11/21/2018 November 21st, 2018Happy Thanksgiving!As we celebrate Thanksgiving this week, I give thanks to God for each and every one of you! As you spend time with friends and family around the table this week, I want to share this ancient Celtic prayer of blessing for you: Bless this house and those within. Bless our giving and receiving. Bless our words and conversation. Bless our hands and recreation. Bless our sowing and our growing. Bless our coming and our going. Bless all who enter and depart. Bless this house, your peace impart. Blessings on the journey, Jim Sunday's Sermon SnippetPromises to God - Service (1 John 3:6-18) As we continue to explore the vow we make to participate faithfully in the ministries of the church, we turn our attention to service. To serve means to do something for the benefit or on behalf of another. In the church, we think of service not only as helping others but also as worshipping God. This connection is noted by a theologian who saw worship and service as two sides of the same coin. Worship is what we do for God because we need to do for our own sake, while service is what we do for God because God wants it done. Service in the faith sense is running God's errands. In this sense, service is something we do for the benefit of others and on behalf of God. So how do we faithfully participate in ministry through our service? In his first letter, John encourages us to love not with words and speech but with actions and in truth. Love is at the root of service. When we serve, we love both God and neighbor. John says, however, that love expressed only in words and speech is not enough. To see someone in need and not to have compassion in action is to not have the love of God within us. This echoes James's claim that faith with works is dead. "I love you. God bless you. I will pray for you." These words are meaningless if not matched by loving deeds. To be faithful, we need to go beyond mere words and begin to act. John goes a step further and says that we are to love in truth. This is an odd phrase - "love... in truth." Truth here is not a set of facts but a state of being, much like being in love is not just a feeling but a state of being that changes everything about us. What is truth? This is a question we might ask today when the truth of everything is called into question. Of course, this is also an ancient question even asked by Pilate as he interrogated Jesus. Paul gives us an answer here: the truth in which we are to live and love is that Jesus Christ laid down his life for us and we should in turn lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. This is what it means to be faithful in service. God calls us to love with actions and in truth. This is a love that costs something - a love that may be free but certainly is not cheap. This is a love that breaks our heart and requires a sacrifice. This is a love that causes us to have many tears and yet promises us that the day will come when God will wipe away our tears with a tender hand. Love with actions and in truth - this is how we live out our vow to faithfully participate in ministry through our service! Living in CommunityThank you to everyone who made this fall session of Wednesday at the Port possible! Cooks, servers, cleaners, teachers, bus drivers and riders, thank you! This Week at Port ChurchMonday, November 19 9:00 - 11:45 am - Office Hours Wednesday & Thursday, November 21-22 Office Closed Happy Thanksgiving! Sunday, November 25 9:30 am - Worship: Promises to God - Witness 11:00 am - Sunday School Looking AheadPoinsettia Order Deadline - December 9
Drive-thru Nativity - December 14 & 15, 7-9 pm Christmas Cantata - December 23, 7 pm 11/14/2018 November 14th, 2018That Pastor ThingAs we were travelling to Georgia over fall break a couple of weeks ago, we approached everyone's favorite part of a trip: making our way through the airport security line. Before we could go through the scanners, we had to show our IDs to an agent at the entrance. Courtney had made it through with one of our sons, and I stepped forward with our other son. As we offered the agent our IDs, I said in a cheerful voice, "How are you today?" As the agent looked over our pictures and then gazed up to confirm we were who we claimed to be, he replied, "Not too great." "Having a rough day, huh?" "Yes, I am." Reaching out to take our IDs back as he waved us through, I wished him well, "I hope your day gets better. Thanks for all that you are doing!" As we walked to catch up with the rest of the family at the line to enter the scanner, my son said perhaps with a bit of embarrassment, "Of course you would be the one to do that pastor thing." "What do you mean?" I asked. "Well, you get that voice that says you care and try to cheer people up. I guess he probably appreciated it though. It seems like he needed it today. It probably made his day better." As I thought about my son's perception of "that pastor thing" I do, I am not only thankful that he has grown to understand the value of small acts of kindness but also challenged because it appears as something I do because I am a pastor. I hope that one day my pastor thing will simply be a "Jim thing" - something that is so deeply rooted in me that it comes out in everything I do and not just when I am acting as a pastor. I hope that one day my pastor thing will simply be a "Jesus thing" - something that reveals more about who Jesus is than about who I am and what I do. And I hope the same thing for you - that kindness and caring will flow from your life so strongly that everyone will come to know who Jesus is through you. May it be so! Blessings on the journey, Jim Sunday's Sermon SnippetPromises to God: Gifts (2 Corinthians 8:7-15) When we are baptized and join the church, we vow to faithfully participate in the ministries of the church by our prayers, presence, and our gifts. When we speak of gifts in church, we most often mean one of two things: the money we put in the offering plate or the spiritual gifts we use to do ministry. Gifts are, we think, what we give to others. Yet there is something more to these gifts. Gifts are what are first given to us by God: our money, our spiritual gifts, our time, our health, etc. God blesses us, gives us these gifts, and calls us to use them to accomplish the work of Christ through them. So how do we faithfully participate in ministry through our gifts? To explore, we consider what Paul instructed the Corinthians to do regarding their gifts of money. A gift is acceptable, he wrote, when it is given according to what one has not according to what one does not have. This is good news for us. Instead of being held to an impossible standard of giving more than we have, faithfulness in giving is giving according to what we have. There is, however, a temptation here for us. We often mistake what we have leftover for what we have to give and thus justify giving only a little of what we have. We think of what we want, spend our gifts on that, and then give a little of what remains. This is not faithful according to Paul's standard. Another temptation comes in the way we equate money with our vote and speech. Giving to something means we support it completely, or so we think. When the church decides to engage in a ministry we do not think is the one it should do, we think about withholding our giving or designating the giving to only the things we like. We wind up giving according to our opinion rather than according to what God has given us. This is like refusing to sing a song in worship because it's not our favorite one, and we wish a different one had been chosen. This is not faithful either. We have made a vow to faithfully participate in the ministries of the church through our gifts. We give even when we disagree because we have made a promise to God and one another to be in this together. Giving according to what we have also raises the bar above one we often set - giving according to the need of the church's budget. That is, if the church is good enough, there is no need to give anything more; if the church gets behind, we will give a little more. While this makes logical sense, it falls short of the faithfulness of giving according to what we have. If we all give according to what we have, the church can move beyond good enough to the amazing work God dreams of for us. At our church, we are doing good enough and meet most of our budget (although we do need a push by the end of the year to meet our missional apportionment goals). How much more could we do, however, if we gave according to what we have rather than what the church "needs"? We could hire someone to coordinate and grow our children's ministries just as we have done for our youth. We could fill another 100 shoeboxes without even thinking about it. We would have so much more energy for actual ministry because we would not have to worry where the money was going to come from for each thing we want to do. God calls us to share the gifts we have and to let blessings flow through our lives! Praise God from whom all blessings flow! Pledging Our GiftsLast month, we included a pledge sheet along with our quarterly giving statements. The pledge sheets are an opportunity to commit to the level of financial support we want to provide for the coming year's ministries. This Sunday, we are asking that you return your completed pledge sheets during worship as a part of your faithful participation in the ministries of our church through the offering of gifts. Please prayerfully consider your giving towards our ministry budget, sponsoring children at Vacation Bible School, and support of our ongoing building projects, and bring your form this Sunday or return them to the church office at any time. Copies will be available Sunday morning if you have misplaced yours. Thanks for your faithful participation in our ministries! Living in CommunityThank you, Lee, for your hard work preparing for our charge conference! Thank you to all of our leaders who completed the reports needed for our conference! We had a wonderful time reflecting on our vision for ministry with Rev. Gomez at our conference. Thank you to Mary, Sue, Hannah, and Steve for leading our Operation Christmas Child and Packing Party efforts! Thank you to everyone who purchased items for the boxes and those who have brought in boxes! This Week at Port ChurchWednesday, November 14 9:00 - 11:45 am - Office Hours 6 pm - Wednesday at the Port Thursday, November 15 Office Closed Sunday, November 18 9:30 am - Worship: Promises to God - Service 11:00 am - Sunday School 2:30 pm - District Conference at Bridgewater UMC Workshops to follow at 4:15 pm See flyer for more details Looking AheadDrive-thru Nativity - December 14 & 15, 7-9 pm
Christmas Cantata - December 23, 7 pm 10/29/2018 October 29th, 2018A New Year of MinistryOn November 12 at 7 pm, we will be holding our yearly charge conference. At charge conference, we review with our district superintendent (DS) the past year of ministry and make plans for the year to come. This year, our DS Rev. Victor Gomez will be leading charge conference differently than we have done before. Charge conference will be a special worship service focusing on the our vision and call to ministry. Everyone is welcome to come and be a part of this worship! Blessings on the journey, Jim Update on General Conference 2019As you likely have heard, our denomination's General Conference will be meeting at the end of February, 2019 to discuss the recommendations of the Commission on the Way Forward. This commission was tasked with coming up with a plan for how we can faithfully move forward as a denomination given the diversity of belief on issues of human sexuality. They drafted three potential plans that were submitted to our bishops. The Council of Bishops endorsed the plan that would allow more local autonomy with the local congregation having the ability to set its own standards on related issues but passed along all three plans for consideration by the General Conference. This past week, our Judicial Council reviewed all three plans to determine whether they were in keeping with the Constitution of our denomination. They ruled that the endorsed plan was largely constitutional with only minor adjustments needed to bring it fully in line. One of the other plans - one to maintain the status quo but with increased enforcement and mandatory penalties for disobedience - was ruled to be largely unconstitutional as it sets up a different standard for obedience on issues of sexuality than on other areas thus bypassing the guarantee of fair process. No ruling was given on the third plan that creates three related denominations as it already required changes to the constitution. Please continue to keep our denomination and our delegates in your prayers as we wrestle with these sensitive issues. While this is a stressful, uncertain time to be United Methodist, remember that at the end of the conference we will still serve a wonderful God who is capable of amazing things, and we will still be family despite the differences we may have. How we treat one another in this time is as important as what we may wind up deciding. Living in CommunityThank you, Tina, for supplying our desserts for Wednesday at the Port recently! Thank you, Susie, for preparing our quarterly giving statements! We appreciate all you do to handle our money well. Thanks to everyone who worked on the cookbook project! From submitting recipes to editing the book, from buying copies to selling them, your generosity of time and money is greatly appreciated! We have sold out and raised a lot of money to care for the windows. Our windows have been prepared for the final framing of the new covers! The project should be completed in the next few weeks. Don't forget to continue praying for the leader(s) of the church you drew last week. Reminder: Please remember to bring your financial pledge for 2018 to worship on November 18. This Week at Port ChurchWednesday, October 31 9:00 - 11:45 am - Office Hours No Wednesday at the Port Thursday, November 1 9:00 - 11:45 am - Office Hours Sunday, November 4 9:30 am - Worship: All Saints' Sunday Rev. Gene Williams preaching 11:00 am - Sunday School Wednesday, November 7 9:00 - 11:45 am - Office Hours 6:00 pm - Wednesday at the Port 6:45 pm - Cantata Practice Looking AheadChristmas Shoebox Packing Party - November 11
Charge Conference - November 12, 7 pm Drive-thru Nativity - December 14 & 15 10/22/2018 October 22nd, 2018Punctuation and Other Life-giving Gifts.Have you noticed how much communication has changed over the last decade or so? Through email, social media posts, and texting, we have lost the formality and even rules of grammar that once dominated our written communication. One of the most telling signs of this change has been the near extinction of the simple period. Write a text, a short email, or a post, and how do you end it? Most likely not with a period. An exclamation point - perhaps! An emoji - likely😀 A hashtag - #aslikelyasnot Nothing at all - probable But a period - absolutely no way. A recent study has shown that people now see a period in digital communication as passive aggressive. To use a period, you had to choose to use a period, and that must mean there is a hidden message behind it. Yet a period serves a very useful purpose in the written word. In an article I recently read, the author defended the importance of using periods in written communication, not because of any traditionalist argument about what is grammatically correct but simply because periods are a gift to the reader. The author believes this because a period says to the reader, "Take a breath, process what you've just read, and then prepare for what's coming up." It doesn't take long, but the short rest it provides between sentences is life-giving. I believe that Sundays are a lot like the period that divides this sentence from the next one. Sunday lies on that boundary between the week behind us and the week ahead. When we spend time with God on Sunday, it is the chance to take a little bit of time to reflect on where we have been and where we are going. Sundays punctuate our weeks and give us the break we need between the completion of one and the onslaught of another. It gives us the time to take a breath, reflect on what we have just experienced, and prepare ourselves for what is coming up. On Sundays, we remember who we are to God, we rejoice in the triumphs of what we have done over the past week and accept grace for our failings, we discern who God wants us to become, and we dedicate ourselves to doing what God is calling us to do in the new week. Like replacing periods with exclamation points, emojis, and hashtags, it may be tempting to replace Sundays with something more exciting yet ultimately exhausting!!!!!!!!!!!! Or we could just do away with them altogether and make Sundays no different that any other day Either way, we miss out on the much-needed life-giving gift of Sunday: a time to rest, reflect, and prepare for what's ahead. May Sundays be a gift of rest between your weeks. (No passive aggressiveness intended) Blessings on the journey, Jim Sunday's Sermon SnippetPromises to God: Prayers (Romans 15:30-33) Last week, we began exploring our vow to participate in the ministries of the church through our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. We are each of us a minister of the gospel of Jesus and are called to do our part to further his work to change the world. Over the next few weeks we are going to look at these five ways we have committed to participate, and we begin this week with the first - prayers. Prayer is simply having a conversation with God - sharing our hearts with God and listening to what God has to say to us. We often think of prayer as telling God what we want to have happen and hoping that God will do it, but there is more to it than that. When we participate in ministry through our prayers, it is not just giving God our wishlist and hoping to change God's mind. God presumably wants the ministries we have been called to do to be successful as well. So what does participation through prayer do? The Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Rome about this very thing. He asked that they join him in the struggle of his ministry through prayer. Prayer unites us and helps us to share the burdens of ministry. Surely there are those will bear the brunt of ministry as the hands and feet carrying it out, but those who support it through prayer share the stress, worry, and weight of it all so that those serving are not alone. Paul recognized that the simple idea of being able to be present one day with this church would be refreshing to him. Leaders can take encouragement from knowing that they do not work alone but have the support of prayers from others. Participation through prayer means praying for our ministry leaders (see article below for ideas on this). All the while, Paul told them what he would like for them to ask God for, but he recognized that what mattered was God's will. This brings us to an important point about prayer. Some see prayer as easy, and it is. They say it is an easy way to start participating in ministry, and perhaps it is. Prayer is easy in that anyone can do it and there is no need for anything special to do it. Yet just because prayer may be easy does not mean that it isn't dangerous. In fact, prayer is one of the most dangerous things we do in our faith lives, because when we pray well we don't just tell God what to do but also listen for what God wants us to do. It is easy to pray for another person - whether for their healing and comfort or for their leadership in ministry. What happens when we listen to God in return? Often God changes us, and the answer to prayer becomes us. When we listen, God often tells us what we need to do to help those we pray for, and sometimes that means changing our lives. Prayer can be a dangerous yet wonderful thing. We are called to share the burdens of ministry through our prayers for one another and our church. Through our prayers, God changes us so that in ministry we will change the world! Praying for Our Church LeadersAs I shared in Sunday's sermon, I recently encountered an article published by UMC Communications on "15 Ways to Pray for Your Pastor." While I certainly welcome any of those 15 ways of prayer personally, I think that by and large they apply to how we should be in prayer for all of the servant leaders in our congregation. While we may need to think a little more broadly on a few of them - preaching, for instance, could be thought as worship leadership or how we proclaim the gospel in general - the vast majority are areas in which I believe any of our leaders could benefit from encouragement and prayer. On Sunday, we had everyone take a slip of paper with the name of a leader or group of leaders to pray for for a few minutes each day in the coming weeks. If you weren't able to get one, more slips will be available this upcoming Sunday as well. You can email Pastor Jim, and he can draw one and let you know who it is. As you pray for the one(s) you chose, check out the article on praying for leaders, and lift them up in prayer each day for a few minutes. Charge Conference, November 12We are busy preparing for our yearly Charge Conference here at Port Church scheduled for November 12 at 7 pm. Charge Conference is the time in we meet with our District Superintendent to review the ministries of the last year and make plans for those in the year to come. Church leaders make reports on what their ministries have done, we approve the budget to fund ministries for the next year, and we elect leaders for the next year. While the Charge Conference deals with some of the formalities of business, at its core is a time of reflection on who have been this past year and who God is calling us to become. I hope you will be able to join us! Living in Community Thank you, Chris, for an amazing dinner of pulled pork and macaroni last Wednesday! We appreciate your sharing your gift with us! Thank you, Courtney, Tina, Jason, and Brenna, for keeping the praise band going this week! Don't forget to bring your items for the Harvest Table to benefit the food pantry. This Week at Port ChurchWednesday, October 24 9:00 - 11:45 am - Office Hours 6:00 pm - Wednesday at the Port 6:45 pm - Cantata Practice Thursday, October 25 9:00 - 11:45 am - Office Hours Sunday, October 28 9:30 am - Worship: "Promises to God: Presence" 11:00 am - Sunday School Wednesday, October 31 9:00 - 11:45 am - Office Hours No Wednesday at the Port Happy All Saints' Eve! Looking AheadChristmas Shoebox Packing Party - November 11
Charge Conference - November 12, 7 pm Drive-thru Nativity - December 14 & 15 |
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Port Republic, VA 24471
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