July 10th, 2010
HAVE YOU BROUGHT YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS YET?
This is how we grow our fellowship so don’t miss extending the easiest invite of the summer…
Come and enjoy the simple pleasures of good company with new & old friends on a simple summer night.
Outside games, music, good talk.
Youth groups meet 7:00-8:00 outside as well. Come early to eat with us.
Everyone Invited. Bring a friend.
Take out or eat in. $5 for BBQ meal. Kids get free hot dogs.
February 17th at 7:00 pm
Worship, music & imposition of ashes
Our journey to the joy of Easter begins with acknowledging our need for a savior.
Join us each Sunday in Lent as we explore the life of Jonah and Jesus’ call to us to heed the sign of Jonah’s life.
Trite as the saying may be, it’s still true. If you don’t care where you’re going, any road will do. But how often do we truly not care where we end up? Even when we say we don’t care who picks the movie or the restaurant, just let someone suggest something and you’ll suddenly find you did care. The New Year presents all of us at Shiloh with the time to consider where it is we want to end up this year. End up individually. End up as a congregation. End up as part of the community around us. The New Year presents us with a time to decide what it is we actually care about. Then having figured out what that is, it is up to us as followers of Jesus Christ to try and discern how God would have us behave.
We begin this January building upon the momentum of our Advent and Christmas. Administrative Council will be meeting in retreat in mid-January for a training time on strengths-based leadership and communication. The entire church is invited to save Sunday evening, January 31st for a potluck dinner State of the Church gathering in which we will share our thoughts on Shiloh’s mission and ministry for 2010. Our Youth Group will continue its activities through Breath of Life, weekly gatherings and a weekend outing to the Winter Blitz 2010 at the Kentucky Convention Center. This yearly gathering of the youth of the Kentucky Conference is a loud, lively inspiring time of faith-sharing from some of the country’s leading youth speakers and musicians. Our Tuesday night small group resumes with “Bo’s Café”, a story of one man’s encounters with grace at an amazing café, published by the people who brought The Shack to publication. Our Sunday School class for adults will also begin a new study in January, “I Can’t See God Because I’m in the Way” in which we explore the possibility that God’s abundant life is present for us if we just change our spiritual perspective. Our women’s small groups on Sunday morning and Friday lunch continue meeting and will be selecting new materials later in the month.
The one thing we all know we care about is that Shiloh’s sense of family, where we know each person by name, continues to be central to our mission and ministry. Be sure to know that you will be missed if you are not with us in worship, in fellowship, in study and in ministry this January.
Pastor Susan
Our Youth leaders are planning a Friday-Saturday Youth work mission trip through our friends at EDGE in Louisville for one of the weekends in October. This would be a great time for our middle school and high schoolers, as well as their parents, to join in a time of work and fun and prayer as we become the hands and feet of Jesus to our community.
Join us during this season of Lent 2009 while we ask just how we are meant to seek God’s guidance for our lives. We can do more than just pray “God, open our eyes” and it is this ‘more’ that we will share in sermon and song and Scripture while we prepare ourselves for God’s triumphant revealing of His ultimate will for our lives in Jesus Christ.
I want to make God more alive to someone else this year.
To all the saints in Christ Jesus in Shiloh United Methodist Church:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Imagine if we were greeted that way as we began our day…as we ran into Kroger’s for last minute groceries…as we opened the door to our house. Sounds wildly improbable, doesn’t it? Admit it, sounds kind of extreme, doesn’t it? Sort of like we thought we were like those New Testament people. The ones we call saints.
Guess what? That is what we’re called to be. Most importantly, it’s what God gives us the power to be. I hope you will be with us in worship with us throughout November as we celebrate the saints in our lives. The people who “made God more alive” to you. We’ll hear stories from the heart of ways saints in this congregation have made each other’s lives richer in love, richer in meaning, richer in laughter and sorrow shared. We’ll also hear stories of times it looked like we were the ones pouring out God’s love, only to find it flowing over into us as well.
The reality of being the church at Shiloh United Methodist, being the saints who’ve loved each other and served God, is that we promise first, our presence and prayers and then, our money and our time. When we miss coming together in worship and fellowship, we miss the vital love that the Spirit of God uses to connect us to each other. It’s not our power that makes us saints to each other: it’s God’s. When we ignore the vital role that money plays in our ability to worship and minister together, we ignore the words of Jesus that where your money is, there your heart is also.
We can hold onto what we have, and find we have less.
Or we can open our hearts, our schedules and our checkbooks…
And find that the ‘someone else’ God is more alive to…is all of us.