Leslie
FBCP Families | 01.29.21
Hey, Friends!
It's been a rainy week, and we know the ground is thirsty for these showers! I hope you can find some moments to curl up and get cozy with your little ones (and listen to the pitter patter of the raindrops!). I also hope the cold and wet weather is a reminder to pray for those who do not have shelter and to ask how we might serve and advocate for them. See the information below for one way we can respond to the call to love our neighbors as we partner with Friends In Deed.
Bad Weather Supplies
We have the opportunity to partner with Friends In Deed as they gather supplies for those without shelter in the upcoming months, especially when weather is less predictable and often harsh. You can check out the full list of supplies that are needed here, and we will be collecting them the next time we are back in the garage for worship. If you need us to come pick up items or arrange a handoff, we can do that, too!
This Day In History
This coming week has lots of dates that have historical significance for a variety of reasons, particularly in regards to the arts and justice. The folks over at SALT compile these weekly Theologian's Almanac, and I thought this week's edition might provide some inspiration for talking to kids about some of these important people and dates. You might even have them do a little detective work to figure out what's so special about that date or person and report back to the family with their intel.
Sunday
Kids
If you want to do a little Bible reading and discussion at home, here's a resource you could use this Sunday. It's a short passage with lots of questions and a guided reading to foster wonder and imagination. Stay tuned for upcoming details about some bedtime stories we will be sharing with our kids.
And mark your calendars for February 13th for our next Liturgy for Families with Kids! We can't wait to share Lent materials and spread lots of love as we worship in the park together!
Youth
This week we will zoom with the youth at 12PM, and sometime this weekend we will drop off a bag of supplies to use during our hangout. Here is the meeting link that you can use to hop on the hangout. We look forward to a fun time together with our youth!
Sending you so much love and virtual hugs!
With gratitude for you,
Pastor Lindsay & Pastor Mary
Friday Updates 01.29.2021
Happy Friday, FBCP!
Today we have an audio from Pastor John Jay with all the announcements for the week. You can listen for full details by clicking the link below, but here are the highlights:
This week we are worshipping online with a new Liturgy for the Living Room, which we will release on Sunday morning.
We hope to be back in the garage for worship on February 7. Stay tuned for updates and safety protocol as we prepare to worship in person again. As always, we will livestream the audio of the service and post a recorded version for those who aren’t able to attend.
This Sunday at 6PM you are invited to join clergy and congregants in the Pasadena area for a virtual time of prayer for our nation and our community. The Clergy Community Coalition will be hosting this time, and you can see the graphic below for information about how to join over Zoom.
On the first Sunday of Lent, our time of worship will be a service of lament and a celebration of the lives of Harold Lane, Bob Maase, and Tom Harris. We’ll share more details in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we will be creating an online space to share your memories. If you have something you want to share in memory of Harold Lane, Bob Maase, or Tom Harris, you can send a written, audio, or video version to lindsay@fbcpasadena.
This Week’s Tracks:
Mary
Gretchen
Lindsay
John Jay
Sunday Special | EP 46
Hi, Friends at FBCP,
Today Pastor Mary shares the story of Jonah and the big fish, and it's a good reminder about how compassionate God is and how we should respond when God calls us to participate in His work. It turns out God is all about pursuing us no matter what!
And we wanted to share a resource from our friends at Illustrated Ministry. It has an interactive prayer practice that kids can do in their homes to bless their spaces and learn some Bible verses. We hope it helps you continue to create a sacred space at home to help you worship during the week and sense God’s presence.
Stay safe and know that you are deeply loved by your church family and by a compassionate God. Happy Sunday, friends!
So much love,
Pastors Lindsay and Mary
Leslie
FBCP Updates | 01.22.2021
Happy Friday, Friends at FBCP!
We have a few reminders and updates to share with you today, so you can listen to the audio below for all the info or read on for a condensed version of the details. Grace and peace to you this evening.
Less without you,
The FBCP Community
Sunday Worship Online
This Sunday we will not meet in the garage and will instead worship with another Liturgy for the Living Room to keep one another safe during the surge in the pandemic. We are excited to share another liturgy full of various voices in our community, so we pray you are able to find a meaningful time and place to listen and engage with worship and your church family. We will continue to monitor the virus and keep you updated on our plans for worship in the coming weeks.
Grieving Together
Recently we lost three pillars in the FBCP community—Harold Lane, Bob Maase, and Tom Harris. Though we cannot come together in person to honor them right now, we know it is crucial that we have a way to share our collective grief and remember these friends well. To that end, we are in the process of making an online space to share memories from our church community. We’ll have a separate page to honor each of those friends, and you are all invited to share any favorite memories you have of Harold Lane, Bob Maase, or Tom Harris for us to include in these online spaces. Some of you have already submitted memories, and we are so grateful to have your contribution. We would welcome any of the following formats for your submissions:
written
audio recording
video
Please email your contribution to lindsay@fbcpasadena.com or use the buttons below. If you have trouble sending something in or have any questions, you can reach out to Lindsay for help. Thank you in advance for these precious memories.
FBCP Families | 01.22.01
Hey, Friends!
We pray you continue to stay safe and healthy in the midst of the pandemic, and we invite you to join us in praying for all the healthcare workers who are fighting so hard to love and care for people well. Our hope is that numbers will continue to recede so that we can move back to worship in the garage. Until then, we hope you are able to worship with the online liturgy in a way that is meaningful to you. I find it so helpful to hear the voices of our community in order to reorient myself to a posture of gratitude and worship. May this weekend be a time of rest, play, and worship for all!
Bad Weather Supplies
We have the opportunity to partner with Friends In Deed as they gather supplies for those without shelter in the upcoming months, especially when weather is less predictable and often harsh. You can check out the full list of supplies that are needed here, and we will be collecting them the next time we are back in the garage for worship. If you need us to come pick up items or arrange a handoff, we can do that, too!
Free Parenting Webinar
Hand In Hand Parenting is offering a free, three-part web series to help you tackle the hard stuff about parenting in isolation and under stress during a pandemic. The sessions will cover when to set limits in a time that's already so restricted, connecting well when you're together all the time, and what to do when it feels like nagging is the new norm.
Sunday
Kids
This Sunday we will be sharing a story and some resources for worshipping and praying at home in interactive ways. We look forward to our next time together in the park, but until then know that God is very present in your homes and with your families!
Youth
This week we will zoom with the youth at 12PM so we can deliver lunch! We will all have pizzas sent from Blaze, so please send your youth's pizza order to me when you can. Here is the meeting link that you can use to hop on the hangout. We look forward to a fun time together with our youth!
Sending you so much love and virtual hugs!
With gratitude for you,
Pastor Lindsay & Pastor Mary
Mary
Paul
Tonight we invite you to pause and listen to this timeless hymn, remembering that God is still very present in the world He created. The lyrics are below if you want to meditate on them while you listen. Grace and peace this evening, friends.
This Is My Father’s World
This is my Father's world,
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.
This is my Father's world:
I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas--
His hand the wonders wrought.
This is my Father's world:
The birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white,
Declare their Maker's praise.
This is my Father's world:
He shines in all that's fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass,
He speaks to me everywhere.
This is my Father's world:
O let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the Ruler yet.
This is my Father's world:
Why should my heart be sad?
The Lord is King: let the heavens ring!
God reigns; let earth be glad!
Lindsay
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
A reflection from John Kelly as we commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today, we celebrate a man born in the era of the Great Depression—who became a leader of the Poor People’s Campaign. We remember a man whose childhood was backlit by the noisy chaos of World War II—who came to be America’s leading proponent of nonviolence. We honor a man born Black, amidst the rubble of the reconstructed South—whose life and ministry came to give the voiceless hope, and the hopeless a voice.
Today, much will be said, shared, and posted about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: that he was peaceful; that he sought unity, not division; that he was a good, Christian leader. And none of this is false. Still, others will assure us that King wasn’t as radical, when compared to contemporary society. They’ll ignore his staunch positions on the immorality of poverty and nuclear warfare, and his criticisms of the US government for propagating both. They’ll characterize the Montgomery Bus Boycott and subsequent Civil Rights Movement romantically, as past lessons that America learned once and for all. Many will point to out-of-context quotes, seeking to prove that “King just wanted us all to get along.”
But such broad generalizations make light of King’s steely convictions, intellectual acuity, and God-fueled hope. Throughout his life, King faced all that the American experience offers—wars, economic crises, warped patriotism, and immoral politics. But despite the temptation to give into inertia and go with the flow of the status quo, King based his life on a different narrative. Though he faced defamation, dehumanization, and even death, King’s faith in the liberating, self-sacrificing God of Scripture gave him the courage to stand on the right side of history—with “the least of these,” to borrow a familiar phrase.
So today, we share a clip from the very end of the last speech King ever gave, just several hours before his death. Working in Memphis for more equitable wages and working conditions for sanitization workers, King remained hopeful that God remains faithful. King remained strong in his allegiance to Christ, not to some idea of power or the status-quo. Up to the hours before his death, King worked to build the Beloved Community.
Though much more could and will be said, today, and tomorrow, and the next day, may we all be practically shaped by King’s character and legacy. May it prompt us to speak truth to power, and to realize that if our spiritual convictions don’t shape our skin-bound society, we might be living by a different narrative than the one found throughout Scripture.
For Further Reading: "Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]"
FBCP Updates 01.16.2021
Today we have some important news to share with our church family. You can listen to the full details and a pastoral word from John Jay in the audio below, but here are some key highlights:
We will not be meeting in the garage for the rest of this month in order to keep everyone safe and healthy. We will continue to release a new Liturgy for the Living Room on Sunday mornings over email and text, and we are excited to share those with you. We hope you will have time and space to worship from afar until we are able to be back together in person.
We are sad to share that Tom Harris died today at 1PM. He was another pillar of our church and special person in the FBCP family. He will be dearly missed, and his legacy will continue to impact us in years to come. Please pray for his family as they process their grief and for our congregation. We will share more soon about our plans to honor and remember Tom and others we have lost in the last month, so stay tuned.
Remember to give yourself permission to breathe and return to your center in Christ. If you can, find a place to go that will give you a new perspective if things feel too hard and intense. You are loved and held by God in the midst of all these things.
Much love from your FBCP family.
FBCP Family Updates | 01.16.21
Hey, Friends!
We hope you are enjoying this beautiful Saturday and the sunshine! And in case you missed John Jay's communication on Wednesday, we will be taking a few more weeks off from outdoor church in the garage and releasing a Liturgy for the Living Room online. We pray that your family finds ways to worship God and make time for play and rest in your home.
Because Monday is when we remember and celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we wanted to share this short video by Kid President that your kids might enjoy watching. We pray that we would all continue to seek God's vision for justice, goodness, mercy, and righteousness.
Bad Weather Supplies
We have the opportunity to partner with Friends In Deed as they gather supplies for those without shelter in the upcoming months, especially when weather is less predictable and often harsh. You can check out the full list of supplies that are needed here, and we will be collecting them the next time we are back in the garage for worship. If you need us to come pick up items or arrange a handoff, we can do that, too!
On that note, we will be sharing some information from Zach Hoover at LA Voice on Monday regarding ways to contact local representatives regarding an extension of the local eviction moratorium. This initiative is important to keep people in their homes during this particularly challenging time. Stay tuned for more information on how you can participate (and youth can, too!).
Iris Chen's New Book!
Our own Iris Chen just launched her book called Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent, and we are so excited for her (and that she is part of our church family!). We have copies for our families with kids if you would like one, and we'll be interviewing her on an upcoming liturgy. Yay! Stay tuned for information about a chance for parents to talk and hear more in a virtual discussion.
Sunday
Kids
This Sunday we will not have a video since we had our liturgy in the park today (and what a great day it was!). But here is a resource that includes scripture and a few activities you might want to do at home to create some space for worship. We encourage you to read scripture as a family and allow wonder and questions to guide you as you engage with God's word!
Youth
We are sad that we will not be gathering with the youth in the park tomorrow, but we know that will help us all stay safe and healthy during the surge. So, this week we will have a Youth Zoom gathering at 2pm. Here is the meeting link that you can use to hop on the hangout.
Sending you so much love and virtual hugs!
With gratitude for you,
Pastor Lindsay & Pastor Mary
A Song for Friday Night
I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say
I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“Come unto Me, and rest;
Lay down, thou weary one, lay down
Thy head upon My breast.”
I came to Jesus as I was,
Weary, and worn, and sad;
I found in Him a resting-place,
And He has made me glad.
I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“Behold, I freely give
The living water: thirsty one,
Stoop down, and drink, and live.”
I came to Jesus, and I drank
Of that life-giving stream;
My thirst was quenched, my soul revived,
And now I live in Him.
I heard the voice of Jesus say,
“I am this dark world’s Light;
Look unto Me, thy morn shall rise,
And all thy day be bright.”
I looked to Jesus, and I found
In Him my Star, my Sun;
And in that Light of life I’ll walk
Till trav’lling days are done.