Starting Sunday, September 13, Social Holiness is a seven-week sermon series exploring the United Methodist Church's Social Principles: what faith looks like when it meets real life.

About the series

The Social Principles aren't abstract theological musings. They're a wrestling match with the questions that keep us up at night: How do we care for creation while living in an economy built on consumption? What do we owe our neighbors, the poor, the incarcerated, the aging, the newly arrived? And how do we hold onto conviction while extending grace to those who see things differently?

John Wesley's fingerprints are throughout, especially his insistence that faith without action toward "the least of these" isn't faith at all.

Expect honest conversation, not easy answers. The series doesn't shy away from the hard stuff: war and peace, criminal justice, immigration, end-of-life care, the tangled legacy of colonialism. It asks us to bring our whole selves: our doubts, our disagreements, our hope that the church can still say something meaningful about how we live together.

The first two Sundays set the historical and theological stage. The five that follow dig into the Social Principles and the Book of Resolutions, the UMC's collection of official policy statements. Whether you've been Methodist your whole life or you're curious what a 2,000-year-old faith has to say about 21st-century problems, there's a seat for you.

Ways to engage

• Join a small group. A parallel six-week study on the Social Principles runs September 20 through October 25. If your group is participating, your leader already has the schedule. Email to get connected to a small group.
• Read on your own. Instructions for following along independently will run in the weekly newsletter each week the study is underway.
• Just listen. Skip the reading and take in the sermon each week. You'll still get the highlights.