Weddings Interested in having your wedding at First Presbyterian Church? Please see our updated guidelines here.
Sunday Worship
Adult Sunday School 10:00-10:45 am Youth Sunday School 10:00-10:45 am Elementary Sunday School (please call church office ahead of the Sunday you will attend) Church Nursery: 10:30 am-12:30 pm Chancel Choir Rehearsal: 10:30 am Morning Worship: 11:00 am
Youth Group 12-2 pm (alternates with Youth Sunday School, please call to check times)
Wednesdays Bible Study: 10:00 am
Chancel Choir Rehearsal: 7:30 pm
What's up? Bible Study Continues - Our Bible Study will resume again on June 28. The regular meeting time is on Wednesdays at 10 am in the Library. Pastor Karen will discuss scripture and how we might apply it in our daily lives. Bring your Bibles! Coffee and pastries will be served. Can you help the Food Pantry? Items currently needed for our pantry include peanut butter, crackers, cream soups (cream of mushroom, etc.) and cereal. Canned fruit, canned vegetables, pasta, tomato sauce, and canned chicken and tuna are always welcome. Donations may be brought to the church office or placed in the canvas hamper in the narthex.
Our Annual Haiti Campaign Comes To an End in June!
This year we were again able to raise the $7200 needed to fund the St. Thomas Haiti Education Foundation (HEF) school in Lavanneau, Haiti. This year's speaker at the Haiti fundraiser dinner on June 4 emphasized the need for clean water for schools and communities in rural Haiti. We have learned from HEF that St. Thomas' school principal is planning for a water purification system for our school. We will provide additional information in church newsletters and bulletins (and on this website) on costs and timing of this new venture. Thank you to all who contributed St. Thomas school staff and continue to pray for the Haiti schoolchildren. | September 2017
Pastor's Letter
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
We live in a tense time. That’s an understatement but I want to get to the point. There have been other tense times.
Surely the bricks of First Presbyterian have stood as a witness to numerous wars (and rumors of wars). And while some of her children might have – with good cause - believed it was the end of the world, still, the world turned, and the Word of God stood.
The front door (“bidding all to come and welcome!”) has seen social changes along the way unlike anything our great-great grand pastors expected. Still, the world turned, and the Word of God stood.
Now it seems things are changing every minute. Tensions amongst countries seem to escalate every day. Even in our own country, divisions amongst our citizenry are epidemic. Social unrest is on a par with…the 1960’s?…the 1930’s?…the 1860’s?
Brothers and Sisters, the Word of God stands. Commandments are made for difficult times. Now, more than ever, we Christians must love as we have been loved by Jesus Christ, remembering his teaching on the “good” Samaritan as the definition of who qualifies as our neighbor. Now, more than ever, we must forgive as we have been forgiven, mindful in the midst of big things to recognize the small things as just that: small things.
One of my friends has said that First Presbyterian is just like Noah’s ark. We are wonderful because we have “two of everything.” We are not all alike. We are not homogenous. In our diversity, God is preserving a model of the fullness of community in us. We are not “the family Presbyterian church.” We are not “the conservative Presbyterian church.” We are not “the blue-collar Presbyterian church.” We are the Ark. We’ve got two of everything. And before the rainbow at the end of the storm, there will be times the lions’ roar is rattlingly loud, and the donkey’s bray is irritating and endless; times when the containment of our diversity might be, hmmm, somewhat “smelly,” and times when we wonder if that dove will ever bear us the evidence of peace and safety.
The piece of art here is Norman Rockwell’s “The Golden Rule.”
Laurie Norton Moffatt, Director/CEO of The Norman Rockwell museum says, “In this image he expressed…his core belief that guided his art from a young artist to his maturity as an elder statesman: that we are one people sharing one world in common humanity. We are all one. Through our cultural, national, political, racial, ethnic and religious differences, we are all the same.”
Let us join as closely in our Ark.
“Remember that you were at one time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made all into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us… So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” (Ephesians 2:12f)
Awaiting the rainbow with you, Ark-o-nauts,
Pastor Karen
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