Report on Sunday, Jan. 2
Looking Ahead
Community Concerns
The Church Door
Report on Sunday, Jan. 2
It was a painfully cold day outside but we started 2011 with an excellent worship experience inside! We had 64 folks here and received an offering of $3751.14. We have also collected quite a bit of food for Crosslines and additional donations of $160 towards food purchases. Again, many thanks to Rob Martin for taking over our website management. If you miss a sermon or newsletter just visit our website at www.spfccc.org.
Looking Ahead
This week and every week unless otherwise noted we'll have the Pastor's Cabinet meeting in the conference room on Tuesday at 4 p.m.
Our musicians meet in the sanctuary on Wednesday evenings to rehearse and plan future music selections.
On Thursdays we provide lunch for the homeless at Bill's Place and we are host an A.A. meeting in our conference room at 5:30 p.m.
Sunday, Jan. 9 - Col. Ron Hertenstein will be presenting in our 9:15 a.m. class on transactional analysis. Our worship leader in the 10:30 service will be Jeremiah Moorhead, one of the case managers from Bill's Place.
Monday, Jan. 10 - Our volunteers will be serving commodities at Crosslines from 8:15 a.m. until 1:30 p.m.
Tuesday, Jan. 11 - An execution vigil will be held at the cathedral with a candle light vigil on the front steps on Jefferson St. at 6:30 p.m. and a prayer vigil in the chapel at 7 p.m.
Sundays, Jan. 16, 23 and 30 - We welcome Dr. Charles Hedrick back to our sanctuary to lecture in the 9:15 class from a recent Jesus Seminar in which he spoke to the topic of Jesus as a wisdom teacher.
Community Concerns
We continue to be prayerfully concerned for Dan McKenzie and Jim Starkey, both of whom are receiving chemo treatments and are convalescing in their homes. I know that an occasional sharing of some home made treats lets them and their families know that they are being remembered.
The Church Door
Launching into a new year, I spent some time in conversation with the pastoral cabinet last week about how we can best support the church's growth in the coming year. Finding new members of the church is always a challenge in this rather religiously conservative area but an equally challenging dilemma is the whole matter of retaining the folks we have.
It is, sadly, very easy to leave a new church because no one has very deep roots in the community. Most of our members were not active in any church prior to coming to ours and it is very easy to return to the church of the Sunday paper or weekends on the lake.
In answer to the question of how to grow deeper, more committed relationships among our church members our cabinet had several ideas but most of them could come under a single heading of: We need to have more fun.
Because we are committed to being a church which addresses both social justice and the inconvenient truths of our society we can come off as being rather "heavy" and as being always very serious. In fact, I am aware that I have often been guilty of being so intense about the topics which seem important to me that it becomes rather telling that I'm not taking much time off to pursue such fundamentals of life as joy, health, entertainment and happiness.
Like millions of other people at this time of year, I am making a new resolution to eat better and exercise more. But I am also going to make it a point to schedule time for building friendships and having more fun. My friend, Andrea Zamora, and I have decided that Monday evenings, when a Celtic band plays at Galloway Station, that we are going to try to be there from 7 till 9 every week. We invite anyone else from our community who wants to engage in friendly conversation in a really hole-in-the-wall smoky bar to join us.
I also want to encourage more group dinners among members, at church or at our homes. I would also love to participate in a regular book or movie discussion..... something which would, perhaps, be less formal than the classes we offer at church in which five or six or a dozen people meet in someone's home to watch and discuss an important movie or discuss a new book.
Others suggested more "get to know you" events at church.... something like a "speed dating" arrangement where we have a series of short "interviews" with other members in order to get to know them.
While I think it is great that we have both many young families and many seniors and I do not want to segregate our community based on age (or anything else) it may be that there are some really important social connections to be made by people who are in similar stages of life. People with pre-school children really need the support of other parents with kids and people who are retired often have time and social needs which are unique to their situations.
What ideas do you have that you would like for me to share with our cabinet at our meeting tomorrow afternoon? And if I put out a sign up sheet for another round of Dinners For 8 to be hosted in member homes, how many of you would like to participate?
Let me hear from you.
