It is such a thrill for me to work next to an artist. Our community in McMinnville has been blessed in so many ways. I frequently point out how blessed we are to have so many people making such beautiful wines in this area. I believe wine acts as a sort of gravitational pull to other artists. This past Friday I got to work with one of them. Jason and Laurie Furch are another tremendous blessing to this place. They run Red Fox Bakery in town. They have seriously invested
themselves in that boutique bakery. They have also invested themselves in this community. Both Jason and Laurie are graduates of the Culinary Institute of America. Those are impressive credentials. And, they create amazing, hard crust, European style of baked art. 
The reason I was
The reason I was working with Jason was a new oven in town. It's called a cob oven and it is located at the McMinnville Public Market. The oven was created by John Mead and Carson Benner of Cellar Ridge Custom Homes. They built the oven as a demonstration project. Once it was completed, they placed it in the hands of Jason and Laurie and told them to use it for the good of the community. What a gift. I'm learning to use it
so that we can do fundraisers for various non-profit organizations that feed people, care for the environment, or seek to help those in need. Our own Occasional Quartet is going to do their CD release party there on Sunday, June 19th. The pizza will be amazing. I can say this because I won't be making it--Jason will! That's Jason in the photo above, talking to one of our cooks from the Cooperative Ministries, Efrain Arredondo.
Efrain told me that just last week he was walking through the market and was watching as bread was being baked in the cob oven, and he thought, "I'd love to be able to cook in that thing." The next day I told him we were going to meet with Jason and be trained on how to use it! Pretty exciting.
The person who made these connections for us was Elwyn Behnke. Elwyn is a member of our quartet and makes his living playing the piano. We were really struggling with where to hold our CD release party, and in a flash of insight Elwyn thought of the McMinnville Public Market. He contacted the manager of the Market, interior designer, Shannon Thorson. Shannon said that they had been looking for someone to help them coordinate the oven for community events, and would love to have us use it. When Cellar Ridge donated it to the Market, they basically said, here, we want you to use this for the public good.
What a gift, and we're just the people to make it work! Kelly McDonald who owns the properties of the Granary District where the cob oven is located has such a beautiful vision for that area, and for this oven. His investment is going to make for a beautiful entry point for the eastern edge of downtown. It is such a wonderful place to gather with folks from the community. I can just see a regular series of concerts with beautiful foods and wonderful wines being poured. You can get a foretaste of the vision next Sunday from 6-8. The gathering is free. Of course if you want to give us a donation for each piece of pizza, and every glass of wine, we won't stop you!
And you can purchase one of our CD's. It should be a great time. And if the weather is bad, Kelly has said we can use one of the buildings on Johnson Street. But it would never rain in Oregon the third week in June, right? It really doesn't matter because it's warm by the oven anyway.
Every Sunday we serve communion at the Cooperative Ministries, and we use the beautiful, artisan bread from Red Fox. It is so good. Some mornings it is still warm in my hands as I lift it up and give thanks to God for it's goodness. That's what Jesus did, and I believe that's what we should do--find beauty in this world, bless God for it and be thankful. Sometimes I think that's 99% of what God is expecting of us. It's just a lot easier to do in some places than in others.