Wednesday Dinners

Communities of Care

a 94 year-old man helps a 6 year-old and 7 year-old clean up

Everybody cleans

Greetings!

Potlucks give us a great chance to share our individual gifts and come together in mutual labor to clean up afterwards!

Tonight’s theme is pasta. As always, we haven’t run out of food yet, so if you don’t have anything, come anyway, particularly if the weather makes it unsafe to hurry. We’ll be discussing communities of care and wondering what it means to care for different people and populations that are part of our church family.

Paul’s letter to the Philippians was written in response to some aid the church in Philippi gave to Paul while he was in prison. This act itself provides us a model for care, but Paul’s response reminds us how to think about one another in community:

Philippians 2:3–5 (CEB)
Don’t do anything for selfish purposes, but with humility think of others as better than yourselves. Instead of each person watching out for their own good, watch out for what is better for others. Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus:

So, how do we watch out for others in our community? We talk often of people who are no longer able to get out of their homes, but we also have our children and high school students, people busy with their work lives, struggling to keep up with family activities, and facing personal demons. How can we live such that we show care for all these and more? Come tonight to talk about it.

And come this Sunday not only for our annual meeting, but also to hear the children of the church sing in worship with us!

Blessings,
Nathan

[email protected]

Music

Greetings!

By this time, we are indeed no longer Strangers and Aliens. Here’s some original music by my friend the Rev. Jack Davidson, to kick off today’s theme of Music. Tonight, we’ll gather for our soup potluck (hot soup, cold soup, sweet soup, savory soup, stone soup) before turning to different ways people use music in church settings. The large group meeting will involve a lot of watching music videos, so kids are welcome.

Psalm 98 gives us our inspiration for music in worship–
Psalm 98:4–6 (NET)
Shout out praises to the Lord, all the earth!
Break out in a joyful shout and sing!
Sing to the Lord accompanied by a harp,
accompanied by a harp and the sound of music!
With trumpets and the blaring of the ram’s horn,
shout out praises before the king, the Lord!

We sometimes have difficulty expressing emotion in worship. How do we show joy when we are gathered all together? How can we be excited? How do we open ourselves up to the tears? The psalmist knew. As we use our own energy to shout and to sing, and to clap and to strum, our bodies ca turn emotion outwards, leaving us changed by the presence of God in song and drum. Sing a song today, see how you feel. Ask what it is about music that moves you to a different place. What are the songs that are the soundtracks to the different parts of your lives?

In my case, college was dominated by the Greg Brown song “the Iowa Waltz,” as I found myself far away from home (as he says, “in the midst of the corn, the middle of the U-S-A”) and the Rolling Stones telling me that “You Can’t Always Get What You Want (but if you try sometime, you might find that you get what you need). Post-college, well, those songs still affect me, years later, and you’ll need to ask me. But I can still sing them for you. Many of us have particular church songs that remind us of moments when we felt God’s grace and mercy, too. What are those going to be in the next five years?

Dinner’s at 5:30, programming at 6 (or when we finish cleaning up).

Blessings,
Nathan

[email protected]

Faith Formation

Greetings!

Can you believe Daylight Savings Time is here already? Get ready to fall back this weekend.

In Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, we see his hope for our faith.

2 Corinthians 10:15–16 (CEB)
We don’t take pride in what other people do outside of our boundaries. We hope that our work will be extended even more by you as your faith grows, until it expands fully (within the boundaries, of course). We hope that our work grows even to the point of the gospel being preached in places beyond Corinth, without bragging about what has already been done in another person’s work area.

Tonight, we gather for our second potluck of the year. We’ll be talking about Faith Formation. I’ll have another presentation and some more talking about different ways churches help people to grow in faith, and then we can talk in small groups. Potluck starts at 5:30. Bring a pie! Any kind will do! Or just eat some. We’ll have some activities for the kids, too. Come and join us as we continue our imagining journey and figure out what it would mean to grow in faith.

This Sunday is All Saints Day. We’ll turn the paraments to white and remember all those we have lost in the past year. If you have a name you’d like remembered, just send an email to me at [email protected] .

Blessings,
Nathan

Worship

Here are some videos from our discussion!

Greetings!

In John’s Gospel, we are presented with a dialogue between Jesus and a woman:

Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you and your people say that it is necessary to worship in Jerusalem.”
Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, the time is coming when you and your people will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You and your people worship what you don’t know; we worship what we know because salvation is from the Jews. But the time is coming—and is here!—when true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth. The Father looks for those who worship him this way. God is spirit, and it is necessary to worship God in spirit and truth.”

Tonight, we gather for our first potluck of the year. Because the topic is worship, our study will be an all-ages study; we will be watching some short videos in the sanctuary and then talking in small groups about what we like about worship and what we can imagine worship being. Depending on the number of kids, I’ll host the kids’ discussion.

Lenten Bible Study!

We’ll be having a five-week series on the Meaning of Jesus, using the book of the same name by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright as our study guide. We hope you’ll enjoy us for dinner and dialogue, starting February 25 (a week after our Ash Wednesday Service). Read more about it here: https://www.ankenyucc.org/questions/the-meaning-of-jesus/

Lots of News!

Youth Group! Sunday School is back! Pig Roast! and more!

 

The week of September 12 is going to be a big one at Ankeny UCC! We’re kicking off the church year with the return of the choir, the launch of our brand-new Sunday School curriculum, and the launch of our ecumenical youth group with St. Anne’s in the Fields (Episcopal)! Wednesday the 10th, we have the first of our Wednesday dinners (a potluck), and Friday the 12th, just before the Ankeny Jaguar-Ankeny Hawk football game, we’ll be hosting our first-ever tailgate pig roast. Sign up sheets for coleslaw and pies are on the bulletin board, and we’ll need some folks to help set up and break down (and everyone to invite your friends!). Proceeds for the Ankeny BackPack Program and Ankeny UCC Christian Education.