Wales Center Community Baptist Church

Answer:  B - Mark 1: 21-27

Birthdays for September

9/2          Terry Kunick

                 Nathan Putnam

9/3          Alyssa Caiati

9/4          Doris Noyes

9/7          Richard Hess

9/11        Brittany Ratka

9/16        Lillian Hausauer

9/20        Shirley Donnelly

9/24        Gretchen Pace

9/25        Kaleigh Lauck

Anniversaries

9/4 Eric & Allison Laurienzo

9/21 Ron & Nancy Settle

Calendar for September

Trustees need to meet to line up budget

9/3          Cookies & Prayer 6 PM

9/6          Labor Day

9/12        National Grandparents Day         

Bring a dish to pass dinner

9/23        First Day of Autumn

9/26        Men’s Breakfast

Compassion

       Do you ever think about the word compassion? It may come from the Latin for “to suffer with” or “to walk with. The Bible calls us to be compassionate - to join one another in suffering and to join one another in the journey of life. We share together and are at one with each other in joys and in suffering.

       Kenneth Carder, Duke Divinity School professor and retired United Methodist bishop writes: “Christian discipleship requires being held in love and being held accountable. We simply cannot follow Christ apart from a community that holds us in compassion and calls us to accountability. Solitary discipleship is a misnomer. We cannot be Christian alone.”

Pay attention to the ways God may be calling you to show compassion and receive the love and care of others.

Church Bulletin Bloopers

Announcement in the church bulletin for a National Prayer and Fasting Conference:  “The cost for attending the Fasting and Prayer conference includes meals.”

Miss Mason sang “I Will Not Pass This Way Again”, giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.

The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been canceled due to a conflict.

Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir.  They need all the help they can get.

Barbara remains in the hospital and needs blood donors for more transfusions.  She is also having trouble sleeping and requests tapes of Pastor Jack’s sermons.

During the absence of our pastor, we enjoyed the rare privilege of hearing a good sermon when J. F. Stubbs supplied our pulpit.

The Pastor will preach his farewell message, after which the choir will sing “Break Forth Into Joy”.

The way I explained it was a bit humorous

My house is not cluttered with junk; it’s just “passage restrictive” and the closets are “closure prohibitive.”

You weren’t really sleeping in church; you were actually “rationing consciousness.”

You did not arrive late; you just had a “rescheduled arrival time.”

And that bad hair day --- it’s actually a case of “rebellious follicle syndrome.”

No sir! No Ma’am!  I don’t believe it!  You’re not talking too much; you’re just “verbally generous.”

-Adapted for Senior Adults from Christianvoices.com

       Plant a Tree, Buy a Field

       The renowned reformer Martin Luther is quoted as saying, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

     In Jeremiah 32:6-15 (lectionary for September 26, 2010) we read of Jeremiah buying a field. This wouldn’t be too consequential except for the fact that Jeremiah knew the pending realities: Judah would be overrun by foreigners and the people would be sent into exile. Yet, Jeremiah invests in the future.

How many of us would have that kind of faith or courage? Jeremiah provides us with a wonderful example – as does Martin Luther several centuries later. Even if we knew tragedy and difficulty were coming, we are challenged still to trust in, and invest in, the future God has promised. May we never be afraid to plant a tree.

Christian America

Then-

John Adams, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were …..the general principles of Christianity.”

Teddy Roosevelt, “The teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally …impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teachings were removed.”

Woodrow Wilson said, “America was born a Christian nation – America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.”

Herbert Hoover, “American life is builded, and can alone survive, upon ….the fundamental philosophy announced by the Savior nineteen centuries ago.”

Harry Truman, “This is a Christian Nation.”

Senate Judiciary Committee of 1852, “We are Christians, not because the law demands it, not to gain exclusive benefits or to avoid legal disabilities, but from choice and education; and in a land thus universally Christian, what is to be expected, what desired, but that we pay a due regard to Christianity.”

Justice Joseph Story 1833 – “One of the beautiful boasts of our municipal jurisprudence is that Christianity is part of the Common Law…..I verily believe Christianity necessary to the support of civil society.”

And now-

Barack Hussein Obama announced to the world from a trip to Turkey that Americans, “do not consider ourselves a Christian nation,” and from Egypt he declared that America was, “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.”

How times have changed!