September Newsletter

Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.” Luke 5:26 At our 2017 Missouri Annual Conference Bishop Robert Farr charged us with the task of preaching a fall sermon series called “Remarkable: A Wesleyan Way of Discipleship.” We will explore together how we can live as handcrafted children of God who are identified by the extraordinary way we love God, rejoice in God, give thanks, pray constantly and love others. When we call ourselves Methodists, we seek to exhibit these marks. The Sermon series will draw from a variety of resources including Steve Harper’s book Five Marks of a Methodist: The Fruit of a Living Faith.

Through the summer we have explored together the stories about Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Leah and Rachel, and Jacob’s sons and daughter. The REMARKABLE Series will mostly feature New Testament scriptures.

It’s not that we Methodists are so different from other Christians. But we HAVE focused on these marks of our lives together and relation to God and others over our 250+ years. Sometimes other Christians accuse us of “believing everything and standing for nothing.” That is not true! We DO place more emphasis on Christian action than on a narrow set of Christian beliefs. So, we ARE tolerant of a broad range of Christian perspectives. We DO trust that God gifts and calls each person to unique ministries. These marks have led us to embrace people of different walks, cultural traditions, languages, orientation and even faiths. But we DO NOT ‘water down’ the gospel of Jesus Christ. Focusing on love and gratitude to God, we celebrate it and proclaim it, and seek to Love all.

I hope you will plan to come to worship each Sunday. Starting September 10 we will start doing worship just a bit differently. The NEW WORSHIP STARTING TIME will be 8:55 a.m. Then, we will move our OFFERING TIME to the hymn just before the scripture reading. This means we will have one less Praise Song- with only one at the end of the service instead of two. We feel this will help us better respect the need of our Traditional Musician (Steve Tate) to get to his other church on time, without compromising the sermon time or the blend of Contemporary Praise and Traditional Worship Music. See you in church! (Click HERE to view or download the full newsletter.) Rev. Mark Harvey