Nativity Newsletter

Meet our Mission Committee Members. Each week we will focus on one member of our Church of the Nativity Mission Committee. Barbara Phillips agreed to go first and let us know her thoughts about Nativity and something about herself. Here is what she has to say.

BARBARA'S THOUGHTS ABOUT CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY

A friend sent a note to me including this idea - “We are always looking forward to a future where we will find the things we’re looking for.”  The assumed universality of the idea kept bugging me and, eventually, connected with my experiences and feelings about my relationship with this Church of the Nativity. 

Yes, the “Church of the Nativity” is a lovely structure. Looking at it last Sunday, it seems to want to be in a lovely village in the English countryside. And here it sits in Water Valley. As lovely as it is and as much as I appreciate the beauty of its simplicity, the meaningful relationship isn’t with the “Church” as building or its quirky renditions of the liturgies, rituals, and sacraments of the Episcopal Church. [Yes, “quirky” to a Cradle Episcopalian, ‘cause y’all don’t know how to behave) This “Church” is spectacularly and uniquely defined by the members of the congregation in their collective intentionality to form the Beloved Community.  

Instead of “always looking forward to a future”, the collective Spirit of the congregation seems to be to look in the present for the thing we are looking for. And more than that – we seem committed to being – not finding – what we are looking for.  As Armanda Gorman concludes in her poem The Hill We Cllimb:

we will rise from the sunbaked South, we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every

known nook of our nation in every corner called our country our people

diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful, when the day comes

we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free

it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re

brave enough to be it.

Especially during these days and times, it surprises no one more than me that I have found my people in a quirky little church in Water Valley.

Barbara Y. Phillips, a social justice feminist, is a writer, sometimes law professor, recovering civil rights lawyer, former Program Officer at the Ford Foundation whose creative nonfiction and other tidbits can be found at BarbaraYPhillips.substack.com. She was born in the Appalachia of southwest Virginia, grew up in Memphis with summers at the Virginia farm of her grandparents, and began her relationship with Mississippi during 1971 first as a Macalester College student engaged in an oral history project, returning after graduation as a community organizer to support the 1971 campaigns of Charles Ever for governor and the first major effort to elect Black local officials since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. After a series of “returns” to the state since then, she has finally made Oxford, Mississippi and Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts her homes during retirement.

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Prayer Request

Richard (father of Dawn Denham)

Steve (father of Katelyn Dilliard)

Pam (friend of Becky Kelly)

Bob ((nephew of Becky Kelly)

Don (brother-in-law of Becky Kelly)

Betty (aunt of Kathy Shoalmire)

Daughters of the King is an international order for women committed to prayer, service, and evangelism. The Nativity DOK members are Jacki Kellum, Liz Reynolds, Kathy Shoalmire, Karen Simard, and Anne Winebrenner. Fell free to share prayer requests with any of the members. We have all taken a vow of confidentiality and a commitment to daily prayer.

Lessons for Sunday, July 6 - Rev. Ann Whitaker, Celebrant

2 Kings 5:1-14Psalm 30Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Announcements! On August 10th, Bishop Dorothy Wells and former Bishop Michael Curry will meet in Jackson, MS for a conversation about Emmett Till. Details here.