Author: Daniel Ross-Jones

by Rev. Dr. Diane Weible I have a favor to ask of the members of our Beloved NCNC Churches. You may have seen the announcement for a Coach Training event we are doing May 13-19. This training will offer participants the 63 classroom hours they need to be certified as a Level 1 coach with the International Coaching Federation. Once the classroom hours are complete, they will need to log coaching hours in order to request credentialing but the classroom hours themselves are the most intense part of the process. A few of our NCNC Authorized Ministers have been selected…

by Conference Minister Diane Weible If you are signed up to receive emails from Valarie Kaur, as I am, you may have already seen this video, which she sent on Valentine’s Day. Her book, “See No Stranger” is the book that the Conference Council is reading right now. Her movement, “Revolutionary Love,” is something that inspires me every day. In her email on Tuesday she offered this quote, “Love is sweet labor—fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving. When we labor in love in a time of rage, love becomes revolutionary.” One of her primary concepts is about the importance of stories.…

Editor's note: this week's Let's Talk is a column published by the Minnesota Conference Minister, the Rev. Shari Prestemon, and shared with her Conference on February 2, 2022. In our Northern California Nevada Conference, we have invested in training and equipping a team of legacy coaches who are individuals ready to assist with creating healthy, vibrant spaces for exploring church legacy, resourcing lay and clergy leaders to make difficult and life-giving decisions about their church's legacy. You are encouraged to reach out to Associate Conference Minister Daniel Ross-Jones to learn more or to be connected with a legacy coach. "Carve your…

by Conference Minister Diane Weible I’m going to keep it short today because what I have to say feels obvious for those of us who wholly embrace the values of the UCC and, yet, it has become even more obvious to me that there can never be too many reminders. Sometimes the best reminder is served short and to the point. My biggest issue with Black History Month is the word month. Why do we think that delegating the importance of black history to one month out of twelve is the way to change the dominant cultural waters we all…

by Conference Minister Diane Weible I told this story a number of years ago and am sharing it again because I was reminded of it during a lunch with a friend and it really is relevant for these days. When we ended our work as mission co-workers in Japan and moved to Hawai’i, my husband was serving a predominantly Japanese-American Church on O’ahu. Our first Easter at the church included breakfast and that breakfast included rice. After breakfast and before worship, as I walked by the kitchen, I saw a number of women standing around a table forming musubi with…

by Rev. Dr. Diane Weible, Conference Minister It is good to be back with all of you. My sabbatical was wonderful and gave me a chance to do two things that have been transformative for me: visiting family and friends and finding time to reflect. Visiting my children, my parents, and treasured friends was wonderful and included many sacred moments that I will hold for a very long time. The second, a time to reflect, however, is the accomplishment that surprised me. I finally had the space to work on the kind of mindfulness practice I have wanted to create…

As with everyone, the economic impacts of inflation have been near the front of my mind for some months now. In a very particular way this was felt in relationship to the housing market: my husband and I bought our home in pre-pandemic 2020 and my parents recently bought a new home a couple zip codes away from us in late-stage pandemic 2021. The inflation of housing prices in the intervening 18 months has been astounding, even by California standards. I notice it in our monthly expenses, in the price for our groceries and other consumables. I’ve seen the uptick…

I’ve confessed to you in the past that I’m a chronic planner. My natural orientation is toward the future, readying and planning and strategizing my way into some new reality. This past weekend, I read a wonderful piece by Elizabeth Weil that introduced me to some new language for the present time, and the challenge of being “native to now.” (Pastoral content advisory: the article focuses on wildfire, and includes reflections on the Oakland, Wine Country, Camp, Tamarack, and Caldor Fires.) In this present moment, as a series of ongoing and interconnected crises, we humans are doing what we humans…

I’m thinking today of a comic one of my seminary professors shared with our class years ago. It was illustrating the trajectory of Jesus’s life through the biblical narrative in just four or five frames. I don’t remember the exact words, but I do remember the gist of the punchline: asking what Mary and Joseph were hiding about Jesus in the oh-too-simple verse from Luke 2:40: “The child grew up and became strong. He was filled with wisdom, and God’s favor was on him.” For sure, that’s a lot of heavy lifting for that passage. It’s summarizing a period of…