Happy New Year and Renewal!
Thank you for being such an important part of Renewed Heart Ministry’s community and for partnering with us to further our work of love, justice, compassion and healing.
Your support during the past year enabled us to provide a faith-based foundation for labors of love and justice. It enabled us to provide people with connection and inspiration as we compassionately participate together in the varied work of justice within our world today.
Your support helped us reach our budget goals and will enable us this coming year, together, to continue being a ministry on the margins that prioritizes the needs of marginalized people, especially those who have been the recipients of misinformed, faith-based harm.
Whether within our larger world or within each of our more local faith communities Renewed Heart Ministries will continue to be a voice for change as we work toward a world that is a compassionate, just, safe home for everyone.
We could not do anything we do without you.
From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you.
We deeply appreciate your generous support.
Last Week’s Episode of Just Talking!
New Episode of JustTalking!
Season 1, Episode 45: Matthew 2.1-12 & Mark 1.4-11. Lectionary B, Epiphany 1
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.
If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it.
You can find the latest show on YouTube at
Season 1, Episode 45: Matthew 2.1-12 & Mark 1.4-11. Lectionary B, Epiphany 1
Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment
Thanks in advance for watching!
January’s Recommended Reading
Tenacious Solidarity: Biblical Provocations on Race, Religion, Climate, and the Economy
by Walter Brueggemann
Tenacious Solidarity features essays and new writings from 2014 to 2018. As all of Walter Brueggemann’s writing is, the chapters are deeply biblical while also concerned with the identities, practices, and obligations of religious communities in contemporary contexts within the United States. Brueggemann consistently attempts to weave the biblical texts–vested as they are with the authority of a storyteller–into the deep contours of his readers’ experiences, in order to foster a tenacious solidarity that might overcome both the psychic numbness cultivated by a 24-hour news cycle as well as the anxious possessiveness nurtured by so many privatized spiritualities.
Brueggemann brings the “transformative potential” of the biblical texts to bear on critical contemporary contexts, including but not limited to economic disparities, racial injustice and white supremacy, climate and care for creation, and the power of memory and mentoring. He delves deeply in the Psalms, which he says, “provides a foundational script for living into the fullest and deepest realities of human existence.” And he draws from the Prophets his foundational concept of totalism, which he defines as “automated fragmentation of social life such that we habitually and callously disregard our relations with others.”
Last Week’s Social Jesus Posts
Articles posted each week at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/socialjesus/
Epiphany, Baptism, Solidarity and Justice, Part 1
In this epiphany story another star (comet) appears. This time not at a caesar’s death as a token of his divinity, but at an infants birth.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/socialjesus/2024/01/epiphany-baptism-solidarity-justice-part1/
Epiphany, Baptism, Solidarity and Justice, Part 2
The entire Epiphany narrative in Matthew speaks of liberation and justice for those pushed to the undersides and edges of their society.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/socialjesus/2024/01/epiphany-baptism-solidarity-justice-part2/
Epiphany, Baptism, Solidarity and Justice, Part 3
As we reflect on Epiphany and the establishment of justice in the themes of Jesus’ Baptism, where are we working for justice today?
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/socialjesus/2024/01/epiphany-baptism-solidarity-justice-part-3/
It’s Here!
Herb’s latest book is now available through Renewed Heart Ministries.
Finding Jesus: A story of a Fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels
by Herb Montgomery
Pages: 210
Price: $14.95
Get your copy today!
To purchase click here.
UPCOMING EVENTS
January 20, 2023
Good News Fellowship
(via Zoom)
Toronto, Ontario Canada
For info: 304.520.0030
Weekly Zoom HeartGroup on Wednesday Nights
Each Wednesday evening, Glendale City Church will be hosting a Zoom-HeartGroup led by Herb Montgomery. Our discussion each week will focus on the content in Renewed Heart Ministries’ weekly eSight articles and the Jesus For Everyone podcast published each Friday. The time of each Zoom session will be on Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. Pacific/10:00 p.m. Eastern.
For more information and for the link to participate each week, contact RHM here.
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