Bothell Amplified

This week, we welcomed Dr. Cee E. Adamson for a conversation with Pastor Joe on the theme of Freedom. How does God's liberating work continue on in us and through us, especially as we honor Pride and Juneteenth? 

This week we celebrate Pentecost! Turning to Acts 2:1-21, Pastor Joe challenges us to remember that Pentecost resists sameness and amplifies difference so that all might be celebrated and welcomed into God's community of belonging. 

This week, Pastor Joe wraps up our series on Gathering and Belonging by turning to the story of Paul and Silas in the prison in Acts 16:16-34. In his sermon, he challenges us to be and to bring the Good News of a God who is love, which means to combat the thousands of years of narrative and culture that has told us that God's love comes with conditions. If we are silent, who will share that Good News?

This week, we welcome the Rev. Liz Kearny from Liberating Lineages Collective as she continues our Gathering and Belonging series by turning to Lydia's story in Acts 16:9-15. In her sermon, she challenges us to finally embrace that the good news isn't just for someone else, but for us, too, and to understand that when we commit the entirety of our lives to solidarity with the most oppressed, we are all made more free.

This week, Pastor Joe continues our sermon series on Gathering and Belonging by turning to Peter retelling his experiences before the believers in Jerusalem. In this sermon, he reminds us that it is often institutionalized religion that hinders the movement of the Spirit, and that we are called to recognize that belonging begins with God, with the Spirit, and with the grace that arrives before we expect it. 

This week, we begin a new sermon series called "Gathering and Belonging" as Pastor Kristin challenges us to read the story of God's people, and especially this text of Tabitha being resurrected, as one of inclusion and belonging! 

This week, Pastor Joe continues in the series, Post-Resurrection Stories, by turning to when Jesus met the disciples on the beach. In this sermon, he reminds us to remember who we are by trusting in a therapeutic God who desires relationship with us and challenges us to tend God's people in community. 

This week, Pastor Joe shares about the disciples' experience of encountering Jesus soon after the Resurrection and challenges us to be resurrected people, not about certainty or lack of doubt, but about belief that is relationship. In a world built on fear and division, how might our faith be one that reaches out, even when it's scary? 

Happy Easter! This week, Pastor Joe reminds us that Easter is a call to resistance against empire. He challenges us to find intentionally rest and to remember the ways of Jesus for the sake of the kin-dom.

This week, Pastor Joe continues to focus on resistance as a theme for Lent as we journey with Jesus into Jerusalem on what is known as Palm Sunday. He challenges us to take a side: to either align with power and empire or to follow Christ into a new way of love, justice, and communal courage. 

This week, Pastor Joe continues our Lenten Journey with Jesus and the theme of resistance by turning to John 12:1-8 when Mary anoints Jesus. He suggests that much of this text is intended to be subversive and challenges us to resist the ways of the world and live in a different way!

This week, we continue our Lent series, Journeying with Jesus, by turning to what is often called the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Pastor Joe offers that this text is more for religious folk, and could be named, as others have suggested, the Parable of the Elder Son or the Parable of the Forgiving Father. Check out how this text encourages us into resistance through this season of Lent. 

This week, our Director of Discipleship and Care, Brian Fu, continues our Lent Journey with Jesus by challenging us to understand repentance and resistance as a turning our face to God and to one another. 

This week, we welcome the Rev. Ben Bond from Disability Belongs who preaches from Luke 5:17-26. In their sermon, Ben challenges us to do the hard work of both removing physically barriers to accessibility and to shift our attitudes towards disabilities. 

This week, we celebrate the first Sunday in Lent and turn to the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. Pastor Joe challenges us to journey through this season as a time of resistance against the powers of empire and to offer to the world a different way that leads to peace and justice. 

This week at Bothell, we are joined by our friend Reverend David Valera, Executive Director of Connectional Ministries of the Pacific Northwest Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Reverend Valera preaches from Luke 9:28-36.

This week, Pastor Joe wraps up our sermon series called Upside Down Economy by turning to the Psalms and exploring the things the psalmist calls us to do, built on a relationship with God! 

This week, we launch a new series called Upside Down Economy. Pastor Joe preaches from Luke 6:17-26 as Jesus teaches from the plains a new way of living, one that challenges the ways of the world!

This week, Pastor Joe wraps up our short two-week series about Calling, challenging us to remember that while calling is a personal matter, the expression of that calling only happens in community to challenge the status quo as we journey towards God's preferred future. 

This week, we welcome one of our Pastoral Interns, Steph Cuthbertson, who shared from Jeremiah 1:4-10. Together, we navigated four myths of calling and explored how each of us is called to bring peace and justice into the world!

This week, Pastor Joe concludes our four-week series called Living with Joy by turning to 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 and exploring how we might recognize God's unconditional love in each other. Ya'll means all and we need each other to survive!

This week, Pastor Joe continued our series Living with Joy and preached from John 2:1-11 and the wedding in Cana. In his message, he challenged us to live into the abundance of joy and to claim God's unconditional love for us and for our community!  

This week, Pastor Joe continues our series called Living with Joy, preaching from Luke 3:15-22. As he reflects on the baptism of Jesus, he challenges us to think of living with joy as an opportunity to connect to God in prayer to claim our own belovedness and to do it in community. 

In this episode, we launch a new sermon series called Living with Joy as we start the New Year looking to the Magi who came to worship Jesus! Preaching from Matthew 2:1-12, Pastor Joe challenges us to move away from certainty and to live into the mystery of our faith!

Join Pastor Joe and Pastor Kristin as they share on Colossians 3:12-17. They also reflect on 2024 and look forward to 2025!

On Christmas Eve, Pastor Joe reflected on how God encounters us through "holy interruptions." Perhaps the Good News for us in this season is that God is up to something in us and through us - may we lean into the mystery of what God is doing and live into the future without fear. 

This week, we welcome back to Bothell Angela Molloy, our former pastoral intern and now a student in Denver in the Iliff/DU Joint Doctoral Program. As we journey towards Christmas Eve, she challenges us to remember the "subversive and revolutionarily kind Mary" and how we can live into her call to active, justice-stirring love!

This week, our Director of Discipleship and Care, Brian Fu, shares on our relationship with material possessions and how that relates to joy! 

This week, we enter continue our journey through the season of Advent as we look to the fulfillment of hope, peace, joy, and love. Preaching from Luke 3:1-6, Pastor of Community Engagement, Rev. Kristin Joyner, challenges us to remember that the salvation that we yearn for is freedom from our separation from God. 

This week, we enter the season of Advent as we look to the fulfillment of hope, peace, joy, and love. Preaching from Luke 21:25-36, Pastor Joe challenges us to notice hope, to be hope for our communities, and to invite others to be that hope together!

This week, Pastor Joe closes out our Pledge Series reminding us to make sure our individual values align with the values of our church so that we can all move towards God's preferred future, together! Thanks to Michael King and Amber Cosand for sharing their story, and if you want to pledge to the ministries of this church, go to https://bothellumc.breezechms.com/form/2025-Pledge-Form.

This week, Pastor Joe launched a two-week sermon series centered around steward and the ways we are called to commit ourselves to love and community. Preaching from Hebrews 10:11-25, he challenges us to let go of the things of old while aligning our values so that we can move forward together!

This week, Pastor Joe challenges us to notice the systems that keep people down and our role in revolutionizing the world towards God's preferred future. Reflecting on Mark 12:38-44, he invites us to experience Jesus' words not as a celebration of the widow's giving, but rather a commentary on the system that has failed her. 

This week we celebrate All Saints Day and remember those  who shaped our lives, all the folks who have left something of themselves inside us. Turning to Ruth 1:1-18, Pastor Joe reminds us that all God's children are connected, through time and space, brought together by the Holy Spirit, and that the presence of each other's spirits, both the living and the dead, journeys with us in and through all the places God meets us.  

This week, we conclude our series and journey through Mark by turning to Mark 10:46-52 and we dive a little deeper into Liberation Theology and the work of Father Gustavo Gutierrez. Pastor Joe challenges us to focus on connection - with God, with our own community, and with the community beyond!

This week, Pastor Joe preaches from Mark 10:35-45 on the complex and beautiful relationship with greatness that James and John have, and how we might experience that greatness together by serving each other this week. 

This week, starting a new sermon series called Take Up Your Cross, Reverend Shalom Agtarap draws from Mark 10:17-31 and guides us through how we must let go of all that we have and search through the salvation of God. 

This week, we celebrated World Communion Sunday and turned to Mark 10:2-16. Pastor Joe looked to these teachings from Jesus and how we are challenged to live into right relationship with one another!

This week, Pastor Joe wraps up our sermon series, A Good Life, and turns to Esther. He looks at the ways we are called to claim identities as followers of Jesus so that we might live into God's preferred future.

This week, Pastor Joe continues our series, A Good Life, by turning to Proverbs 31 and inviting us to take on this well-known text as a way for all of us to embody the strength of the Proverbs 31 woman that resists the destructive powers of empire and violence, and instead build up community and life. 

This week, Pastor Joe continues our series, A Good Life, by turning to Proverbs 1 and challenging us to take on a posture that listens to Wisdom for the sake of the world. 

This week, Pastor Joe launches a new series called "A Good Life" as we learn from wisdom literature on how to live well. Today, he reflects on Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 alongside community members Reyna Quemado, Eric Trott, and Phyllis Murphy to share their stories on what it means to have a good name that connects what we do to why we do it to who God calls us to be. 

This week, Pastor Joe preaches from James 1:17-27 as we wrestle with what it means to follow a Good God and how we might live to embody that!

This week, Pastor Joe concludes our 7-week series journeying through Ephesians remind us that we are not called to be the saviors of the world, but rather to resist the systems that produce and legitimize rulers and the authorities who put power over people so that we can notice the workings of the Holy Spirit that unites us into Beloved Community. 

This week, Pastor Joe continues our journey through Ephesians. Drawing from the context of Ephesians and the movement of the Holy Spirit that unites, Pastor Joe challenges us to live as wise people, knowing the same Holy Spirit that was at work in Ephesus two-thousand years ago is still at work now, uniting us as a people daring to dream of a better world!

This week, we welcome our Pastoral Intern, Brian Fu, to continue our journey through Ephesians. He challenges us to posture ourselves in a way of forgiveness and love so that we might all experience the unity of the Spirit.

This week, Pastor Joe continues our journey through Ephesians by challenging us to live with gentleness and humility as we move towards Unity through the Spirit.

This week, Pastor Joe continues our series through Ephesians by looking to this four-part prayer that the author lifts up for the community. 

This week, we continue on in our journey through Ephesians as we turn to the author's declaration that Christ is our Peace. Together, we wonder how we might go against the empires of today and live into God's preferred future, breaking down the walls that divide us and choosing to accept a "permanent, positive peace". 

This week, we launched a 7-week series journeying through Ephesians under the theme, No Longer Strangers. Pastor Joe began the series looking at how God's belovedness includes all. Rather than allowing our faith and convictions to feel better than the other, perhaps the blessings God promises should inspire us to action in the midst of a broken world!

This week, we welcome the Methodist New Year and celebrate Pastor Joe and Pastor Kristin as they begin another year appointed at Bothell United Methodist Church! Pastor Joe preaches this sermon from Ezekiel 2:1-5 challenging us and inviting us to engage in a posture of humility as we listen for the ways God is speaking...