Creator's Pentecost Potluck and This Year's Thanksgiving Litany

During the potluck celebration, Creator shared a Thanksgiving Litany. The words touched on Creator's continuing land story which was both interpreted and celebrated in light of the mortgage burning, land stewardship practices, and spoken, sacred memory.

This community's journey over the years was reflected in the litany. We began by honoring Indigenous stewards of the land. We then remembered that we founded a mission congregation. We built and maintained a sacred space through financial and spiritual investment. This has been a layered story of stewardship. Paying off the mortgage isn’t just about financial responsibility; it symbolizes trust in God’s abundance and a faithfulness to one another and to future generations.

The land is not just a resource but rather expresses a relationship. And when selling land was necessary through the years, it was not viewed as a mark of loss, but of wise and prayerful discernment. The congregation always balanced care for this physical place and Creator's ministry with responsiveness to changing circumstances. The question going forward now becomes: How does this legacy of care shape the way we steward our property and resources for the next season of Creator’s life?

Testimonies of past pastors praised Creator's legacy of bold, Spirit-led risks such as founding a church in a growing suburb, riding a scooter door-to-door, building a worship space with Mission Builders, becoming Reconciling in Christ, sponsoring a refugee family, grounding the community in deep scripture study, and now committing to a radical love of neighbor and world.

The land has held these risks with this congregation. It has witnessed their unfolding. Now, with the mortgage paid, we dream again. What new risks are there to take in the name of love, inclusion, and justice?

The litany honored Indigenous peoples and church founders, linking past spiritual legacies. That connection is profound. Creator's land story is not merely institutional history; it’s held as sacred memory. The footsteps of Indigenous caretakers, early church planters, and refugee families all echo together on this ground. We walk now in their shadow and their light. So the question is not how we have thought about it in the past, "What is next for our property?" but rather, "How do we deepen our relationship with this sacred place?"

The litany had a refrain, “May your vision continue on” which pointed to something powerful: our land story is not a closed book. It’s a living testimony. Paying off the mortgage is not simply finishing a chapter; we are opening a new one.

Creator Lutheran has become a place of healing for the land and a neighbor-loving tool with a new garden open and established to be worked and harvested for neighborhood food distribution.

The land acknowledgment in today's litany will never be a closing gesture; it’s rather an opening invitation. Now that the church owns the land outright, our responsibility deepens. We become involved in a longer, more difficult and faithful conversation about land justice.

Creator's ongoing land story is a story of faithfulness, transformation, and hope rooted in place. With the mortgage now burned and the Spirit still stirring, our community is uniquely positioned to ask: How will we tell the next chapter of God’s story—here, on this land, among these people, in this time?

Pastor Melissa Reed closed this portion of the potluck by leading us in new visioning around that question  Certainly, the answer will come, not all at once, not perfectly, but in faithful steps, sacred conversations, and bold acts of love.