Thank you for visiting our website. We have included text and photos to introduce ourselves
to you, but there is so much more to us than
you will find here. Look at our pages. Get
a feel for who we are and what we value. We
hope that you will find something that invites
you to visit in person. You are always welcome.

Read our Covenant and Mission Statement

CURRENT SUNDAY SCHEDULE:
8:45 Media Library Opens (Learn more...)
9:15 Sunday School (See Summer Schedule)
9:15 Vietnamese Sunday School
10:20 Deacons' Prayer Group
10:30 Worship Service
August 1 Order of Worship
10:30 Vietnamese Worship Service
5:00 Youth Choir
5:45 Youth Snack Supper
6:00 Youth Group

WEDNESDAY SCHEDULE:
~ Wednesday Activities Resume Aug 4
5:00 Library Opens
5:00 Children's Choirs
5:15 Wed Family Supper
5:15 Childcare Available
6:00 Announcements and Prayer
6:20 Mission Friends
(children age 4 - kindergarten)
6:20 Children's Missions Activities
(children in grades 1-6)
6:20 Youth Activities
6:20 Adult Study
6:20 Brass Ensemble Rehearsal
6:20 Handbells Rehearsal
7:15 Adult Choir Rehearsal

~ August 2010 ~

We are forever telling stories about ourselves. Stories permit the storyteller to become the narrator of his or her life without becoming the author of it. For the one who professes faith in God as creator, storytelling is quite necessary.
Stories are one medium by which we describe ourselves. But they are more. All need reminding that his or her story is worth listening to by others. The neglected Book of Lamentations illustrates this point. It is a story of a personified city. The narrator likens Jerusalem to a widow. How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she that was great among the nations! The narrator and the personified city recognize the isolation. The latter is desperate to learn that her story is worth listening to by others.
A friend and deacon from New Orleans emailed lastweek. He is putting together a sermon consisting of stories. August 29 marks the fifth anniversary of hurricane Katrina.
He wrote offering me a voice. It gave me pause. On the first, and even the second anniversary of the storm, folks told stories in conditions of fatigue, uncertainty, and some pain. Most had taken stock of what survived the wreckage of 29 August 2010. The assumed story was over, but a new one had not yet taken shape. Half a decade later, I can describe what happened in exquisite detail. Long-term memory is resilient despite the fact that the memory can be hurt repeatedly. Legendary storyteller Eudora Welty writes, As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, memory lives for us. It lives for us in our coming to assign the remembered event its significance.
Of course there is an inherent risk with telling stories. Perhaps you have witnessed a scene about which the reminiscing and remembering did not jibe with your memories.
You adamantly rejected the retelling and grew angry. In a strange turn of events the anger empowered you. You found your voice. You discovered the power of becoming a storyteller.
I have not decided on submitting a story for my friend's sermon. I have anticipated some of the storytelling that will be shared that Sunday. The thing that will make Katrina stories good is the act of witness. It will be storytellers telling not what the audience wants to hear but what the survivor knows to be true because he or she lived it. That it is always a challenge to remember past hurts and trauma. That we do not need to let ourselves be defined by what happened in the past. The good story enables one to confront the past and find its burden releasing. Again it is Welty who reminds us,
But to be released is to tell, unburden it.
We are always telling stories about ourselves. Seeing that we cannot always control what happens, storytelling offers us a medium to live these events differently. Or as it
has been said, storytelling allows one to become the narrator of his or her story without becoming the author of his/her life.

Steven