God s Inspiration of Our Creative Lives

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1 January Newsletter Pastor David Tatgenhorst 568 Montgomery Ave Resources The pastor recommends In the Dark, by Madeleine Baran, is a podcast of investigative reporting from American Public Media. Cathy and I binge listened to two whole seasons of shows on our Christmas trip to Massachusetts and back. The first season is gripping, but the second season is even more amazing because of the impact the show is having. Spoiler alert - as a result of the investigative reporting APM did, the subject of the trials in Mississippi, Curtis Flowers, will have his case reviewed by the US Supreme Court early this year. Curtis Flowers was tried 6 times after being accused of murdering 4 people in a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi. The reporting shows serious problem with the prosecution and the process. It is a riveting podcast. Winter Planning Retreat Saturday, Jan. 26th 9:30 am - 3 pm Please reserve the time. From Pastor David God s Inspiration of Our Creative Lives Our tribute to the carol Silent Night during Advent and Christmas meaningful and fun. The services with bells and stars, mangers, new songs and familiar carols felt alive with the presence of the Spirit. We liked the rituals enough to decide to continue some of them during the coming season after Epiphany. Let me know which of these works or doesn t work for you: 1. Moving of Joys and Concerns to be part of the prayer time later in the service. 2. Opening the service with a conscious transition to worship - a deep breath, and themed music 3. One time for reading scripture instead of two consolidating one or two readings, with music transitioning into the choir anthem 4. Prayer and offering at stations with a creative response to the message

2 What Gives Me Hope Pastor David Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you. - 1 Peter 3:15 Being hopeful (which is not to be confused with being optimistic) in this world is not easy. Hope requires some effort and some practice, but if we put that energy into looking for what gives us hope, we can develop it as a habit, like a muscle memory. What gives you hope this month? Here are three things that give me hope this month: Watching new and old friendships at St. Luke, and the ways people provide healing support to each other. Passage of a bill to raise the minimum wage for city workers to $15 an hour and to direct employers to give part time workers respectful notice of the hours they will work. a play called Barbershop Chronicles imagining men in barbershops all around England and Africa, how their lives are connected and intersect. 5. Communion by intinction Our next worship series starting on January 20th is called, Drawn In: Living Out the Creative Life with God. We are using a book called Drawn In: a Creative Process for Artists, Activists and Jesus Followers by Troy Bronsink. You may purchase a Kindle copy of the book from Amazon for about $8.50, if you would like to dig deeper or follow along. Each Sunday we will hear from someone in the congregation about how their creativity informs their spiritual life and vice versa. If you would like to accept the challenge to talk to us about that subject, please let one of the pastors know. The idea of the series, as you might suspect, is to encourage all of us to understand ourselves as part of God s creation and cocreators with God of our world. We will invite each other to notice beauty and to nurture beauty in our environment. Be prepared to think a bit and be challenged to expand your creative energy, to be surprised by God s creative energy in our lives. Gratitude Thanks to Lauren Nunnelee and Anne Kybert for taking part in the Whites Confronting Racism workshop with 15 clergy and laypeople from our region. Thanks to St. Luke for hosting! Thanks to Pastor Joanne for contributing. Thanks to Elaine McDermott for providing greens for decorating the sanctuary, and to Jim McDermott and friends for bringing up the trees and decorating. Thank you to Joanne Miles for a beautiful Christmas altar, and for leading the Advent Bible study. Thank you to Bill Reim for designing slide presentation for Christmas worship. Thanks to Matthew Phillips-English, Marcell Bellinger and the choir for a beautiful Christmas Cantata. Thanks to Pastor Joanne for decorating the chapel for our Blue Christmas service. Thanks to Pastor Joanne for organizing the new family Christmas Eve service. Thank you to Emilie Moyer and Paul Himmelberg for helping to make it happen. Thanks for Marcell and Matthew for organizing the brass quartet that

3 graced our Christmas Eve service, and to Noah Nichilo for playing in it. January Newsletter Thanks to Virginia and Fred Vivino for bringing wassail to the Christmas Eve service for people to enjoy. Thanks to everyone for exchanges of gifts and love during the holidays! Thank you to our new members class, Ann Abbott, Beth Camaora, Terri Leone, Noah Nichilo, Scott Cooper, and Maria Wilson, their commitment to God and themselves. Some people at St. Luke are finding new and better ways to pay their pledge to make sure their support for our community continues through the whole year. You can set up your bank account to make a regular contribution. Most banks can make these arrangements online with no cost. This way you save the fee that St. Luke pays for our online gifts. And your contribution can be automatic so you don t even have to think about it. May generosity be our watchword! We will share from our plenty. We will give for those in need. We will praise lavishly. We will encourage frequently. We will care passionately. We will love wholeheartedly. Find our online donation site at The first time you make a gift, you input your routing information from your bank account, and after that you can make gifts any time you want without a checkbook or credit card! Thanks for your generosity to St. Luke ministries. Jan., 2019 Drawn In to Life with God January 6th, 2019 Epiphany Sunday Every Sunday during the Advent/Christmas season we have added stars around the sanctuary - stars with prayers written on them, prayers for people we love, prayers for ourselves, prayers for our community. This Saturday is the twelfth day of Christmas and Sunday is Epiphany, a major Christian holiday celebrating the presentation of the Christ child to the world in the from of the three magi. The message this morning is Follow Your Star. As we enter 2019 we can't help thinking about who we are and what God wants us to be about in this new time. On this first Sunday of the New Year we celebrate Holy Communion, the very presence of the Living God. Every Sunday during the Advent/Christmas season, we have rung bells at the beginning of our service. This Sunday if there are some young people who would like to ring the bell in our tower, you may come at 9:50 am to ring the bell to call people to worship. The men from the Men's LIFE group will help young ones to not get pulled up into the tower by the rope. We will also ring a bell in the service which has the inscription "Weselyn (sic) Service Guild, Bryn Mawr PA, October 20, 1969." If you would like to bring bells from home to help us ring in the New Year, please join this ritual at the beginning of our morning celebration. The Men's LIFE group meets for breakfast and spiritual support at 8 am in Lurwick Hall. After church there will be bagels and conversation available as usual in the narthex of the church. At 11:30 am the New Members class will meet with Pastor David. We invite others from the church to help take down the Christmas trees and candles and carefully put them away for another year. Read: Isaiah 60:1-2, 5-6; Matthew 2:7-11

4 January 13, 2019 Baptism of Jesus Sunday; Installation of Leaders We celebrate baptism on the Baptism of Jesus Sunday, the outward sign of the inward grace the Spirit offers to all people. The message for the morning is Connect with Your Beloved-ness. Through our baptism, we hear the words God spoke to Jesus addressed to each one of us, This is my beloved child. Henri Nouwen says that to pray to to let that voice speak to the center of our being, to our guts, and to let that voice resound in our whole being. This Sunday we install and pray for the officers and leaders of the church for After church, the Parents LIFE group meets for support and discussion about how the church can support them as parents. Read: Isaiah 43:5-7, Luke 3: January 20, 2019 Human Relations Sunday On Martin Luther King s birthday weekend, we will have our Winter Planning retreat on Saturday, the 19th from 9:30 am to 3 pm. On Sunday we begin a six week sermon/worship series Drawn In: Living Out the Creative Life with God. This first week is subtitled Dream, which refers both to the creative process of starting with a dream or vision, and also to MLK s dream for a country that treats all people with respect and dignity. We dream of a church that makes a difference in making that goal a reality. This weekend we will offer a number of opportunities for involvement and work for that world. Those opportunities include a talk by David Billings, an organizer with Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond. He will speak at FUMCOG in Germantown and at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church about his book on racism titled Deep Denial. Rev. William Barber will be speaking on Wednesday, Jan. 23rd, at 6 pm at Irvine Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania. There are also opportunities on Monday for service and action, and a POWER People s Congress at Bibleway Baptist Church. Plan: Luke 4:13-21 January 27, 2019 Third Sunday after the Epiphany The second week of the Drawn In: Living Out the Creative Life with God series uses the word Hover as our theme. The word refers to the part of the creative process where one pulls back to hover over the process to look at the whole. We will have a Church Council meting after church today with some important items to consider. Read: Luke 4:1-13 Applying Bible Principles Let s play an old game called Let s Pretend. Let s pretend that we are poor, dirt poor, as poor as proverbial church mice. Suddenly, without warning, a financier crosses our path and makes a startling announcement. Today, the financier is creating a special bank account for us.

5 Starting tomorrow and continuing every day for the rest of our lives, each morning he will deposit into our account $86,400 that is ours to use as we like. There s only one catch. Every day, whatever we do not use will be lost at the end of the day. No balance can be carried forward in this account. Given that prospect, each of us would no doubt draw out every cent every day. Dr. R. G. Lee, a pastor in Memphis, wrote: Well, you have such a bank, and its name is Time. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it rules off as lost whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries no balances. It allows no overdrafts. Each day, the bank named Time opens a new account with you. Each night it burns the records of the day. If you fail to use the day s deposits, the loss is yours. God entrusts to each of us 86,400 seconds seven days a week, 365 days a year. How we use this resource is up to us. We can waste those seconds, minutes and hours in pursuit of things that don t really matter in the light of eternity. Or we can invest them by using as many of them as possible in serving the Lord, especially here at St. Luke. 1. How do we value one year? Ask a student who failed a grade. 2. How do we value one month? Ask a mother whose baby arrived prematurely. 3. How do we value one week? Editors of weekly newspapers know. 4. How do we value one hour? Ask someone who lies terminally ill waiting for a loved one who is late. 5. How do we value one minute? Ask someone who missed a plane, a train, or a very important engagement that can never be rescheduled. 6. How do we value one second? Ask an Olympic medalist, someone who just missed having an accident, or someone saying good-bye to a loved one they will never see again. Last week you were given 168 hours or 10,080 minutes or 604,800 seconds. How many of each was used in pursuit of your interests and activities? How many were used in seeking first God s kingdom and God s righteousness? In retrospect, what was the real value you placed on the time God gave you? So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart (Psalm 90:12). Calendar Tuesday, Jan. 8, 7 pm LIFE group Leaders Friday, Jan. 11, 6 pm Children s Celebration Movie and Game Night Sunday, Jan. 13, 10 am Installation and Blessing of Officers and Leaders Tuesday, Jan. 15, 7 pm Letters from Anne & Martin at Main Line Reform Temple Thurs, Jan. 17, 6:30 pm, A Conversation of Race and Faith at WHYY, 150 N. 6th St. Mon. Jan. 21: MLK Day of Service and Action Wed., Jan. 23, MLK: An Interfaith Conversation with Dr. William Barber, Irvine Auditorium at UPenn

6 7 pm David Billings, author of Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in US History and Life speaking at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church; Sat. Jan. 26th, 9:30 am-3 pm Winter Planning Retreat at St. Luke Church Sun. Jan. 27th, 11:30 am Church Council Meeting Tues. Jan. 29th, 7 pm Leadership Team (?) Planning Your Will? Keep St. Luke Ministries Alive for Decades Name St. Luke in your will as a beneficiary of your investment account. Don t forget to fill out the Five Wishes form to act as your living will. Find our online donation site at The first time you make a gift, you input your routing information from your bank account, and after that you can make gifts any time you want without a checkbook or credit card! Thanks for your generosity to St. Luke ministries.