Violinist George Figueroa Set to Open FPC Arts Series with Latin Flair

Special Session Meeting to Receive New Members

Next Wednesday Program Will Be Nov. 28

From Nazareth to Bethlehem by DVD

To accommodate the Thanksgiving holiday, there will be no evening programs or fellowship events next Wednesday, November 21. We will resume our intergenerational DVD series, The Journey: Walking the Road to Bethlehem, on the following Wednesday, November 28, at 6:00 p.m. Sixth-graders through adults are invited to take a fascinating look at the birth of Christ, as we walk the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem by means of scripture, historical information, and archaeological data. Please join us in the Fellowship Hall for dinner before the program.

Wednesday Night Kids

Two weeks from now, on November 28, we will learn about "Rest and Inertia" from Creation Day 7. "So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation." Come join us as we talk about the day God rested, and complete the last and special part of our Creation Tower.

Children's Ministries News

Snack and Serve December 2

On Sunday, December 2, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., students in grades 3 through 5 will meet at the church to share holiday snacks while putting together holiday treat bags for patients at Wellmont Cancer Center. Our goal is to prepare 50 bags to offer encouragement to those who are dealing with serious illness during the holiday season. We are planning to include small items that might be useful, as well as student-made ornaments and cards. We hope all our grade 3−5 students will join us as we share snacks and games and work together to brighten the holiday of others. For more information, contact Ann Abel, Allison Brooks, or Shannan Miller.

Kids' Kirk News

On Sunday, November 25, Kids' Kirk, for four-year-olds through first graders, will be offered at both services. We will be learning about "Jesus By the Sea," when four ordinary fishermen along the Sea of Galilee were called to be disciples. Children will participate in some fishing activities as well as learn how they, too, can be fishermen for Jesus.

Our children are excited about Christmas, and you can share their excitement as a volunteer with Kids' Kirk during the 8:30 a.m. Sunday service during the Christmas season. Please contact Ann Abel if you can help on any or all of the following dates: December 15, 23, and 30, and January 6.  

Heart to Heart Celebrates Advent

The Perfect Gift

Student Ministries News

Students Did Big Things in One Busy Weekend

Serve 2012 was an incredible weekend (check out the photos below). FPC high schoolers spent it in Pulaski, VA, working on a house for a young disabled man who had lost his home in the 2011 tornado. Students wrapped the house, hung roof vents, framed in soffits, installed windows and doors, put in insulation, removed a trash heap from a neighborhood, and much more. The sounds of hammers, drills, and saws could be heard all day, along with the occasional cheer for another task completed.

Students stayed at the Reuning's farm in Dublin, VA, where the they enjoyed chasing cows, extreme capture-the-flag, worship, painting t-shirts, and great food. God definitely did big things through our students to serve the people of Pulaski! Katie Arnold, Director of Student Ministries

Think about the last time you heard the word blessed. What came to mind? For many of us, the word conjures up images of the coolest clothes, the newest gadgets, and a worry-free life. But when we look at what God has to say about being blessed, we realize that we probably have things pretty mixed up. Because if being blessed is more about our relationships and what we do with them than about the stuff we have, we may have some reevaluating to do in order to redefine what it means to be blessed, and to realize that we might just be more blessed than we originally thought.

All youth of the church and their friends are invited to our Student Ministries Fellowship on Sundays at 6:00 p.m., in the Youth Wing, to question, share, and reflect on what it means to be blessed.   Katie Arnold, Director of Student Ministries

During November and December, the Neighborhood Initiatives Steering Committee will be collecting boxes of pretzels for the children of Fairmount Elementary School who cannot bring their own snacks to class. Either small pretzels or little pretzel sticks will do; just put them in the Little Red House in the Fellowship Hallway. The committee will take them to the school, and the teachers will divide them into snack portions as needed.

Kay Ward, the community outreach liaison at Fairmount, has discovered that there are at least two children in each of 23 classrooms whose parents cannot give them snacks. That adds up to a need for 46 snack portions every day, a total of 230 snacks per week, or 920 snacks each month.

Your loving contribution will give dignity to children from low-income families by allowing them to enjoy snacks with their classmates, and tide them over until the end of the school day. Say a prayer of blessing as you send them on their way!

FPC will have no more blood drives before the new year. The next blood drive is scheduled for Wednesday, January 16, when the Marsh Bloodmobile will once again park outside the front entrance to the church.

Library News from Bill Wade

Mary Gordon is a contemporary American novelist whose work has won several awards; she is also a professor of creative writing at Barnard. You may have already read and admired her work. Some years ago, while stuck in a taxi amid a Manhattan traffic jam, she found herself irritated by the constant bombardment from an aggressive evangelist on the cabbie's radio. But then she realized that in her Catholic upbringing little attention had been given to independent reading of scripture. When she reached her destination, she vowed to read the Gospels in their entirety because she wanted to know exactly what Jesus had said and done.

Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels is the result of Mary Gordon's resolve. And her book has a special claim upon our attention because most of us were raised to read the Bible from early childhood throughout our adult years. The stories and parables of Jesus - the Sermon on the Mount, the various healings, the encounter with the woman at the well or the episode of the prodigal son - all are familiar. You've heard them countless times. But Mary Gordon read them through for the first time as an adult and as a writer with a keen ear for the power and beauty of language. The insights she brings from her reading, the questions she raises about Jesus' teachings, are fresh and poignant, and she gives new meaning to those stories we know so well.

She divides her book into two sections; the first consists of responses to ten collections of Jesus stories, often placing on the same page the variant readings of a single event found in more than one of the Gospels. She notes the nuances in the wording to show how the writer gives a distinctive flavor to each Gospel story. We find ourselves becoming newly sensitive to the language and the impact it has on our understanding of a passage.

And then she provides us with eight "problems," not that they are really problems to be solved. Rather, they are challenges for us to take Jesus' teachings seriously. One is his call to be perfect: "Could we live the way he enjoins even if we wanted to?" she asks. And there is the problem of asceticism: do we really want to live like that? Mary asks. You may consider the questions as merely rhetorical, but Mary takes Jesus' commands seriously, and it becomes a challenge for all comfortable Americans. Are we really to take his words seriously, or are they merely nice aphorisms that we can disregard without a sense of guilt? There are eight of these challenges; read them all, and you'll have to admit that Mary is on to something here.

As a practicing novelist and teacher of creative writing, Mary Gordon writes beautifully. The freshness of her approach, the open curiosity with which she approaches the Gospels, provide many new insights that those of us already familiar with the stories pass over blindly. It's a sparkling fresh look at the Gospels for our glazed-over eyes. The last section of her book deals with the passion of the Christ on the cross, and Mary Gordon makes it an epilogue with the title "The Seven Last Words and the Last Words." Now what does she mean by that?