First Congregational Church

Pastor’s Brooks sabbatical is a great opportunity for our church members to share their gifts with the congregation. In the words of Erin Moregenstern in Night Circus;

“Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. … Do not forget that… there are many kinds of magic, after all.”

Click here to read or listen to the first in the series.

The theme for tomorrow’s worship service is gratitude. From an opening meditation on gratitude to songs of thanksgiving, we will let this uplifting focus guide us. The sermon is entitled “A Fairy-Tale Church,” and it will imagine a place in which a spirit of gratitude comes to be the center of a community’s life.

Start your reading now! From mid-September to mid-November, our church will have book groups for three different books. We will start sign ups for the book groups in August, but if you want to start reading now, these are the books that were decided by a planning group at our church:

Beyond the Bullet: Personal Stories of Gun Violence Aftermath by Heidi Yewman

The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben

Each of these books relates to one of the three areas of focus for the Faith Action Network in the coming year: poverty, environment, and gun violence. The Faith Action Network is a state-wide coalition of faith communities seeking social change.

Before Nirvana became one of the biggest names in rock music in the 1990s, Slim Moon organized concerts for them and loaned them his fourtrack player to record demo versions of their songs. With Nirvana’s help, Moon later started his own music label to release CDs from underground performers, many of them local. Some of them eventually became international music stars. Among the talented acts produced by his label are the Decemberists (a chart topping folk rock group) and Elliott Smith (a top 20 performer known for his songs on the Goodwill Hunting soundtrack).

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