Meet The Miller Family!

This week we have the joy of sharing another “new Attendee” within Savior’s community. If you haven’t already met The Miller family, join me in getting to know them! 

Who is in your family (children, pets, etc.)?  
• Parents: Matthew and Becky
• Five kids: Katherine (14), Joshua (12), Estel (9), Providence (7), and Iunia (5) (pronounced Yoo-nee-uh, it's the Latin spelling of the female apostle Junia in Romans 16)
• Pets: Two Bengal cat brothers, Bugaboo and Bungalow

Where do you live? Where are you originally from?
We have lived in Wheaton for two and a half months. We moved here from Maastricht, Netherlands, where we lived for the past eight years. Becky was serving on the pastoral staff at an international church, and Matthew was a managing partner at an analytics consultancy. Our two youngest kids were born at home in Maastricht. Before that, we lived in Rhode Island, where Matthew grew up. Becky grew up all over the globe as a military kid. 

Are you related to anyone at Savior?
Matthew is Fr. Kevin Miller’s nephew! Mtr. Karen has been Becky's pastoral leadership coach for the past three years. Getting to live near them was one of the reasons we moved to Wheaton.

How long have you been coming to Church of the Savior?
Becky visited the church while staying with the Millers during her annual week-long intensive courses at Northern Seminary for the past few years. We've been attending the Zoom services as a family since we moved here (and we popped in a few times to the Facebook broadcast while still living in the Netherlands).

In your time at Savior so far, what have you enjoyed most? 
This is a big tradition transition for our family—we've never been part of a liturgical church before. During the first service we participated in on Zoom, one of our kids asked, "Why does church have a script?"

We have really enjoyed the sermons and the variety of preachers who have shared messages. This is something unique about Savior that we would love to see more churches emulate. We also love the focus on social justice, gender equity, and anti-racism. It's important to us that our kids grow up seeing women in church leadership to set an example for them.

What are some fun and entertaining ways your children have participated in the church services?
They mostly use the living room furniture as a jungle gym while we're trying to participate in the service. Their favorite parts of the service are any times that Pastor Esther’s daughter is on the screen and when other members include their pets.

What do you do when your family is not at church? (Job, hobbies, etc.)
Matthew works for Salesforce as a product manager and is adjusting to working from home after spending the last 12+ years traveling extensively for work. He loves coffee and cycling and awful puns, and he wishes he had more time to play guitar and write songs. 

Becky just finished her master's in New Testament and is working on a book on Jesus's emotions. She enjoys reading, cooking, interior design, and discussing Biblical interpretation.

All the kids love reading and are thrilled with the Wheaton Library because it's full of English books! (Our library in the Netherlands had only a small selection of English books, though the kids are also fluent in Dutch.) We love riding our bikes and brought 16 bicycles in our shipping container. We have made it our family mission to visit every playground in the Wheaton area. The kids can't wait to go back to in-person school and make friends. They have had so much fun at the church picnics and bonfire.

What has been a surprising gift to your family during this time of COVID? And what don’t you want to return to “normal”?
Matthew getting to be home instead of traveling constantly is a nice change. This is the first time our family has been able to create consistent rhythms and routines.

Better public health measures like masks, frequent sanitation, and regular handwashing have made a big difference to us. We used to get sick all the time with the kids bringing home germs from school (one child horrified us by explaining the game of "Lick Tag" they played), but now we haven't had colds or stomach bugs in seven months. We hope to carry better public hygiene habits forward with us.

Worship Seminar

Have you been wanting to know more about worship? We are excited to present a short, 4-part video seminar on worship, taught by Pastor Esther.

Part 1: What is Worship

Part 2: What is True Worship and What is False Worship?

Part 3: Why do we do what do we do in our worship service?

Part 4: Are All Worship Songs Good for the Church to Sing?

Christ Our Peace - Church Plant Update

Deacon Sandy Richter shares with us what the last 9 months have looked like, as she and Ian have followed the Lord’s calling on their life.

When a small group of us began meeting in January 2020 to dream and pray about a new church in Oak Park, we had no idea what the next few months would hold. We gathered around the idea that God was at work in Oak Park and seemed to be stirring our hearts to join him. Looking back 9 months later, so much has shifted and changed, but that conviction has remained.

Here’s how we have seen God at work over these past few months...

Building Our Team

We now have 11 adults and 8 children as part of our core team. After meeting a couple of times in person before the lockdown, we decided to move ahead with meeting weekly via Zoom. What at first seemed an unfortunate necessity showed itself to be an unexpected gift. Our schedules were all clearer, our hearts more open to God and one another; and it was a relief to work together on something constructive in the midst of so much uncertainty and loss. 

Clarifying Our Vision

Over the summer, individuals on our team faced various personal hardships and together we grieved over the loss of Amaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other black image bearers. Through this collective grief, God knit our team together and further crystallized the desire for our church to embody the values of: Spirit-led hospitality, vulnerability, truth telling, and a commitment to racial justice. 

Out of this came our new name--Christ Our Peace Anglican Church. Christ’s Peace is what creates hospitality; frees us to tell the truth about ourselves, God and our world; and opens the way to eternal peace through reconciling us to God and one another. 

The Call to Racial Justice

A few things are clear to us:

1. The Church, and in particular the white church, has often served to perpetuate rather than overcome racism within our country. One result of this is that the American Church is largely segregated.

2. Oak Park is a multiethnic, multiracial village and our desire is that our church would reflect this diversity.

We believe we are called in this season to examine ourselves, to repent of our racial malformation and be led by the Spirit to new internal and external expressions of his love and justice in Oak Park.

What we don’t know is where God is taking us. In the next few months, as our all-white core team works through books like White Awake and curriculum like Be the Bridge 101, we are also praying for a black pastor to join our staff and persons of color to join our team. If this is going to be a multiethnic church, it is imperative that this early work of vision and gathering be done in a multiethnic culture of mutuality and togetherness.

At the same time, we’ve heard many stories of how multiethnic churches have been a source of further wounding rather than healing for persons of color, and we strongly believe in the power of minority churches to create safe places for kingdom work, healing and restoration. How our dreams and convictions fit into all of this, we still aren’t sure. We are holding these questions before God and waiting to see where he will lead.

Christ Our Peace and Our Hope

Early on in our time together, a wise mentor called to share with our team a word he had received when in prayer for us. You may think, he said, that this is a strange time to build a church, with so much uncertainty and so many limitations, but the reality is, this is the perfect time. You will join Moses, Esther, Elisha, Mary, Peter and so many others who heard God’s call but had no idea how he would lead them. You will see from the beginning that this is truly a work of God. 

That really is our only hope: It is Christ who builds his Church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it. (Matthew 16:18)

People Who Stood Up - by Ted Olsen

Note from Fr. Kevin: In my recent sermon on “Community,” I said that “justice requires a community” and mentioned one such community: the historic church, where many people stood up for justice. Helping us meet some of these people is Senior Warden Ted Olsen, who once served as an editor of Christian History magazine.

By Ted Olsen:

Memorable pioneers for racial justice include Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and John Woolman. Or meet Jarena Lee, the first African-American woman to preach the gospel publicly.

Further back, meet Gregory of Nyssa, St. Patrick, Bartolomé de las Casas (big asterisk, of course, but still), and the abolitionists George Bourne (not well known, but as an editor and writer I’m a fan) and Thomas Clarkson. I also love Quaker radical Benjamin Lay (though I expect he’d be as critical of me as he was of everyone else!).

William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect have received a lot of attention in recent years for their work against the slave trade and other injustices. I'm a big fan, too. But I am eager to remember that their efforts were imperfect and troubled. I don't find that discouraging but rather encouraging — even our heroes had trouble and faltered when it came to pursuing righteousness and justice. Nevertheless, they persisted.

But I'm most eager to emphasize the work of Black Christians who pursued justice. Some of those names: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Nick Chiles (he was a new one for me), Henry McNeal Turner, and African Methodist Episcopal Church founders Absalom Jones and Richard Allen. Finally, I’ve been coming back time and again to the sermons of Francis J. Grimke, the Presbyterian preacher who helped to found the NAACP. 

Church of the Savior
Senior Warden

Prayer Support For The Saavedra Family

This week we lift up the dear Saavedra Family in our prayers. The Saavedra’s first came to Church of the Savior in Fall 2019, while on furlough from the mission field in Quito, Ecuador.

The Saavedra family has lived as missionaries in Quito, Ecuador since 2007, with David working in education and Beth in the local church. We are grateful our furlough in the U.S. connected us to Savior, where we have found encouragement and rest. We invite the friends of the Savior to join us in prayer for Ecuador, which has been hard hit by Covid-19. 

Infections and fatalities are especially high among indigenous people groups, many of whom live in remote areas with limited access to medical care. Please pray with us for our friend, Pastor Manuel Chacaguasay, and his family, who work with Kichwa pastors, as well as running a holistic children’s drop-in center.

Another vulnerable population in Ecuador is Venezuelan refugees, many of whom have had no way to earn income during these months of quarantine. Our church in Quito has a large number of Venezuelans. We ask for prayer for Oscar and Camila Palma, our pastors, as they work in food distribution and providing social and spiritual support for the community.    

Finally, we ask for prayer for our school, Alliance Academy International, where David is currently teaching high school Bible. May community be built and spiritual growth happen, in the midst of the challenge of adapting to the required online format for all schools in Quito. 

For those who want to learn more about the Saavedra Family or to support their ministry, please visit here.