling and prioritizing the feedback into a report about where the congregation seems to feel God is leading us.  On the basis of this, we will make specific plans and fix specific goals to help us move in that direction.

My thanks to the discernment team and to all those who are participating in the conversation!

One thing we can do is to know and to be honest about our history.  I’ve lived going on 17 years in Louisville, but since I didn’t go to high school here, even if I live to be 90 and die in Jefferson County, most likely I’ll still die as an outsider.  But my outsider status gives me some perspective. . .

Two things have changed dramatically on the religious landscape during my career in the ministry.

First, denominational labels have largely become unimportant to people seeking a church.  That’s not always true, but movement across denominational lines when joining churches has become the norm, not the exception.

Second, churches used to ...