Faith Biscuits: Don Shrumm interviews Paula Steinbacher

Don Shrumm, pastor of Genesis Presbyterian Church (Littleton) has a podcast called Faith Biscuits.  Don recently interviewed Paula Steinbacher, pastor of Church of the Eternal Hills in Tabernash. 

Paula confesses, she is terrified to do interviews. ”It has something to do with my being on television in high school and feeling completely idiotic. In any case, my good buddy Don Shrumm invited me for an interview (or another way of looking at it is that I twisted his arm and forced him to invite me) about ministry in the mountains and I ended up singing songs from Into the Woods.”

Paula reveals, she had a great time and feels Don made her sound better than she thought.

There are two parts to the interview with Paula, be sure and listen to both.

Don also interviewed Dan Doloquist. Dan is currently serving as Interim Pastor at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Denver.

Subscribe here and listen to Part 1 here Part 2 here.

Emergency Grant Funds Now Available!

On March 16, 2020, The Council of Denver Presbytery took the proactive step of forming an Emergency Procedures Commission (EPC) and was approved by Assembly last night during our Zoom Special Called Meeting. This Commission shall act on behalf of the Presbytery in emergency situations (such as the current pandemic) by addressing financial concerns that cannot wait until the Assembly next meets.

The Emergency Procedures Commission shall consist of Joel Adams, Wanda Beauman, Dana Hughes, Peter Hulac, Kendal Mullins, Olivia Hudson Smith, Bruce Spear, Justin Spurlock and Chris Wineman.

Since the formation of the EPC, we have seen the Coronavirus affecting our congregations through the threat of serious illness, fear and social isolation, job insecurity and job loss among many of our members, financial implications upon people, congregations and all governing bodies and their programs. Yet as members of the Body of Christ, we still claim our call to serve God and God’s people with energy, intelligence imagination, and love.
 
Denver Presbytery is committed to helping our congregations as our resources allow. We recognize that some of our congregations have been experiencing financial challenges even before the current crisis began. Given the uncertainty that the current pandemic is creating for most of our congregations, we believe it is important to offer immediate assistance to those churches that will suffer in the coming months. 
 
The government Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act invites small businesses, including churches, to apply for financial assistance, and many of our churches are applying. In order to provide assistance to our churches before CARES Act funds are distributed, or in the event CARES Act funds are not available, Denver Presbytery is offering grants of $5,000 to each of our congregations.
 
To receive one of these grants, simply send an email copy of your CARES Act Loan application to accounting@denpres.org. 
 
The Presbytery’s resources are not unlimited – and their value is declining in the present market. The Colorado Trust is the source of 74% of our operating budget, and the amount we receive each quarter depends entirely on how well the Colorado Trust's funds have done in the stock market. Given the volatile nature of the market, we are bracing for a 20% reduction in what we receive from the Trust.
 
In addition, the Presbytery currently serves as guarantor of $7 million in Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program (PILP) loans to several of our congregations. It is incumbent upon us to maintain a healthy level of reserves to backstop those loans.
 
We are all members of one Body, and together we seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance as we work for the vitality of our churches.  Let us keep each other in prayer, and reach with all hands for the future that God is creating. 
 
 If you have questions, please contact Chuck Sparks at accounting@denpres.org. 

God be with you,

EMERGENCY PROCEDURES COMMISSION

Joel Adams                              
Wanda Beauman
Dana Hughes
Peter Hulac
Kendal Mullins
Pat Queen (Finance & Property Resource)
Olivia Hudson Smith
Bruce Spear
Justin Spurlock
Chris Wineman

Tuesday of Holy Week Devotional from Becoming a Beloved Community

Tuesday of Holy Week April 7 | Grace H. Park

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. — Leviticus 19:34

Jesus’ first miracle was one of hospitality, providing more wine at a wedding to ensure the guests had plenty. In this incredible act, Jesus was following the Middle Eastern understanding of the concept of welcome and providing for others.

Years before Jesus walked on this earth, God commanded the Israelites as recorded in the book of Leviticus to open their hearts and homes to others, to strangers in their midst, to provide for and welcome them. Why did God ask them to do this? Was it to remind them of their beginnings, to remind them to rely on God for provision as they provided for others? Perhaps. But perhaps it was to remind them that God has room at the table for everyone. No one is to be a stranger — everyone has a place with God.

Fred Rogers once said, “Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort.” The Lenten season, especially Holy Week, is the time to look inward and upward, to discover more of who we are in the light of God’s love and be drawn closer to God through this time.

Loving and welcoming God, help me to invite all to the table that Christ has set for us. Help me to have a heart for those who need hospitality, for it is in this welcoming that our hearts may continue to grow and stretch. Amen



Sharing a COVID-19 Story: Carrie Doehring, PhD at Illiff Seminary

Last week I asked Carrie to be a part of our Wednesday Zoom Conversation for Pastors and Church Leaders to offer Pastor Care for our Pastors during this time.

Carrie is a professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Iliff Seminary. As a minister member of Denver Presbytery, Carrie is an instrumental voice on our Committee on Preparation for Ministry Committee. Carrie shared her story for some reflection. Her written words and video are provided.

What’s my Covid-19 challenge?
My challenge is getting my 92-year-old mother, who lives alone in Montreal, to stay home. My sisters and I call ourselves the Mom Squad. We confer daily on how to ensure she has everything she needs so that she doesn’t leave her apartment. My mother has a fierce sense of independence. She doesn’t like being bossed around by us. She also has a strong Catholic sense of duty to authority.

Our Mom Squad includes the Premier of Quebec, the Pope, her pharmacist, doctor, and tax accountant. We invoke them freely to bolster our authority. Our COVID-19 challenge brings out the worst and best in us. The worst moments are being overwhelmed by fear that our mother will have a COVID-19 death. The best moments are loving conversations about mortality, past experiences of struggles, and what makes us resilient. We also laugh a lot with each other.

What helps me cope? What helps me when I feel overwhelmed?
My stress response is like a fingerprint with unique patterns shaped by my life experiences, especially of trauma, and my psychological vulnerabilities. My spiritual fingerprint is the unique patterns shaped by formative experiences, values, and beliefs that coalesce when we use body-aware practices to calm ourselves (Doehring, 2020). I offer my ways of coping in cultural humility, wary of insidious inclusive beliefs that there is ‘one God’ at the heart of all religious traditions (Prothero, 2010).

My ‘spiritual fingerprint’—my particular experiences of beauty and goodness, values and beliefs about suffering and hope—is shaped by childhood experiences of connecting with beauty through sacred choral music. I have been listening to British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ cantata Dona Nobis Pacem. He composed this in 1936, in remembrance of the horrific suffering of World War I that he witnessed during military service on ambulance teams. His unit brought the wounded out of the months-long Third Battle of Ypres at Flanders, where one and a quarter million British, French, and German soldiers were killed. The Latin title Dona Nobis Pacem means “Give us Peace.”

In this cantata, Vaughan Williams set to music Walt Whitman’s poem “Reconciliation.” Whitman was a “wound dresser” in the United States Civil War. Listen to Whitman’s word of hope as he recalls the trauma of caring for wounded soldiers :

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
And the hands of the sisters, Death and night,
Incessantly softly wash again and ever again,
This soiled world. (Whitman, 1865/2015, p. 131)

When I listen to Dona Nobis Pacem, I try to take into my body the beauty of this poetry and music. I envision being part of a web of life that includes war veterans like Ralph Vaughan Williams and Walt Whitman.
I envision the ways my sisters and I are incessantly knitting a web of life that holds our mother.
I envision how so many of us, in our own ways, are knitting a web of life to hold the most vulnerable.

References
Doehring, C. (2020). Coping with moral struggles arising from coronavirus stress: Spiritual self-care for chaplains and religious leaders.
Fawson, S. (2019). Sustaining lamentation for military moral injury: Witness poetry that bears the traces of extremity. Pastoral Psychology, 68(1), 31-40. doi:10.1007/s11089-018-0855-8
Prothero, S. (2010). God is not one: The eight rival religions that run the world and why their differences matter. New York, NY: HarperOne.
Whitman, W. (1865/2015). Drum-taps: The complete 1865 edition. In L. Kramer (Ed.). New York, NY: New York Review of Books.

_____________________________

1) Shawn Fawson, a Ph.D. graduate of the Iliff and DU Joint PhD program and chaplain at Children’s Hospital in Seattle has described how to use Whitman’s poetry in sustaining lamentation for military moral injury (2019).

Do you have a COVID-19 story to share? Contact Communications & Administrative Manager, Beth Carlisle.

Join Wednesday Zoom Conversation for Pastors, click here.

Mid-Council Partners: The following letter will be sent to all loan customers

Mid-Council Partners:
The following letter will be sent to all loan customers 

Dear Partners In Christ,

 As many of you know, the CARES Act recently passed by Congress that provides financial assistance in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic includes an SBA loan provision. This Small Business Administration (“SBA”) provision offers $349 billion in loans with preferred terms to assist for-profit and non-profit organizations during this challenging time.  The specific program is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).  Legal counsel for the denomination has reviewed this CARES Act and believes that churches do qualify to apply for these loans. 

In order to apply you must go through a financial institution that is an SBA lender. The Presbyterian Investment & Loan Program is not allowed to be an SBA lender due to government restrictions. You may want to contact your local bank to see if they are an SBA lender or if they know of one in your area. A list of lenders in your area can be found on the SBA website. In case you do not have sufficient information on the PPP loan program and the application process we have provided you with some resources that we believe are helpful.  

The Treasury Department has published a list of resources which they recommend you read to keep up-to-date on the PPP.  You may reach Treasury's resources through the following website: https://home.treasury.gov/cares  This website has an excellent summary of what is being offered and a direct link to the application.  You can apply beginning this Friday, April 3, 2020.  There is a limit on the funds available so timing may be important. Here is a quick summary of the PPP:

• Loans are administered by SBA Approved Financial Institutions

• Loans are lesser of $10 million or 2.5% times average monthly payroll costs incurred during the 12-month period prior to the loan date

• Calculations for seasonal and new business can vary

• Interest rate on residual loans is 4% or less

• Term of the loan is up to 10 years

• Deferral is 6 to 12 months (interest accrues during deferment)

• Prepayment is eligible

• 501(c) (3) nonprofit organizations are eligible

• Usage can be for payroll and related benefits, interest on mortgage payments, other debts, rents and utilities

• EIDL loans may not be refinanced into a PPP loan

• No collateral needed from church or its members

• No guarantees needed

Please also refer to the denomination’s legal counsel summary of the CARES Act.  You will find information on the PPP in the first section of this CARES Act summary.

We recommend that you inform your presbytery of your congregation's intent to apply for PPP. For further information you should refer to the Department of the Treasury website or your SBA lender.

You remain in our prayers.

Sincerely,

James G. Rissler
President & Chief Executive Officer
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Investment & Loan Program, Inc.

Churches can tap into their share of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act

Small Business Administration will soon be accepting applications through June 30

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

Churches and other nonprofit organizations will soon be able to apply for forgivable loans as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. (Contributed photo)

LOUISVILLE — Churches and other nonprofit organizations are eligible for their portion of the $350 billion in aid, the same as small businesses, as part of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress last week and signed into law by President Donald Trump Friday.

Of significant interest to churches that have seen a downturn in giving as a result of congregants not being able to worship in person are the loans under the Paycheck Protection Program — many of the loans forgivable, so long as churches and worshiping communities maintain employment levels.

According to a guide published by the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship, the PPP will provide cash-flow assistance through 100 percent federally guaranteed loans to employers who maintain their payroll during this emergency. If employers, including churches and nonprofits, maintain their payroll, the loans will be forgiven. Eligible entities can apply if they were harmed by COVID-19 between Feb. 15 and June 30. The program is retroactive to Feb. 15 in order to help bring employees who have already been laid off back onto payrolls.

Allowable costs include payroll, the continuation of health care benefits, interest payments on mortgage obligations, rent and utilities.

Financial analysts say the Small Business Administration probably won’t be ready to process applications for the Paycheck Protection Program for several weeks.

The Rev. Chris Iosso is coordinator of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy. (Contributed photo)

The Rev. Chris Iosso, coordinator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, cited reports adopted by previous General Assemblies following other calamitous financial downturns as indicators that it’s the economic system itself that’s in need of reforming — a message that’s been repeated by the denomination’s highest ecclesial body for many years.

One example: Following the Great Recession of 2008-10, the 220th General Assembly (2012) adopted the report, “World of Hurt, Word of Life: Renewing God’s Communion in the Work of Economic Reconstruction.”

“One key understanding” in that report, Iosso said, “was that the economic crisis revealed the spiritual rot, seen most clearly in the high levels of inequality that effectively generate poverty.”

The report “looked at more ‘bottom up’ ways to build a more durable and healthy economy for families, neighbors, and future generations, based on investing in good jobs, rather than further ‘financializing’ our economy,” Iosso said.

Then, and even more so now, Iosso said, “the church faces the challenge of being a middle class body when the middle class itself is being squeezed, and keeping up its prophetic solidarity with those who will be most hurt by the great contraction in economic activity” brought about by the coronavirus.

In 2014, the 221st General Assembly adopted a report on reforming the nation’s tax policy, “Tax Justice: A Christian Response to a New Gilded Age.” In his introduction to that report, the Rev. Gradye Parsons, then Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the PC(USA), wrote it’s a “core belief of our Reformed Protestant tradition that Christians have a public responsibility to work with others to help reform the societies in which we live. Naturally, no Presbyterian is required to affirm the specifics of any social witness policy; in our view they derive from the influence of God’s Spirit on our representative assemblies, working with material provided by expert volunteer study teams and staff … While Presbyterians may differ on particular policies, we do not evade our responsibilities to the common good and to the future.”

General Assemblies’ historic concern about the nature of the economy goes back more than a century — to 1903, Iosso said, when a small “workingman’s” department was set up.

“Through depression, war and wage stagnation, there have been steady themes: we must share both more of the pain and more of the gain, and redirect economic incentives from maximum, individual consumption toward personal wholeness and communal life,” Iosso said. “Otherwise at every downturn — and they will come faster with climate change — we will sacrifice the vulnerable by not having planned differently.”

Iosso noted that more than half of the stimulus and relief package being rolled out in the coming weeks will go to large corporations and industries. While the CARES Act isn’t designed “to move us closer to long-term sustainability,” Iosso said that “still, from a Reformed Christian perspective, it is a democratic and representative government taking responsibility for the economic well-being of the whole society — the ‘common welfare,’ however much it is a top-down approach.”

SOURCE: Presbyterian Mission Agency website.