Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCA)

401 Fifth Street North, Saint Petersburg, FL 33701

Phone: 727-822-3307 • Email: office@trinitylutheranstpete.org

Sunday Worship: 10 a.m.

We welcome all who come to our worship services.

Communion is open to all believers!

  Trinity is a “Reconciling in Christ” Congregation in the ELCA.  — Welcoming all people without regard to race, family or economic status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or differing abilities.

Come Join us this Sunday: Trinity Lutheran is located in the downtown area of Saint Petersburg, a block from the Coliseum and the Senior Center. Parking is available in three lots and on the street. VIEW MAPS

The Church Office is open Monday through Thursday 9:00 am – 3:00 p.m.

Our Mission at Trinity is very simple: Sharing Christ’s Love through Welcoming, Worshiping, Learning, and Serving. We take great joy and satisfaction in working within the community, and welcoming all who wish to worship with us.

Enjoy our member, Brendan Hall, performing the Prelude and Fugue in C Minor from Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” as he did at Trinity on the Third Sunday of Advent.

Confirmation Classes

Theyre not just for teenagers anymore

Trinity is offering Confirmation Classes for all ages.  The first unit of instruction is on the Bible, what’s in it and what Lutherans belive about it.  This unit will consist of nine sessions of instruction over the next three months; the first class will be on Thursday, April 26, beginning at 6:30 pm.  Contact the church for more information.

From Pastor Paul

As Jesus was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders and said to him, “Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?”

Luke 20: 1-2

So that I can courageously proclaim God’s will and God’s desires to the people who come to Trinity to hear the good news, I attended the 2018 “Festival of Homiletics” in Washington DC, May 21-25.  “Homiletics” is the science of preaching.  It asks why pastors preach and how they can best preach.  The Festival of Homiletics is an annual event that draws pastors from all over the US and Canada.

At this year’s festival, a word that came up a lot was “hermeneutics,” which is described as the lenses through which we read the Bible and try to understand the God who inspired its words.  What guides our interpretation and understanding?

Martin Luther is famous for saying “sola scriptura”–that the Bible should be our one and only tool for understanding God.  At the time, he was working against the corrupt influence of the traditions of the Roman Catholic church–traditions that had been elevated above the importance of even the Bible.

In the 1700s, the founder of the Methodist church, John Wesley, put forward his famous “quadrilateral,” the four things on which Christians should rely to have a healthy understanding of God.  The four points of the Wesleyan quadrilateral are scripture, tradition, reason, and experience.  Wesley encouraged a balanced use of the Bible and the traditions passed down to us over centuries of Christianity, plus the use of our God-given brains and the valuing of our life experience.

On the first evening of the Festival of Homiletics, the Roman Catholic monk and author Richard Rohr challenged his mostly Protestant audience of pastors to throw away the quadrilateral and start pedaling a tricycle.  His hermeneutical tricycle ignores reason, which holds too much power over us in the modern era and it has caused us to distrust our own life experience.

Rohr encourages us to make scripture and tradition the two stabilizing back wheels of our trike, and to let our life experience steer the vehicle to where it wants to go.  He reminded us that the apostle Paul had an experience of Jesus Christ with enough power to make him re-evaluate his religious scriptures and his religious tradition.

One of my jobs as a preacher is to empower you to trust your own experience of God; to help you understand that God does want to speak to you and be active in your life.  Luther advises us to rely upon our church family to keep us from going down any wrong paths on our own.  Rohr reminds us that there still is a role for our God-given brains.

We are to be reasonable about our use of scripture, of tradition, and, most of all, of experience.  We are to critique our own experience and our congregation can and should help us to do that.

May God give you a genuinely new experience of how much you are loved, an experience that compels you to share with others the good news that you have heard.

WEEKLY ACTIVITIES FOR OUR TRINITY FAMILY

Sunday 9:00 a.m Bible Study

Sunday Worship 10:00 a.m.

Tuesdays & Fridays 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Distribution at our Food Pantry

Wed 8:15 a.m. Men’s Breakfast @ Rae Rae’s

Wed 6:00 p.m.  Suppertime Study

Sat 8:00 a.m. Loaves & Fishes Breakfast for the community