Published: June 11, 2021

Saturday, June 26, 2–4 pm

The world is starting to get back to normal, but a lot of people are still struggling due to the pandemic. We need your help to support the Dining & Caring Center and the Grocery Bag Ministry! As you do your own shopping in the coming days, please consider collecting items for donation that would be useful for these amazing ministries and those in need.

Click here for a list of needed items

Published: June 11, 2021

Primary elections are on Tuesday, June 22. Early voting starts Monday, June 14. We urge you to consider voting in the primaries!

You can check your voter status and see your ballot by clicking here. Click on "Check my Voter Information" to find your polling place and see your ballot. Then you can research whom you want to represent you. The Democratic primary is county-wide, while the Republican primary is limited to Rush and Hamlin.

In a primary, the party selects its candidates for the General Election in November. It is how parties choose their message bearers and their message. Ordinary voters often overlook the primary, but it is important to get the votes of people who are looking for moderation in politics. It takes very few votes to sway the direction of a party and people with strong agendas can turn voters to move the party further to the left or right. 

Click here to view some posted debates between the candidates for Rochester City Council and School Board from the League of Women Voters.

Published: June 10, 2021

Sunday, July 4, 10 am, Front Lawn

We are so excited for Rev. Rachel Dupont, the new Minister for Christian Formation and Director of the Discipleship Project, to join our pastoral staff! Help us in welcoming her to Asbury First at an outdoor reception after the 9 am service on July 4.

In addition to regular pastoral duties, Rev. Dupont will be working on a special initiative called The Discipleship Project, which she envisions as a network of “class” and “band” meetings (the original Methodist small groups) that covenant together to be accountable to a Methodist way of life. These small groups will begin within the Asbury First community to train leaders that will help start similar groups around Rochester, inviting new people into Christian discipleship. Not only does this align perfectly with our Dreamscape goals, but it also provides a new means of meaningful connection for a community coming out of a year of isolation.

The generosity of the Petherbridge family gives us the opportunity to try this initiative for a year. Our hope is that it will be so fruitful that we will be able to identify funding to support Rev. Dupont’s appointment in the years ahead.

Published: June 4, 2021

Monday, June 7, 12 pm, Federal Building, 100 State Street

On Monday, June 7 at noon in Rochester at the Federal Building at 100 State Street, join The Poor People's Campaign to make our voices heard and urge our members of Congress to take action and sign onto a newly-released national resolution. They will be gathering just to the right (south) of the Federal Building between it and the Holiday Inn.

Over the last three years, the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has been clear in its commitment to shifting the moral narrative in this country by building lasting power for poor and impacted people. That is why on Monday, June 7 at noon, the Poor People's Campaign is organizing news conferences around the country to demand that our U.S. House of Representatives sign the national resolution titled, “Third Reconstruction: Fully Addressing Poverty and Low-Wages in America by Building from the Bottom Up.”

[Note that because of construction on the Riverwalk, the Genesee Crossroads Garage is closed. Use the Sister Cities Garage with entrance on Fitzhugh St. Exit onto Church St. and turn right.]

As always, the Poor People’s Campaign is political, but non-partisan; this is not about left or right, Democrat or Republican, but about right or wrong. If you have any questions or would like to become more involved with this action, please call or text John McNeill at 585-329-6193.

To learn more about the Poor People's Campaign, visit https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/.

Published: June 4, 2021

The Asbury First campus gardening group can use some more volunteers! mVolunteers are assigned a garden area to keep weeded and trimmed. They can attend to it any time convenient for them. Twice a year, on a Saturday, we have a campus clean-up (a couple of hours of spring or fall sprucing up). Anyone interested can contact Bonnie Gregory at bonniegregory126@gmail.com.

Published: May 28, 2021

October 17–18, Virtual

parliamentofreligions.org/home

The first Parliament of the World’s Religions gathered in Chicago in September of 1893. This was the first world-wide organized interfaith gathering. Faith leaders and members travelled for months for the opportunity to gather and celebrate diverse faiths and traditions together. This October, the 8th Parliament of the World’s Religions will gather virtually on October 17 and 18. We are looking forward to having a cohort of individuals attend from Asbury First UMC. The cost is $10 for students, and it starts at $70 for everyone else. You can sign up directly on the website linked above. 

The AFUMC cohort will meet at least once prior to the event, once during or immediately after the event, and once shortly after the event. Our hope is that through our participation we might help spread the good news and good work of this gathering to our local church and community. We often hear that we are better together, and this event is an opportunity to experience and practice what this means on a global and faith-filled scale. Please contact Mike Mullin (mmullin@asburyfirst.org) with any questions and to let us know when you sign up!

Published: May 21, 2021

As we draw near to Pentecost (the birthday of the church), it seems fitting that we look with hope toward those signs of rebirth around us. Given that NY State has now adopted the new CDC guidelines, we are pleased to make some adjustments to our worship and on-campus gathering guidelines.

MASKS:

Beginning Monday, May 24 (after this Sunday), masks will be optional on our campus (indoor or outdoor) for those who have been fully vaccinated. Some may wish to continue wearing masks and some may not. Both are welcome. For those who have not been fully vaccinated, masks will continue to be required on our campus, both indoors and outside.

WORSHIP SCHEDULE:

We plan to continue our previously announced schedule of services through the summer with a 9 am outdoor service (weather-permitting-only) beginning on May 30 and the 11 am service remaining livestream-only until the fall. However, mark your calendars for August 1 as we plan to hold our annual Tent Service that day (one service at 11 am).

INDOOR MEETINGS:

As we adjust to this new reality, we ask that indoor meetings follow our masking guidance and also attempt to maintain 3–6 foot social distancing.

We have put together a FAQ list to help answer further questions. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out with any further questions.

Sincerely,

The COVID-19 Task Force

Click here to read the Return to Worship FAQs.

Published: May 20, 2021

Virtual Race, June 14–20

Keeping Our Promise Inc. invites you to participate in Run for their Lives — a Virtual Run Walk Bike Wheel or Ride Race to support our local Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) resettlement program. The race period will begin June 14th and end on Sunday, June 20, 2021, at 5 pm EDT to coincide with World Refugee Day. You can submit your race results anytime during this period. We want to honor the journey that our wartime allies endured in order to resettle in the Rochester area. For some of our SIV friends, this journey took years while their lives and those of their family members were in immediate danger as a direct result of having supported the wartime efforts of the United States.

The registration cost is $35 per participant. The t-shirt guarantee registration deadline is May 24, 2021, but registration will remain open until June 20, 2021. For more information and to register, click here.

We are also encouraging individual and team fundraising for the event. If any Asbury First members want to start a team and fundraise, you can sign up on the race website by clicking the "Become a Fundraiser" button.

Published: May 10, 2021

Currently Seeking: Director of the Outreach Center
Reports To: Minister for Outreach

Asbury First United Methodist Church (www.asburyfirst.org), a large, vibrant, outreach-oriented, progressive, mainline church located in the heart of Rochester, NY, is seeking a full time Director of the Outreach Center.

The Director of the Outreach Center will be responsible for providing hands-on supervision and management of on-campus poverty-relief efforts, which relate to serving and working with guests (of any faith or no faith) to provide meals, groceries, clothing and medical care. He/she will work closely with the Minister for Outreach as well as the Outreach Center Committee, to improve programs and explore new programming, recruit, coordinate and train volunteers; and manage budgets and grants activity.

The new Outreach Center at Asbury First brings together all on-campus food, clothing, and health ministries into one fully-accessible and humanizing space. Construction of the Center will begin this fall. Prior to the pandemic, the Dining and Caring Center was serving approximately 35k meals a year, the Storehouse (clothing) was serving 6k families, and the UR Well Clinic was serving about 600 patients. The Director of the Outreach Center will work with each of these vital ministries to help prepare and transition them into a shared services approach in a new space.

The successful candidate will have at least three to five years’ experience in management of an organization, especially not-for-profit human services or poverty-related programs. The candidate should also be able to manage the tension between social justice and immediate charity needs, and thrive in a hands-on, high-energy, fast-paced environment.

Asbury First United Methodist Church is strongly committed to building a diverse staff and keeping racial equity as a priority in our hiring practices to include those with varying abilities, backgrounds and experiences.

Interested candidates please send cover letters and resumes to: search@asburyfirst.org.

Click here for the job description specifics.

Published: May 6, 2021

Sunday, May 16, Dine-in or Takeout, Uno Pizzeria, 931 Holt Road, Webster
 
Please show your support for Flower City Habitat while enjoying a great meal! Come and support A Habitat for Humanity Eat, Drink and Dough Rai$er on May 16 at the Unos in Webster. You can take out or eat in. Uno will donate up to 20% of your check. Proceeds will go to the Asbury First and Harvest Home Coalition current house build on at 757 Jay St. To make sure your meal counts toward the Dough Rai$er, please print the flyer (download here) and present it to your server when you pay.

Published: April 29, 2021

August 2–5, 2021, Outdoor

We are pleased to announce that Asbury First UMC will have an in-person VBS this Summer! It will be August 2-5 and it will be outdoors. We will follow all CDC COVID-19 guidelines to ensure the safety of all that participates. Ages 4 through 6th Grade are welcome. For more information and to fill out the registration form, please click here or email Paula Dugan at pdugan@asburyfirst.org. 

Published: April 16, 2021

Welcome Back Video

We are eager to see you all in person again starting in May! Click here to take some time to watch our "Welcome Back" video for some fun tips and to learn about what to expect about what to expect when you return in order to keep you safe. We hope to see you soon!

Return to In-Person Worship Guidelines

We pray this note finds you safe and well in this Easter season. Thank you for your patience and grace during this pandemic moment.

As was announced this morning, we plan to begin our return to in-person worship this May! Beginning May 2, and for the following three Sundays (May 9, 16, and 23), we will be adding a special in-person service in our sanctuary at 9 am. The 11 am service will remain livestream-only until the fall. Beginning on Memorial Day weekend (May 30) and continuing through Labor Day weekend (September 5) we will move outside to a weather-permitting-only service every Sunday at 9 am. Again, the 11 am service will remain livestream-only until the fall. Our hope will be to re-open more fully this fall. All of these services will adhere to CDC and NYS Health protocols including mask-wearing and social-distancing. At this point, we do not plan to add childcare to our services until the fall.

ABOUT THE INSIDE SERVICE: Following guidance from the CDC and NYS Health Department, the services inside our sanctuary this May will have a limit of 150 people. This will allow us to maintain social distancing and keep everyone safe. In our survey, 173 respondents indicated that they are ready to return now; 111 indicated that they anticipate being ready to return sometime late spring/early summer. We have struggled with how to maintain our commitment to being “open to all” while at the same time limiting the number of people who come on these four Sundays in May. In the end, we have settled on stepping out in faith. Here is our request: You are welcome to come to as many of the May services as you would like, but please recognize that it may be helpful to choose one or two so that we can ensure everyone who desires to be present will have an opportunity to worship inside the sanctuary this spring. If there are more than 150 people who come to one of the services in May, additional socially-distanced overflow seating will be provided in the fellowship hall for members to watch the service on a screen in community. The same guidelines will be followed as those in the sanctuary.

ABOUT THE OUTSIDE SERVICE: When we switch to outside services on Memorial Day weekend (5/30), we will not be restricted by the same size limitations. However, this means that we will need to keep the outdoor service weather-permitting-only. We will work out a system for notification if that outdoor service is cancelled (likely to include an email, a statement on our website, and an opt-in text option); a general rule will be that if it is raining, we will not hold the 9 am outdoor service that day. While we will have some chairs available for those who might need them, we strongly encourage folks to bring their own blankets and/or lawn chairs for the service.

May and Summer Schedule

MAY SCHEDULE: (5/2, 5/9, 5/16, 5/23)

• 9 am Service — In-person INSIDE (limit 150)
  • Request: We encourage those interested to choose one or two Sundays to attend.
• 11 am Service — Live-stream Only

SUMMER SCHEDULE: (5/30 through 9/5)

• 9 am Service — In-person OUTSIDE — Weather Permitting Only
• 11 am Service — Live-stream Only

We will have more information in the weeks to come about what you should expect during these services. In the meantime, I invite you to check this special FAQs page of our website by clicking here. We ask that you continue to keep our entire community in prayer as we find our way safely back together. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Grace and Peace,
The COVID-19 Re-Opening Task Force

Published: April 15, 2021

Survey Results and Re-opening Announcement this Sunday

Thank you to all who filled out the Return to In-Person Worship Survey! We received 442 responses, which provided crucial data for our COVID-19 Re-Opening Task Force. We plan to make an announcement this Sunday about our plan for re-opening for in-person worship. Please plan to tune in to our service on Sunday for more details. In the meantime, here are some of the key takeaways from the survey:

1. Most people are not yet ready to come back.
   • A strong minority (39%) said that they are ready to come back now.
2. Most people will be ready soon.
   • Nearly 2/3 (64%) of our congregation are either ready to return now (39%) or believe that they will be ready by late spring/early summer (25%).
   • More than 1/3 (34%) are either unsure or do not think they will be ready until late summer/early fall.
3. At this time, people prefer an outdoor worship service to an indoor service.
   • Just over half of respondents (54%) are likely to return for indoor services, whereas two thirds (66%) are likely to return for an outdoor service.
4. People are anxious about the safety of the community.
   • Rise of COVID variants (27%), unknown vaccination status of others (26%), and difficulty of social distancing (23%) were the three largest areas of concern.
5. Virtual church is here to stay.
   • 58% of people reported that they plan to worship through the livestream either exclusively (18%) or alternating with in-person worship (40%).
   • Fortunately, we plan to continue the livestream even after we re-open fully!

Published: April 8, 2021

Help us get back to in-person worship by filling out a brief survey!

We have just held our second virtual Easter, and many are wondering when we will be able to celebrate the resurrection in person and in our sanctuary. Soon—we hope.

As we continue to plan for our return, we would love to have each of you complete a brief 7-question survey. Your responses will help us do our best to remain open to all as we love, live, serve, and repeat!

All are encouraged to participate in this survey, whether or not you ever intend to join us for in-person worship.

We are thankful to each of you for your continued support throughout this past year. And for those that may never enter the doors of our sanctuary, we look forward to continuing to connect with you through our streaming services and various virtual small groups and opportunities. We truly are Better Together!

Sincerely,

The COVID-19 Re-Opening Task Force

Published: April 8, 2021

Thursdays starting April 22, 7-8:30 pm, Zoom, zoom.us/j/8347173468

Enrich your Eastertide/Springtime by joining Rev. Kathy Thiel and me, Claude Adair, in an insight practice group that will explore the book The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See by Fr. Richard Rohr. We're calling it an 'insight practice group' because our time together will be a mixture of discussion and contemplative practices all geared to building a safe community and opening our hearts and minds to new insights about the word so central to our faith and to reality itself; Christ.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org), teacher, internationally recognized author, and spiritual leader. Of his many books, The Universal Christ, which came out in 2019, is thought to be his most important. Fr. Richard teaches primarily on incarnational mysticism, nondual consciousness, and contemplation, with a particular emphasis on how these affect the social justice issues of our time.

In the foreword to the book Rohr asks, "What if Christ is a name for the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe? What if Christ is a name for the immense spaciousness of all true Love? What if Christ refers to an infinite horizon that pulls us from within and pulls us forward too? What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness." No doubt there will plenty of challenging ideas and associated feelings that come up to give us all a chance to stretch and grow together.

This weekly, 90 minute session on Thursday evenings at 7 pm will run for eight weeks starting April 22 via Zoom. The book is available to order on Amazon, and if you need a copy, please contact Kathy at (585) 271-1050 x106, or kthiel@asburyfirst.org. Please do your best to read the Introduction and the first two chapters for our first session.