Recent report from the church

Posting a few recent reports about how we put a lot of the theories here into action.

It was good to relax this past Sunday as we gathered for conversation, to watch more of the documentary on monastic life Into The Great Silence, share communion and fix and eat a healthy lunch. It is also good to see that the garden we have planted for the community is yielding produce for our center and food pantry, and thanks for other donations of home grown fresh produce for it from others.

Looking ahead: This Sunday and next we will watch and discuss the movie Simon Birch and John Irving's book A Prayer for Owen Meany which "suggested" the movie, both as a way of launching a study and discussion of the Gospel of Mark and radical discipleship in our time, a time when it is both quite easy to be a Christian and extremely hard to be a follower of Jesus.

First Sundays of each month we will pick back up on our Church Without Walls Sundays, doing things together in the community or worshipping with other groups. Second Sundays during our holy conversation time we will de-brief our lives and bring back reports on how we are living as missionaries of love and justice, sharing stories and struggles. On other Sundays we will offer turns at doing Odysseys sharing something special from our life story, or something we have found that inspires and sustains us, or a passion we want to use in the world. Children will continue with lessons from the book Hide and Seek With God.

Special days: Saturday Sept. 26 will be a day of transforming the landscape, and lives, at Cherokee School, with gardening from 8 am to 11 am, with a special lunch and tour of the school as a gift from Bonnie and I in celebration of the day we met 50 years ago in kindergarden at Cherokee; then more gardening in the afternoon. For more and ways to help, in person or with other ways, contact Bonnie at BJAshing@aol.com. Come be our guest and help us help the school. On Saturday Oct. 31 we will host our annual big community Halloween Party at our A Third Place Center; help us keep making the celebration bigger and better; Sunday, Nov. 15 at 2 pm help Turley United Methodist Church as it celebrates its 100th anniversary; Nov. 22 will be the Thanksgiving Service and the annual Reverse Offering Sunday when we give out money for people to use for acts of random kindness beauty justice or to seed projects and causes that make a diffeerence, then on Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday we share stories of how we used the monies; On Nov. 29 we begin Advent sundays leading to Christmas Eve communion.

Stay tuned for other special days of community service through A Third Place and special fund-raisers.

Thanks and blessings and more soon,
Ron

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