Archive for Worship Together
Missionaries Visiting This Weekend
This weekend, we’ll have missionaries visiting with us. They will be speaking to our community and the people of Open House. In addition, there will be a couple of opportunities to meet them and interact in an informal, casual setting.
Erin Sabol is a missionary to Argentina and she’ll be here Friday night through Saturday. Friday evening at 7:00, we’ll be hosting her for dessert and coffee at the Nexus Building cafe. Everyone is invited to come hang out and hear from Erin about her calling and life in Argentina. There will be a Q & A afterward.
Don Plummer is a missionary to Russia and he’ll be here Sunday. Sunday morning, we’ll hear briefly from him about his work, and Sunday night he’ll be speaking at the Ramsey Home Community Group. Get directions here.
Both are serving with the Christian & Missionary Alliance and are supported by the Great Commission Fund. A percentage of our budget every year goes to this fund.
We hope you’ll come to meet these two people and hear about their calling and mission!
An Idea for Your Devotional Time in Advent
The season of Advent began yesterday and so we are officially in a time of expectation and waiting for the coming of Jesus! It is, as the songwriter said, “the most wonderful time of the year!” However, as you know, it can be a season that brings great anxiety, pressure, and even depression.
Last week, I encouraged you to “re-set” the rhythm of your life to the quiet waiting of Advent. Now, I’d like to offer one way you can put action to that. This is a great tradition you might want to try out during your personal prayer time in the next four weeks. It’s a great experience for families as well.
You can easily make your own Advent Candle to help focus your prayer and devotional time during this season. Get a tall, slender candle – something like a 12 inch dinner candle.
Then take a ruler and felt tip pen. Start about an inch from the bottom so there’s enough candle to stand up. Then mark all the way up the candle, twenty-six evenly spaced segments. The candle in the picture is, of course, store-bought, but it gives you the idea!
You can then use your felt tip pen to mark the dates. Starting at the top with December 1, all the way to 24 at the bottom.
Then, choose a time every day when you can burn one segment. A slender candle takes 10-20 minutes, depending on the length, width and quality of wax.
What to do while the candle burns? You could use the time to sit in silence, or read, or pray. You might make a family commitment to sit together silently, praying for one another. Advent is traditionally a time of waiting: perhaps you can pray every day for a person or place that is waiting for news, or peace, or healing.
If you’d like a daily schedule of scripture readings for Advent, here is a good list to work from.
I hope you’ll take the next two days to prepare for this “new” tradition! It’s actually very old, but it’s been a new experience for me and my family, and we’ll be doing it again this season.
If you have any ideas or suggestions for focal points or things to contemplate during the burning of each segment, please share them in the comments below.
Looking Forward to the Advent Season
This Sunday, November 28, is the first Sunday in Advent. It is a season of preparation, a season of waiting, and a season of expectation. It sets the stage for Christmas, but it’s important that we recognize it is not the same as Christmas.
Popular culture knows something about the true meaning of Christmas, but it knows little to nothing of the meaning of Advent. It’s a danger for the church that we end up in the same position. In our rush to the manger, we skim over the anticipation of Advent. We might want to fast-forward to “Joy to the World,” forsaking the plaintive cry of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”
For centuries, the Christian community has viewed the experience of Advent as a way of preparing our hearts for Christmas morning. I want to invite you to be a little “counter-cultural” this season! When all around you are Christmas decorations and muzak-interpretations of the great carols(!), remember Advent. Beginning this Sunday, we’ll begin a four-week series of worship experiences designed around the themes of Advent. We’ll be talking about what it means to enter into the expectation and longing for the coming of Jesus. My prayer is that we all experience a spiritual “re-boot!” - that the rhythm of our lives will be recalibrated so we’re able to experience deeply the truth of God with us!
I invite you to the worship gathering this Sunday at 10:00am. Even more, I invite you to enter into the season of Advent every day, beginning this Sunday!
A Prayer for Advent
In this season of expectation
We prepare to welcome Christ Jesus, Messiah
Into the bustle of our lives
and the hard to find moments of solitude
We prepare to welcome Christ Jesus, Messiah
Into our homes and situations
along with friends and families
We prepare to welcome Christ Jesus, Messiah
Into our hearts, and those often hidden parts of our lives
We prepare to welcome Christ Jesus, Messiah
For beneath the surface of your story
is an inescapable fact
You entered this world
as vulnerable as any one of us
in order to nail that vulnerability to the cross.
Our fears, our insecurities and our sins
all that can separate us from God
exchanged by your Grace for Love.
We cannot comprehend the reasoning
only marvel that Salvation comes to us
through a baby born in a stable,
and reaches out to a world in need.
[Prayer written by John Birch]
Commissioning of Open House This Sunday
This Sunday during our worship gathering, we’ll be having a very special commissioning service for the people of Open House. The leaders and all those connected in community with Open House have been invited to worship with us. We’ll be praying for them as they embark on a new stage in their journey as a church!
Open House is the first church plant of The Bridge. From our start in 2004, we have understood our calling to be a “church that plants churches” — to become many instead of mega. A lot of prayer and listening to God from 2005-2008 led to this new thing that would become “Open House!” Eight people from within our community began meeting together in the Fall of 2008, dreaming about a fresh expression of church that would reach more people and connect them to Jesus!
After a season of prayer and forming their initial identity, they began gathering “publicly” for worshp in the Spring of ’09. Saturday evenings worshiping together in the old Ministry Center were interrupted just a bit(!) as we made the transition to the new facility last fall. But after a brief time of meeting in homes, as soon as the front of the new Nexus Building was available, they began worshiping there. They continue to worship in the front cafe at the building each Saturday night at 6:00.
I encourage you to read more of the story of Open House at their website.
It began as a group of people from The Bridge. It has grown into a unique community with it’s own spiritual DNA. They are connecting with new people and continually growing! It is an exciting time in the life of Open House – and that means it’s an exciting time in the life of The Bridge Community, because we’ll always be one church! I hope you’ll be there this Sunday as we celebrate what God has done and look forward to what he’ll do next!
Summer Reading: Galatians
If you do a Google search on “summer reading,” you’ll find a list of suggestions ranging from children’s classics to mystery thrillers. Amazon.com claims “everyone will be reading” The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Barnes & Noble offers Jane O’Connor’s Fancy Nancy for the kids, and Oprah’s summer reading list includes Dickens forgotten classic Dombey and Son. Whether it’s a full length novel, a magazine from the check-out line rack, or a set of short stories on your electronic reader of choice, summer is the season for people to “catch up on their reading.” The pace of the “dog days” of summer and the extended day-light hours make it the perfect time to curl up with a good read!
A few Sundays ago, I joined in with a “recommendation” of my own! The ancient letter to the church in Galatia, written by the Apostle Paul is my choice for this summer. It’s the kind of book you can read through in one setting, but it’s also the kind of book you can ponder and meditate on one passage at a time. I began teaching from this biblical book a few weeks ago (you can listen to that message here), and this Sunday I’ll be continuing this summer series.
Galatians 5:13 claims that we “have been called to live in freedom.” And what better subject for us to explore on this Sunday, July 4th than “freedom!” But it’s not the same kind of freedom you’ll hear about in patriotic songs or cable news documentaries on the United States’ independence. I want to invite you to gather for worship with The Bridge this Sunday and discover more about the true freedom offered by Jesus Christ – the kind of freedom that leads to giving your life away to something bigger than yourself! Oh, and don’t forget about your summer reading!
Worship Gathering Location Change
Hey everyone – the joys of building renovation continue!
Due to construction at the building, we will be going mobile for a couple of weeks!
We will gather for worship this Sunday morning at Mouser Custom Cabinetry, 2112 North Dixie Avenue – across from Kohl’s department store. They have graciously allowed us to use their large meeting room this Sunday, May 16 and also next Sunday, May 23. This is a great space for worship! We met here one Sunday in the winter when we were snowed out of the school.
Normal worship time, 10:00 am.
I hope you’ll be there as we continue our experiential learning exercise: God is not contained in a building!! Just kidding, this Sunday is a celebration of the ascension of Jesus – an amazing truth for us to encounter!
Please tell anyone you know who may have come, or be planning to come. Thanks!
–
* By the way, this means we’ll have need for a set-up and tear-down crew for the next two weeks. Can you help out? Send me an email to volunteer. Thanks!–
Our Response to the Tragedy in Haiti
This week, we’ve heard the news and seen the images from the devastation caused by a 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. It destroyed Port-au-Prince, the capital city. According to news reports, the death toll may top 100,000. The hospitals are gone, and medical supplies are desperately needed. About 3 million people – one-third of Haiti’s population – were impacted by the quake.
This Sunday in our worship gathering, we will have an opportunity to respond as a community. Compassion and Mercy Associates, or CAMA Services, will provide immediate assistance, including clean water, emergency shelter, medical aid, and other necessities, as well as long-term help in rebuilding efforts, integrating Jesus’ message of redemption with practical acts of compassion. We will be collecting a monetary offering and sending it to CAMA immediately on Monday.
CAMA Services is the relief arm of our denomination, the C&MA. If you’d like to read more about the relief efforts, visit www.cmalliance.org/give/relief/ or call 719-265-2039.
Please pray about what you can give. May God bless our collective offering this Sunday.
Getting to Know The Bridge Community: Arts Ministry
This is Part 3 of a series of blog posts, “Getting to Know The Bridge.” In this post, Matt Black talks about the role of the arts in our community. To read all posts in this series, click here.
We value art and the artist in our community.
Our arts ministry exists to encourage artists within our community to step out in their gifts. We recognize that the role of the artist in the church has been greatly diminished in the past few hundred years. We hope to play our part in recapturing the artist’s role in the church to creatively communicate the gospel, encourage the body, and portray the world we live in. We will give anyone who has creative capacities freedom to grow, be used, and find accountability.
In our first five years as a church, the majority of our community’s artistry has been weighted in musical gifts and songwriting. However, recently we’ve been blessed to see some of our family involved in local theater through the Hardin County Playhouse. Many of these people will lead the way in our first dramatic presentation, “A Christmas Tale,” on December 27th.
In the future we expect to see more forms of art expressed both inside and outside the church as our community grows. I hope that many of you who are reading this may be encouraged to once again nurture some of those art forms that you studied in your youth. It’s tempting to put things aside when they are no longer deemed practical (especially when they may not “pay the bills,” or “send your kids to college!”). But it’s important to realize a lesson of Scripture, that not everything of real value is easy to measure by cultural or material standards. This value, even if we can’t quite put it into words, makes artistic expression worth it!
Everyone has been touched by creative expression. Consider a sunset, courtesy of the “Great Artist!” Many can attest that they’ve seen the realities of the physical and divine in a clearer way through art than through less elegant forms of communication.
If you have artistic gifts, whatever form they may take, please let me know. I’d like to talk with you about how we can feature these talents both within our church and in the greater Elizabethtown, Radcliff community.
Matt Black Pastor of Worship and ArtsMissionaries to Belize Visiting This Sunday
This Sunday, Jervis and Melissa Fisher and their children will be joining us. They are part of a life-changing mission in Belize, Central America. They will introduce LOL Ministry briefly on Sunday morning, and then, they will be sharing in depth in the evening at a Community Group.
LOL Ministry is an international organization that exists to love and nurture orphans, neglected and disadvantaged children and young adults.
Here’s a video that gives a glimpse into the mission:
We’re honored to be hosting them and look forward to finding out ways we can partner with their kingdom-work!
Missionaries to Ecuador Visiting this Weekend
I hope your week has gotten off to a great start! This Sunday, we have some special guests joining us for worship and I want to take a minute and introduce you to them.
Dustan and Rebecka King live in St. Louis and are preparing to go to Loja, Ecuador. They will be involved in ministry to university students at a small cafe in Loja. I hope you’ll come to the worship gathering this Sunday to find out more about them and ways The Bridge can support them in their journey. They will also be hanging out at the Cox House Community Group Sunday evening from 5:00 to 7:30.
Check out their video:
