There will be a congregational meeting this Sunday, March 22, at 10:25 a.m. in the Fellowship Hall.  The purpose of this meeting is to consider changes in the terms of call for the Pastor/Head of Staff. All members of First Presbyterian Church are urged to attend.

The Milligan College Concert Choir, under the direction of Noah DeLong, will present a program in our sanctuary this Sunday, March 22, at 3:00 p.m. The Milligan College Concert Choir is an auditioned ensemble whose members represent a variety of majors from throughout the student body. In its past, the choir has sung at the invitation of the President at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. It performs extensively on campus and throughout northeast Tennessee and travels frequently throughout the United States, including a tour this month through Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.

The choir has also toured England, with special performances in Coventry Cathedral and in the Civic Centre of the City of Birmingham. In addition, the choir has been invited to sing at the North American Christian Convention, the Conference on World Evangelism-National Missionary Convention, and the Tennessee State Convention of the American Choral Directors' Association.

The choir frequently collaborates with the Johnson City Symphony Orchestra and the Symphony of the Mountains. Recent engagements have included performances of Orff's Carmina Burana with the Symphony of the Mountains last March and Handel's Messiah with the Milligan College Orchestra in last April. 

We are ordering lilies to brighten our worship spaces on Easter morning. To order lilies in honor or memory of someone, fill out a form and return it to the church office with payment by this Monday, March 23. Lilies are $15 per plant, and order forms can be found in the Sunday bulletin, on the kiosk, and in the office. To aid correct acknowledgment, please print names exactly as you wish to see them in the Easter bulletin. Lilies will be placed in the sanctuary and Fellowship Hall after the Good Friday worship service.

Jessica Stollings

On Wednesday, March 25, we will provide a forum for a conversation about ministry with different generations and their makeup, identity, and values. Jessica Stollings, founder of ReGenerations, an organization that specializes in connecting generations, will be our speaker. Jessica is a Millennial who graduated from King University with degrees in English and communication. She captained the volleyball team as an academic All American, received national awards, and was honored among collegiate, professional, and Olympic athletes.

Please join us at 5:30 for dinner in the Fellowship Hall and stay for the adult learning program at 6:20. Student Small Groups and Wednesday Night Kids will meet as usual at 6:00.

Parents: Please keep your children with you or within sight until they are called to their groups at 6:00. We want to keep our children safe and adults unworried!

On the last Sunday of each quarter, we collect our Five-Cents-a-Meal Hunger Offering. Our donations to the bread pans in worship respond to the food needs of our neighbors near and far. But where specifically does the money go?

In 2014 First Presbyterian Church submitted six requests for Five-Cents-a-Meal grants. Holston Presbytery awarded each requested grant with $1,158.51, a prorated amount (about 58%) of the $2,000 request. Local grants were awarded for the food programs of Bristol Emergency Food Pantry, Abuse Alternatives, Haven of Rest, and Fairmount Elementary School. International grants were awarded to Western Wollega Bethel Synod in Ethiopia and to Bethel School in Felipe Camarão, Natal, Brazil.

In all, Holston Presbytery awarded $54,450 to 47 local agencies and 10 international missions. Our hunger-relief work truly makes a difference at home and abroad!

Our next collection of the Five-Cents-a-Meal Hunger Offering will be next Sunday, March 29. Thanks in advance for your generous donation to this important special offering.

On March 29, Palm Sunday will lead the procession into Holy Week. The schedule below gives information about our services from Sunday to Sunday. We look forward to worshiping with you!

FPC's Fusion group can enjoy a glow-in-the-dark egg hunt next Friday, March 27, at 7:00 p.m. at the home of Ray and Lilly Osborne. All fifth and sixth graders are invited!

All children from infancy through sixth grade are invited to an Easter egg hunt next Saturday, March 28, at 12:30 p.m. at the church. Bring a basket! After finding eggs, we will head indoors to make resurrection eggs. Please join us!

Lorri Looney's Heart to Heart DVD Bible Study group will begin a spring study, Discerning the Voice of God by Priscilla Shirer, on March 25. This course will run until May 6. Workbooks will be available at the first session. This group meets on Wednesday mornings at 9:30 in the church parlor. All women of the church are welcome to come and bring a friend!

If you can take a meal to someone just home from the hospital, send a card or make a phone call to someone in a special care facility, or comfort someone in distress, FPC wants you for Care Shepherds, our congregational care ministry. The goal of this ministry is to show Christian love to members of our church family who are in need.

We begin a new Care Shepherds schedule in April and will hold a training event sometime that month. Come with your talents and build confidence as you serve! There are as many ways to do so as there are opportunities. Volunteers serve one month at a time on a team that coordinates the needs of the congregation for that month.

For more information or to volunteer, please contact Sue Faucette at suerforeo@hotmail.com or 423-652-1947 or Gordon Turnbull at gturnbull@fpcbristol.org or 423-764-7176.

We Need More Volunteers for Our Family Promise Rotation 

Our upcoming Family Promise of Bristol rotation begins this Sunday evening, March 22. We still need overnight hosts for this Sunday. We also need volunteers to help with the laundry that will have piled up by next Sunday, March 29. Please help if you can!

Overnight Hosts for March 22

Overnight hosts need to arrive at the church by 8:30 p.m. Sunday, spend the night, and help with an early continental breakfast on Monday. Our guests will leave the church around 7:00 on Monday morning. To volunteer as an overnight host for this Sunday, contact Dan Gross at dan.c.gross@gmail.com or Scottie Bales at Scottie@rtherapeutics.com or 423-360-5357.

End-of-the-Week Laundry

At the end of our Family Promise week, we will have guestroom laundry for two families to take care of: sheets, towels, and comforters to wash with bleach and return to FPC's Family Promise Closet. If you can take some of this laundry, please contact Scottie as above. You will have plenty of time to return it before it's needed again.

Thank you so much for your love and hospitality to these families! 

Sharing Christ Help Needed March 28 

FPC will have an opportunity to serve the community through the Sharing Christ Ministry next Saturday, March 28. We are looking for volunteers to provide food and to perform an assortment of tasks. We need folks to pack sack lunches, to prepare dinner ahead of time, to serve dinner, and to clean up. Feel free to volunteer in more than one area!

Sharing Christ fed 139 people in late February, and we usually plan for 150. We have plenty of peanut butter and jam, and we are six frozen casseroles to the good. What we need now is sandwich bread, snack cakes, and paper bags for 75 lunches. We also need chicken casseroles, slaw, green beans, and dinner rolls. We will provide the recipes, and Tammy Connolly will post numbers on Facebook.

For more information, please contact Tammyat 423-968-3831 or lconn4691@btes.tv.

It Might as Well Be Spring 

We've had a few springlike days, the crocuses have done their thing, the daffodils are getting into the act, and in a couple of weeks mowers will blossom out all over town. Several of our veteran mowers will not rebloom this year, so we are looking for fresh starts.

Our mowing days are generally Wednesdays through Saturdays. Mowing takes three or four hours, and each volunteer's turn comes up every five or six weeks, depending on the number of volunteers we have.

We are also looking for folks who can pick up tree branches early in the week and stack them on the curb on the Spruce Street side of the front yard. This is a good service activity for families with young children.

Even if you can help only once or twice during the season, we can use you! To volunteer to mow or to clear, please call Randy Cook at 423-956-1541 or email him at npolecook@aol.com. He will give individual lessons on operating the Scag Tiger Cat to any volunteer who wants them.

Snacks for Fairmount Students 

We are collecting cookies for our young friends at Fairmount Elementary School. The Neighborhood Initiatives Steering Committee is asking us to fill the Little Red House in the Fellowship Hallway with boxes of vanilla wafers. The committee will take them to Fairmount, where teachers will divide them into portions for the youngsters whose parents cannot afford to send snacks to school with them. Let's make sure all students get a midafternoon energy boost!

Windsor Avenue Presbyterian Church will present Night of a Thousand Stories ... Give or Take a Few this Sunday, March 22. This free event will begin with dinner at 6:00 p.m., and members of the acclaimed Jonesborough Storytellers Guild will begin to spin tales at 7:00. The evening's bill boasts Mountain Man Bob Phillips, Madge Roher, Sherrl Miller, Mary Grace Walrath, and Judy Farlow.

WAPC will provide meat and drinks, and members of their congregation will provide covered dishes. If you plan to attend and wish to take a covered dish, please feel free to do so, but don't feel that you must.

Windsor Avenue Presbyterian Church is located at 1100 Windsor Avenue in Bristol. For more information, please call WAPC at 423-764-6653.

C.S. "Chuck" Thompson has published six mysteries featuring a female Bristol detective, but he stakes out new territory, in both senses, with his latest book, Jasper Lilla and the Wolves of Banner Elk. It's the first volume in the Jasper Lilla Chronicles, a trilogy set in and around Boone, North Carolina. Jasper is a teenager who inherits a necklace of wolf teeth from his father.

Chuck describes his novels as family friendly and never graphically violent, and he offers this teaser for his new book: "Did his father really believe the necklace had some sort of magic power over wolves? Could it be a talisman used by the Nicatani, a legendary Cherokee priestly clan? Could the necklace hold the key to who he and his family really are?"

The book is available through Kindle here.

Today we feature two Christian writers, both women, both well known and widely acclaimed for the intensity of their spiritual writings. But the similarities stop there. In many ways they are as distinct as night from day, and we have featured them both because they illustrate the truth in the words of the old hymn, "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy."

Corrie ten Boom, who died in 1983, was Dutch, living with her father and elder sister, Betsie, in Haarlem when the German army invaded in 1940. Devoutly Christian, they felt it their mission to shelter Jews as the Nazis introduced the Holocaust to the Netherlands. In time, the activities of Corrie's family became known, and they were arrested. The father died within days, Betsie was sentenced to a camp where she later died, but Corrie, thanks to a clerical error, was released.

Her life was completely changed by this harrowing episode, and after the war she spent 30 years as a missionary evangelist, traveling the world and speaking in 64 countries. Her message was one of reconciliation and forgiveness, for she had at first harbored a lingering bitterness in her own heart. She became a regular spokesperson on Trans World Radio, the famed agency that carries the gospel around the globe. A movie was made from her earlier book, The Hiding Place, and shown worldwide. The book we are featuring here, I Stand at the Door and Knock, contains meditations taken from her radio messages. The simple but direct expression of her feeling shows through clearly in these pieces.

Anne Lamott is a contemporary writer living in California. Like Corrie ten Boom, Anne has gone through some very rough days, but hers were those of a wayward life, characterized by a rejection of God and seeking the pleasures of the flesh. Now a fervently dedicated Christian, Anne will still on occasion speak with a voice that echoes the older times. We are featuring her book Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. One reviewer writes, "Anne Lamott is walking proof that a person can be both reverent and irreverent in the same lifetime. Sometimes in the same breath." In this book Anne "takes us on a journey through her often troubled past to illuminate her devout but quirky walk of faith." She tells how "she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself." Anne is not like our typical First Church member, but I have a feeling that had she lived in the first century, you might have found Jesus a frequent visitor at her house.

These two books are very different, but they are equally passionate for the same gospel. And perhaps the message they convey is that there is indeed a wideness in God's mercy, and if we do not realize that fact, we display a reduced understanding of the mercy and power of the Gospel message.

Sunday's music participants: Milligan College Concert Choir and Noah DeLong, conductor; Milligan College Orchestra and Dr. Kellie Brown, conductor.

Sunday's music: Please see the Worship column.

Program of note: The Milligan College Concert Choir, under the direction of Noah DeLong, will present a program in our sanctuary this Sunday, March 22, at 3:00 p.m. For more information, please see the second article in this newsletter.

Lenten Organ Meditations: The Wednesday Noon Lenten Organ Meditations at Central Presbyterian Church come to a close March 25. Joan Keith, a member of Central who serves as a substitute organist in our area, performs next Wednesday. Admission is free, but donations to Central's music program are gratefully received. The church is located at 301 Euclid Avenue in Bristol, Virginia.

In Our Prayers

Becky Busler

Jane Crewey

Dorothy Dollar

Fred Frazier

Ann Galliher

DeeDee Galliher

Dorothy Giesler

Juanita Goforth

Ron Grubbs

Will Hankins

Mary Nell Harris

Sharon Hatcher

Hawley Heglar

Carolyn King

Nancy King

Sue Olsen

Nancy Preston

Mary Rice

Brenda Rogers

Virginia Rutherford

Katy Sikorski

Faye VanNostrand

An extensive list of prayer concerns, "Pray for One Another," is available for pickup at the church each week.

Birthday Prayer Fellowship

March 23     Louise Bowdoin

March 24     Alison Looney, Roby Witcher

March 27     Cory Wallen

March 28     Betty Barger, Mary Jane McGuire, Jay Regan, Bill Ward

Publication of recently received memorial gifts and honoraria will resume next week.

Sunday, March 22

8:30 a.m.     Worship, Fellowship Hall

9:00 a.m.     Cherub Choir, Room 209

9:45 a.m.     Sunday School, Education Wing

10:25 a.m.   Congregational Meeting, Fellowship Hall

11:00 a.m.   Worship, Sanctuary

3:00 p.m.     Milligan College Choir Concert, Sanctuary

Monday, March 23

7:00 p.m.     Session Meeting, Room 123

Tuesday, March 24

9:00 a.m.     Staff Meeting, Room 123

10:00 a.m.   Morning Prayer Group, Conference Room

1:00 p.m.     Jackie Burt's Bible Study, Burt Home

6:00 p.m.     Venture Crew 3, Room 123

7:00 p.m.     Boy Scout Troop 3, Scout Wing

Wednesday, March 25

9:30 a.m.     Lorri Looney's DVD Bible Study, Parlor

10:00 a.m.   Elizabeth Patrick's Women's Bible Study, New Mothers' Room

4:15 p.m.     Children's Handbells, Room 212

4:45 p.m.     Youth Handbells, Room 212

4:45 p.m.     Savior's Singers Children's Choir, Room 209

5:15 p.m.     Baby & Toddler Care, Rooms 34-37

5:30 p.m.     Fellowship Dinner, Fellowship Hall

6:00 p.m.     Wednesday Night Kids, Rooms 11 &31

6:00 p.m.     Student Small Groups, Youth Wing

6:20 p.m.     Adult Learning, Fellowship Hall

7:15 p.m.     Sanctuary Choir, Room 202

7:30 p.m.     Praise Team, Fellowship Hall

Thursday, March 26

7:00 a.m.      Men's Bible Study, Parlor

12:00 p.m.   Noon Bible Study, Room 117

Saturday, March 28

4:00 p.m.     Sharing Christ Mission, State Street, Bristol