The Silver Lake Camp & Retreat Center will present it's annual Silver Lake Award and recognize a volunteer of the year at the annual Award Celebration on Oct. 6.

The Silver Lake Award is going to Rev. Molly Baskette, current pastor of First Church Berkeley UCC in California who previously served in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Dan Jakubiak will be honored as Volunteer of the Year, a new award this year being presented to someone who has "demonstrated extraordinary action-oriented commitment to Silver Lake Camp and Retreat Center and its missions and people."

The celebration and auction is being held Sunday, Oct. 6, at the Hollow at Manchester Country Club in Manchester, CT.

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Rev. Molly Baskette, co-senior minister of First Church Berkeley UCC, writes:

I thought it was my idea–but I was wrong. It was already happening quietly in my church’s pews. People were seeking out psychedelics for healing from PTSD, depression and anxiety–or to experience spiritual growth and more intimate communication with God.

Every once in a while, God whispers in my ear. This time, God put me on blast. “This is what you are going to go learn about next–to help the people in your care who have tried everything and still haven’t found relief.”  

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Rev. Carol Steinbrecher, Area Conference Minister for the North Central Region, writes:

We, as a nation, and as a world, are facing a multitude of critical problems.  Over 50 years ago, in his final sermon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.  That is where we are today.”
 
That is where we STILL are today.  

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Dan Smolnik, a member of Spring Glen Church in Hamden, CT, writes:

Transparency is a word currently more often assigned to human character than it is to inanimate objects. “Window” and “transparent” are so interchangeable that any window not fully transparent is allocated special architectural descriptors, such as stained glass or glass block.

The same quality in people is, in contrast, typically followed by a period when described in the written word. A person’s quality of transparency needs, and typically receives, no further explication ... This valued quality, however, gets no literary treatment in the Bible. The abstraction of transparency had no place to anchor in the physical world of the times.

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Registration for Online Attendance is open until Sept. 11.
Justice Summit: Politics as an Act of Faith
Sept. 14, 8 AM to 5 PM
Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT
This day-long program will equip local church leaders, both lay and clergy, to engage with politics as people of faith.

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