Gretchen
Jeannette
John Jay
FBCP Families | 02.27.2021
Hey, Friends!
Last Sunday was such a special time of remembrance as we honored four members of our church whose legacies will long outlast their days with us. As we celebrated their lives, I couldn't help but also think about our younger church family members and the potential they also have to shape our church in special ways as they grow and become the people God has called them to be. The rich tradition of FBCP continues in each of us, and it's a joy to carry on the legacy of those who came before us as we imagine new ways to grow as a church. Thanks for being such a special place to belong!
Virtual Parent Conversation
This Sunday at 7:30pm we are hosting a time for parents to get together and discuss their parenting journeys with Iris Chen. For those who have read her new book (you can find it here or we can send you a copy!), this is a chance to ask questions and share anything that has resonated with you. If you haven't had a chance to read it but still want to join us, we would love to have you! Iris will begin by talking about her own journey with parenting, and then we'll have time for questions and conversation. We love our parent community and look forward to gathering together for a time to connect and learn! Here’s the Zoom link to join.
Kids
Liturgy for Families with Kids
Mark your calendars for our next time of worship in the park on Saturday, March 20th, at 10:30AM! We will have a fun-filled morning of learning and praising God together. (And stay tuned for details about Easter—we have a fun celebration for families in the works!)
Honoring Black History Month
Here are some resources to help families learn and celebrate Black History all year long. To hear from a local voice, check out a recent article from Denise Verret, the CEO and zoo director of our Los Angeles Zoo. She has some powerful words to share about being a woman of color in her field, and she shares a story about Dr. Roger Arliner Young, the first African American woman to ever receive a doctorate in zoology. You can read her article for Black History Month to learn more about both of these women and their contributions to science and zoology.
Youth
Sunday Gathering
This week the youth have a Youth Zoom gathering at 2pm. Here is the meeting link that you can use to hop on the hangout. We look forward to being together and talking about a simple prayer practice for Lent (and we'll make space for play, too!). We will be in the park next week at 10:30AM to continue with our every-other-week schedule.
Fuller Youth Institute Cohort
Since the start of 2019, a team of FBCP adults and youth have been part of a two-year cohort with the Fuller Youth Institute to develop new methods for youth ministry. It continues to be a rich and imaginative process, one that has continued during the pandemic. We look forward to sharing more about what we are developing in the coming months, and we would welcome your prayers for vision and clarity as we seek new ways to grow alongside our young people.
Sending you so much love and virtual hugs!
With gratitude for you,
Pastor Lindsay & Pastor Mary
Leslie and Warren
Friday Updates 02.26.21
Happy Friday, Friends at FBCP!
Chip and John Kelly bring us the announcements today in the style of all your favorite game shows. You can listen to the fun in the audio below, but here are the highlights:
We look forward to gathering again for outdoor worship on Sunday. As always, we will livestream the service and post a recorded version later in the day. Thank you for honoring our agreements so that we can love each other well and stay safe and healthy:
Stay in your car if you are able to drive to the garage.
Wear a mask whenever you are outside your car.
Keep 10ft of space between you and others.
Share your love by not hanging around before or after service.
Stay home if you aren’t feeling well and let us know how we can help care for you!
A huge thank you to all who were able to donate to Friends In Deed to help them stock up their bad weather supplies! We were able to drop off those items on Wednesday, and we are so grateful for your partnership to help those who are without shelter in these colder months. Let’s continue to pray for our most vulnerable neighbors, that we would know how to advocate and care for them.
Our weekly Lenten Bible Study continues this week on Wednesday at 12pm over Zoom. Join us for a time of reflection and discussion as we make the journey through Lent together. We’ll be using a Lenten devotional created by the folks at SALT Project, and you can pick up a physical copy of the devotional at Outdoor Church or can access a digital copy here. We would love to add your voice to the mix, so be sure to look for the Zoom invitation in the coming week!
Less without you,
The FBCP Community
Mary
John Jay
Friends at FBCP,
Today I have an audio message to share with all of you for a couple of reasons. One is to talk a bit about how we are thinking through Black History Month and to share some books that have shaped my own understanding of race, theology, and the contributions of our Black brothers and sisters to our faith tradition. The other purpose in sharing tonight is to offer an apology for failing to give context for the final song in last Sunday’s worship service. I will continue to be honest about the times I fail, and I am grateful for your time given to listening to this message.
We are a diverse church, and I am so thankful that our community is one where we can listen deeply and correct one another when necessary. What a gift to be a congregation of such discernment and trust. I remain…
Less without you,
Pastor John Jay
Lindsay
MEMORY
is not just a then, recalled in a now, the past is never just the past, memory is a pulse passing through all created life, a wave form, a then continually becoming other thens, all the while creating a continual but almost untouchable now. But the guru’s simplistic urge to live only in the now misunderstands the multilayered inheritance of existence, where all epochs live and breathe in parallels. Whether it be the epochal moment initiated by the appearance of the first hydrogen atoms in the universe or a first glimpse of adulthood perceived in adolescence, memory passes through an individual human life like a building musical waveform, constantly maturing, increasingly virtuosic, often volatile, sometimes overpowering. Every human life holds the power of this immense inherited pulse, holds and then supercharges it, according to the way we inhabit our identities in the untouchable now.
Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once. Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.
The genius of human memory is firstly its very creation through experience, and then the way it is laid down in the mind according to the identity we inhabited when we first decided to remember, then its outward radiating effect and then all its possible future outcomes, occurring all at the same time. We actually inhabit memory as a living threshold, as a place of choice and volition and imagination, a crossroads where our future diverges according to how we interpret, or perhaps more accurately, how we live the story we have inherited. We can be overwhelmed, traumatized, made smaller by the tide that brought us here, we can even be drowned and disappeared by memory; or we can spin a cocoon of insulation to protect ourselves and bob along passively in the wake of what we think has occurred, but we also have other more engaging possibilities; memory in a sense, is the very essence of the conversation we hold as individual human beings.
A full inhabitation of memory makes human beings conscious, a living connection between what has been, what is and what is about to be. Memory is the living link to personal freedom.
Through the gift of an inheritance truly inhabited, we come to understand that memory creates and influences what is about to happen, and has little to do with what we quaintly and often unimaginatively call the past. We might recall the ancient Greek world where Memory was always understood to be the mother of the muses, meaning that all of her nine imaginative daughters, all of the nine forms of human creative endeavor recognized by the ancient Greek imagination, and longed for by individuals and societies to this day, were born from the womb and the body of memory.
Taken from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte.
Dave & The 1994 Chancel Choir
Ain’t Got Time to Die
Hall Johnson
Lord, I keep so busy praisin’ my Jesus
Keep so busy praisin’ my Jesus
Keep so busy praisin’ my Jesus
Ain’t got time to die
‘Cause when I’m healin’ de sick (I’m praisin’ my Jesus)
When I’m healin’ de sick (I’m praisin’ my Jesus)
When I’m healin’ de sick (I’m praisin’ my Jesus)
Ain’t got time to die
‘Cause it takes all o’ ma time (To praise my Jesus)
All o’ ma time
To praise my Lord
If I don’t praise Him de rocks gonter cry out
Glory an’ honor
Glory an’ honor
Ain’t got time to die
Lord, I keep so busy workin’ fer de Kingdom
Keep so busy workin’ fer de Kingdom
Keep so busy workin’ fer de Kingdom
Ain’t got time to die
‘Cause when I’m feedin de po’ (I’m workin’ fer de Kingdom)
When I’m feedin de po’ (I’m workin’ fer de Kingdom)
When I’m feedin de po’ (I’m workin’ fer de Kingdom)
Ain’t got time to die
Lord, I keep so busy servin’ my Master
Keep so busy servin’ my Master
Keep so busy servin’ my Master
Ain’t got time to die
‘Cause when I’m givin’ my all (I’m servin’ my Master)
When I’m givin’ my all (I’m servin’ my Master)
When I’m givin’ my all (I’m servin’ my Master)
Ain’t got time to die
Now won’t you get outta ma way (To praise my Jesus)
Outta ma way
Leslie
Friday Updates | 02.19.21
Happy Friday, Friends at FBCP!
Chip and guest Noah Moore (one of our FBCP youth!) have all the updates and information along with the latest slang the kids are using these days. You can listen to all the goodness in the audio below, but here are the highlights:
We look forward to gathering again for outdoor worship on Sunday. As always we will livestream the service and post a recorded version later in the day. Thank you for honoring our agreements so that we can love each other well and stay safe and healthy:
Stay in your car if you are able to drive to the garage.
Wear a mask whenever you are outside your car.
Keep 10ft of space between you and others.
Share your love by not hanging around before or after service.
Stay home if you aren’t feeling well and let us know how we can help care for you!
This Sunday our time of worship will be a service of lament and a celebration of the lives of Ed Enriquez, Harold Lane, Bob Maase, and Tom Harris. We also have created an online space to share your memories. If you have something you want to share in honor of Ed Enriquez, Harold Lane, Bob Maase, or Tom Harris, you can send a written, audio, or video version to lindsay@fbcpasadena.
Starting this Sunday, you are welcome to bring items to contribute to the Friends In Deed Bad Weather Supplies. Here is a full list of items that are needed to support our neighbors who don’t have shelter in these colder months.
Starting this Wednesday, 2/24, we’re offering a Lenten Bible Study over Zoom from 12-1pm that will run each Wednesday during Lent. Chip will be the host and each week a different member of our staff will lead a discussion based on the scripture passage for the week in a Lenten devotional created by the folks at SALT Project. You can pick up a physical copy of the devotional at Outdoor Church or you can access a digital copy here . We would love to add your voice to the mix, so be sure to look for the Zoom invitation in the coming week!
On this Day in History: 79 years ago on this day President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, a policy which resulted in nearly 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans being turned out of their homes, their businesses and neighborhoods and sent to live in concentration camps scattered across the United States.
We remember this action on this day in order to honor those who suffered but also as a way to acknowledge that violence, racism and hatred continue today against the broader Asian American Pacific Islander population, some of whom are brothers and sisters with whom we worship and live. Let’s commit ourselves to the ongoing work of educating ourselves in this part of our history, to seeing and acknowledging where injustice continues and to do what we can to stand with our brothers and sisters and fight for justice.
This Week’s Tracks:
Mary
Another way you can practice prayer during Lent is by joining one of our global servants as she and her local Life Group in Beirut spend 40 days of Lent praying for Lebanon in specific ways. Click on the button below to subscribe to a daily email with prayer points. If you already signed up to receive the daily prayer updates for Lebanon, you might check your spam folder to see if it wound up there.
FBCP Families | 02.18.2021
Hey, Friends!
We had a blast with our families last Saturday and loved learning about the kind of treasure we can keep in our hearts—like love, compassion, and generosity. We are so grateful for the treasures that each of you are in our lives and in our church family! Our next Family Liturgy will be March 20th, so be on the lookout for a new fun postcard and more details.
We hope you received our online Ash Wednesday liturgy yesterday, but if not, you can always go back and access it when you have a chance. One of our FBCP kids asked to do it with his parents and found it to be really meaningful, so you might consider adapting the interactive prayer experiences in the liturgy for your kids, too. We also hope you are able to use the family Lenten devotion we delivered in ways that are fun and impactful with your family. Blessings as we move through Lent together with you!
Virtual Parent Discussion
Sunday, February 28, at 7:30pm we are hosting a time for parents to get together and discuss their parenting journeys with Iris Chen. For those who have read her new book (you can find it here or we can send you a copy!), this is a chance to ask questions and share anything that has resonated with you. If you haven't had a chance to read it but still want to join us, we would love to have you. Iris will begin by talking about some of the main lessons she has learned in parenting, and then we'll have time for questions and discussion. We’ll send a Zoom link next week so you can join. We love our parent community and look forward to gathering together for a time to connect and learn!
Mars
NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance, touched down on the Red Planet today! NASA is inviting everyone to be a part of history by holding live streams and replays you can watch here. This huge step for human space exploration is a great opportunity to inspire your kids to learn more about space. The folks at KiwiCo collected some of out-of-this-world DIY activities to help you transport your kids to the cosmos right from home.
Kids
This week we have a new kind of video for our kids—story time! Join us as Pastor Mary reads "A Sick Day for Amos McGee.” You can curl up to watch before bedtime or listen when you need a break during your day. Anytime is a good time for a story, especially one as sweet as this!
Youth
This week the youth will be in the park, but we will gather later than usual so that youth and their families can attend our morning worship and memorial service in the garage if they want. Youth can head to the park around 11:45AM, and we will wrap up by 1:15PM. We can't wait to spend time with our youth safely in the park! Lunch will be included.
Sending you so much love and virtual hugs!
With gratitude for you,
Pastor Lindsay & Pastor Mary
Judy
John Jay
John Jay
Leslie and Rick
Better Days
Tarron | Anthony Clemons Jr. | Christopher Payton | Dylan Del Olmo | Jacob Kasher | Justin R. Timberlake | Kenyon Dar Ke Dixon | Khirye Anthony Tyler | Larrance Levar Dopson | Uforo Imeh Ebong
Let me talk to ya
Some people come out of a storm better
And some people come out of a storm bitter
The difference between the bitter and the better is the compass of your heart
And the direction that you wanna go
So let's go
See, some people wanna stay in the position of a victim
But those of us we know we are victors because we have victories, you see, haha
Becausе when you have victory, you understand that thе pain was part of the plan to make you greater
You understand that the circumstances or the weights that you kept lifting every day
And today is a new day, look at you
You had to cry, but you're smiling now
You had to go through it, but you're better now
Because you are something special
God plans ya
Even in the darkness, you are the light
Where's the light?
There's a light at the end of the tunnel
Keep your eyes on the road ahead
But if you're feeling lost in the night
It's okay to cry
Just as long as you hold your head
'Cause we're on our way to better
Better's ahead, better's ahead
It gets worse 'fore it gets better
But better's ahead, better's ahead
Better days are comin'
Better days are comin'
Better days, better days
Better days are comin'
I know you've been kicked down
Slept on, let down, faith gone
Waited for too long for somethin' to lean on
You feel weak, just be strong
Deep breath, stay calm
If you just press on, press on, press on
You gon' see there's a light at the end of the tunnel
Keep your eyes on the road ahead
And if you're feelin' lost in the night
It's okay to cry
Just as long as you hold your head
'Cause we're on our way to better
Better's ahead, better's ahead
It gets worse 'fore it gets better
But better's ahead, better's ahead
Better days are comin'
Better days are comin'
And better days are comin'
I know you feel left out and stepped on
Keep goin', keep goin'
Shine bright, don't dim yours for no one
Keep goin' higher, and higher and higher and higher
Better days, better days are comin'
Better days, better days are comin'
Better days, better days are comin'
Better days, better days
Better days are comin'
Friday Updates 02.12.2021
Happy Friday, FBCP!
Today we have the weekly update from Chip along with special guests to help provide some trivia fun. You can listen the full details (and all the answers to the trivia questions!) by clicking the link below, but here are the highlights:
We look forward to gathering again for outdoor worship on Sunday, and we will also livestream the service and post a recorded version later in the day. Thank you for honoring our agreements so that we can love each other well and stay safe and healthy:
Stay in your car if you are able to drive to the garage.
Wear a mask whenever you are outside your car.
Keep 10ft of space between you and others.
Share your love by not hanging around before or after service.
Stay home if you aren’t feeling well and let us know how we can help care for you!
Starting this Sunday, you are welcome to bring items to contribute to the Friends In Deed Bad Weather Supplies. Here is a full list of items that are needed to support our neighbors who don’t have shelter in these colder months.
Wednesday, February 17th, is Ash Wednesday, and we will be releasing an online liturgy so that you can engage with worship from wherever you are. Here are some items you will want to gather to engage with the liturgy experience from home on Wednesday:
candle
bowl of water
salt
towel
dirt or ashes (or something else like charcoal pen)
We have a Lenten devotional from SALT to help you move through Lent with intention and reflective practices. You can access a digital copy here or pick up a paper copy if you come to the garage for worship on Sunday.
On the first Sunday of Lent, February 21, our time of worship will be a service of lament and a celebration of the lives of Ed Enriquez, 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 honor of Ed Enriquez, Harold Lane, Bob Maase, or Tom Harris, you can send a written, audio, or video version to lindsay@fbcpasadena.
Today is Chinese New Year, and you can listen to the audio below to hear Iris share a little bit about her family’s traditions during this special holiday. The celebration comes at a time when hate crimes against Asian Americans continue to be on the rise after an increase at the start of the pandemic. Join us in praying for our Asian sisters and brothers and for our part to play in the work of justice.