THIS SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, our pastor, Rev. Lamar Oliver, is once again taking a Polar Plunge to support our friends at the Beauregard Council on Aging - and we need your help to make it worth his while! If you would like to help sponsor Lamar's plunge, please contact with your pledge amount. You may drop off your contributions to the church office, put it in Sunday's offering with the notation "Freezin'," or give online @ fumcderidder.org/give and drop a note to designating that transaction for the Freezin' fundraiser.
For students in the 6th-8th grades, confirmation is a season set aside for learning, prayer, reflection, and commitment as we explore the Christian faith, our United Methodist tradition, and the vows of baptism in preparation to becoming a professing member of this congregation and Christ’s universal church. As any faithful life-long member of a United Methodist congregation will show you with the witness of how they live their lives, confirmation is neither the beginning nor the end of one’s faith journey, but a step along the way of, as any old-school member will affirm, consistently and faithfully living out all of your days an active, vibrant, invovled, worshiping Christian faith.
Whether physical or rhetorical, there is no denying that violence seems to be pretty prevalent in many parts of society, including those spaces that we thought were off-limits like schools and churches. There are times it seems we get hit day after day with some sort of hatred at work - and may begin to feel as though we are either powerless to stop it, or that we have played no role in the corrosiveness of our culture. Over the next couple of months, we are going to wade through some of the wisdom shared with the Christian community in the first generations of church. We will learn a little bit more about our responsibilities in the world in which we live; how our thoughts, actions, & attitudes towards ourselves, our fellow church members & others within the Christian community, those who may have differenting political, social, & moral views matter more than we realize; and how we are called not only to not participate in this corrosive mindset, but to be and to set an example of how to live as people who truly love God with everything they have and their neighbors as themselves.