The Second Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of Peace, and much about this service will be designed to help you feel peace within the beauty and comfort of Advent.  Members of the Board of Mission and Social Action will light the Advent Candle with the children’s help.  We will read reassuring words from the Prophet Micah (5:2-5a) about our security in God, a passage that ends “and he shall be the one of peace.”  We will hear one of the most beautiful passages in all the Bible, the Benedictus of Zechariah, the Father of John the Baptist, that ends:

“By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes: December 6, 2015 →

We are entering Advent this Sunday, which may be the most beautiful and beloved season of the church year.  This is especially true if we include the Christmas Eve service, but each Sunday in Advent is full of music and rituals and readings designed to fill us with the Advent blessings of hope, peace, joy and love.

Advent is a season to savor, and this First Sunday of Advent will offer many opportunities to feel moved. Early in the service the children will bring in greens to decorate the Advent candle table.  The children and adult choir will sing Light One Candle as the Anthem, and then they will light the candle of Hope together.
Continue reading Upcoming Service Notes: November 29, 2015 →

This Sunday we will celebrate Thanksgiving, Neighbors in Need Sunday, Reign of Christ Sunday and the Last Sunday after Pentecost which means the end of the church year.  It’s  a big day!  Next Sunday Advent and the new church year begin.  This week we will reflect on all the wonderful gifts of the past year in our lives and in the church (including this Saturday’s 60th Annual Wild Game Supper), and also consider the promises in scripture of far greater things to come.  We will look ahead up the path of this congregation’s aspirations, and celebrate the vision we have formed together.  The sermon title will be, “And All These Things Will Be Given to You As Well.”

The service will celebrate all this with a greatest hits of scriptures and music.  We will read two favorite passages, Psalm 95 and a section of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:25-33, and we will sing three beloved Thanksgiving hymns, Come, Ye Thankful People Come, and We Plow the Fields and Scatter, and We Gather Together.   The choir will sing the beautiful hymn, Savior of the Nations, Come, as the Introit and the traditional Netherlands folk song, Prayer of Thanksgiving as the anthem.  Organist John Atwood will play as the prelude J. S. Bach’s Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland BWV 661, one of the Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes, a master work of the great master of church music.   It is based on the hymn the choir will sing as the Introit.  For the offertory John will play a piece based on the same hymn composed by Bach’s cousin, J. G. Walther.  The postlude will be a “Fugue in C Major” by yet another of the baroque greats, Johann Pachelbel.