Hog Roast

Ankeny UCC is Returning to Creation (and Hog Roasts)

Greetings in Christ-

This is it! An annual event where we get to put ourselves out into the community, invite folks in from outside, and live our mission to serve beyond (and have fun while doing it). The Deacons, the Howiesons, and others have been hard at work rolling out the red carpet for the Hog Roast, a number of you have been out selling tickets and signing up to bake pies, and so let’s come together in fellowship and joy, and invite our friends and neighbors as we come together to remember the hungry, the oppressed, the widow, the orphan, and the prisoner served by the BackPack Program and Doctors Without Borders.

And then on Sunday, celebrate the beginning of our program year! Choir rehearsal is tonight for the first Anthem on Sunday, and our classrooms are all ready for our Sunday School students. If you’ve got a chance, head on over to https://www.ankenyucc.org/education/registration 
so we can do some final adjustments to our classrooms.

Blessings,
Nathan

August 2016 Monthly Letter from Pastor Nathan

We’re coming up on two of our big church celebrations! This Sunday-Thursday, we’ll be celebrating our children and our ecumenical ties with our joint Vacation Bible School at Ankeny Christian Church, alongside them and St. Anne’s in the Fields Episcopal. This year’s theme is One God Many Games. Here in the office, we’ve been making calls to make sure that all the children and youth we know will be there, and I encourage you to come out and be energized, too. We’ll kick off with songs at 6pm, eat around 6:20, and then go off for more crafts and games. If you can only come one night, that’s fine. We’re serving dinner on Monday and Tuesday nights, so those would be great times to come down and help serve (and eat). My spirit is always rejuvenated by singing songs and seeing the joy children have together.

And, September 9 is our third annual Hog Roast, benefitting Doctors Without Borders and the Food Bank of Iowa’s BackPack Program. One of our goals this year is to have more fun. Cornhole! Croquet! Frisbee! Football! Iowa-Iowa State trash talking! It’s all good! We’ll have tickets to sell shortly, lots of opportunities to serve, and delicious pastured pork. Let’s do good by cooking out.
As we Welcome and Serve in these ways, we’re also going to be Exploring in worship. The sermon series for the month is “Telling Our Stories,” and we’re going to do something slightly different. Starting August 14, we’ll have some space in sermon time to share our stories with our neighbors. One of the most powerful forms of testimony and prophecy in the Bible is the narrative that starts with the story of me (the speaker), leads into the story of us (the listeners and the speaker together) and continues into the story of now (where are we compelled to go from here). This is an incredibly effective tool for quickly understanding what other people see as essential in their lives, and also inspires us to work closely together. Comes and join us.

Blessings,
Nathan