Ha Na Park

My Message I offered at Celebration of Ministries Service of the Annual Meeting of the Conference of Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario (May 31, 2015) Sermon I guess by this time, you’ve got some idea about what kind of relationship Min-Goo and I have. As you may have well assumed, we are a couple, a quite loving couple, married in 2004. Our first son was born in 2006 in Korea. Since we moved to Canada, in 2007, we’ve shared an eight-year journey of studying, being ordained and working within the United Church of Canada. Our first two years of marriage, before we left Korea, started with life within a Korean church where Min Goo served as an assistant minister. During those two years, I was expected to play the role of the good, supportive wife of an ordained husband. I was reduced to being a silent angel, not telling anybody what I really thought or felt. I had become like the Moon which can only shine through reflected light. To be a good wife, I kept my inner Sun from blazing. The

Good morning. My name is Julia Antonyshyn. For a little background on me, I’ve been a part of the United Church my entire life and I have been a full member of St. Mary’s Road United Church since February 2014. In recent years, the church has become very important to me. I’ve become more and more involved in St. Mary’s Road United through our youth group and youth band and the opportunities that stem from that.  I’ve been blessed in attending numerous events for United Church youth, including Conference youth retreats, Rendezvous, which took place here in Winnipeg last August, and most recently the 42 nd General Council Youth Forum’s Winter Gathering in Paris, Ontario in February. If you want to hear more extensively about youth forum give me your email and I’ll send you the link to my Youtube video on that. There are two important things to take away from it: the sense of community and the comprehensive review. If you don’t already know, the Comprehensive Review is a series of

Sermon (on May 3rd, one week after the Confirmation/Baptism of 9 youth at United Church in Meadowood) Julia (Antonyshyn) gave us food for thought: "We, the youth, we have the chance to stand up and be that change, to build a sustainable and relevant united church IF… if we accept the fact that we are the church of today… not just tomorrow." Listening to Julia, I clearly hear the difference between “Those youth, you know, they’re really the future of our church” and “Our youth, they are really the present of our church.” Can you notice the difference?. How sad if we think that the youth don’t matter, ‘yet.’ Affirming our young people as the present of our church is to see, to acknowledge, that their time is  now, their influence is ongoing . How we see our youth, and how they perceive themselves makes a whole different reality. How we see – our perceptions – and how we speak – our choice of words – can create either new possibilities or deprive the Spirit o