This semester, our group focused on service, community building, and meaningful engagement.

Each week, we hosted our Large Group community meals that included speakers, discussions, and documentaries on topics such as debunking the Rapture and digital minimalism. We participated in protests and attended vigils for Palestine, while also engaging in interfaith work. Wesley is now proud to host an interfaith dialogue open to everyone in the community each week.

Our efforts extended to collaborating with the Food For All, and raising money for children in Uganda.

We also connected with the broader community and welcomed new students through events such as Smore’s with S’Methodists and Farm Fest.

Service has been super active this semester!

We volunteered with dogs and cats at Gloucester Mathew’s Humane Society; helped run a book drive with W&M’s Pi Beta Phi; visited Spicy Kitchen Farm to learn about local sustainable agriculture and help out with some farm chores; and did a campus cleanup with W&M’s Dining Sustainability Team.

This coming exam week, we will also be running a “Share the Love” event to spread good vibes, pass out free snacks with encouraging notes, and advertise an optional donation for shoes for children in Uganda.

We are always looking for opportunities to give back to our community and make a difference! 

The Weekly Wire and Wesley’s Instagram have been going strong this semester! The GroupMe is even more active than ever.

It has been exciting to create new posts for each week that tie into each event, and I am always happy to see when a well-promoted event gets more attendance than usual.

I have also become much more involved with Worship this semester, leading the music along with Joslyn and Ryan - and acting as its promoter across platforms. 

This semester’s Small Group was a lot of fun!

We centered our discussions this semester around the book Convictions by Marcus J. Borg, a noted progressive theologian. We discussed the nuances of our faith, our path to who we are today, and our relationship with scripture at our weekly meetings. Oftentimes the book chapter provided a guide from which we made our own topics.

The community formed this semester was wonderfully insightful and invigorating. We had great conversations and got to engage in stress relief and fun in the form of frequent visits from my dog, Winslow. Deep relationships surrounded by joy, tangents, and occasionally defined by the topic at hand, were a defining part of the semester; we are all looking forward to seeing how Small Group will continue to develop!

This semester has been a blast!

We’ve played games, watched movies, done puzzles, and have had lots of s'mores, of course! Within the house, we sang karaoke and had a weekly game night to learn more about each other. We built a new fence for the garden with some elbow grease from Ryan Staggs.

Fall Break was very informative, learning about continued efforts against the strengthening of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Southwest Virginia. We saw the impact of the pipeline, basically a giant potential bomb laid across countless streams, apple orchards, and historic mountain towns. We learned about POWHR’s water monitoring and drone monitoring efforts while enjoying the peace of Alta Mons and connecting with VT Wesley.

We’ve gotten to celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving, and soon Christmas all together!