Love All

What a joy it is to celebrate Christmas with you. The Advent season has been one filled with great joy and blessing shared with you. I look around our church and into the eyes of the people and see our faith growing and deepening together. We have had a tremendous year in ministry and mission. We have "Embraced our Heritage" and begun "building our future" in exciting ways. This Fall, 5 Disciple Bible studies took place where people grew in their understanding of God's Word. Missions continued to make a difference in the lives of people serving food, providing material assistance and helping other churches, all in Jesus' name. Our youth ministry has more than doubled in size this year and they have grown deeper in their discipleship. Worship has been a powerful experience each week all year for me and I trust for you as well.
This year we moved forward together to build our future through the Wesley Center, making space for ministry to happen in the decades to come. You responded to all these positive life-changing possibilities with great generosity.
Join with me in praising God for your faithfulness in giving this year. We paid 100% of our missional committments beyond our church. Through what we call apportionments, you supported college campus ministry, scholarships, missions in Africa, missions at home and more. You went above and beyond by also giving to "Fair Share Goals" which are not expected every year. Your giving supported Lakeview Camp, Lon Morris College, and others. On top of all of this, your general giving of course made possible the ministries I mentioned already and we completed the first of a three year pledge campaign to build Wesley Center. We met our general budget, fulfilled these missional apportionment committments and are on track with our Wesley Center committments 1/3 of the way.
Only you know where you are on your personal giving committments for the year 2009. Time still remains for you to fulfill what you feel led to give for this year. If you would like to give for the year 2009 for tax purposes, please mail or bring by your gift before the end of the year. I thank God for your faithfulness and for what He has done in and through us.
Love All. That is the last of the four values for Advent that I lift up this week of Christmas. While that little phrase may sound sentimental and simple, it means so much more. To love all is to take seriously the love of God for all people. In Jesus Christ His only Son, God demonstrated His boundless love for every person for all of time. Young and old, rich and poor, black, white or brown, God loves us all.
Being loved like this causes me to pause this Christmas and gulp pretty seriously and look at others in a new way. Why? Because I'm aware more than ever, that God looks at me with nothing but love and invites me to come to Him and receive the gift of new life in Jesus Christ. Of all the gifts we receive this Christmas, may that gift take first place in our hearts.

Merry Christmas to you all,
Tommy

Give More

Last Sunday in worship was a glorious day of music. The Chancel Choir, with Jim Lazenby's leadership, was a blessing to us all. I know God was pleased by such an offering of praise and worship. I'm grateful to God for Jim, for Jackie Fultz, our organist/pianist, for Shalane Wesley for stepping in on the drums, for the soloists and the whole group. The choir loft was full and the sound was even more full.
This Sunday we'll continue with great music as we enjoy our children's choir leading us in worship in addition to more music from the Chancel Choir.
This week the value I want to lift up for the Advent season is Give More.
First we must understand that to give more this Christmas does not necessarily mean quantity or the amount of stuff one gives. Giving more means giving more fully of ourselves to God through worship, gift-giving, through relationships with family and friends.
In this way, we can all give more.
One of the most common struggles we human beings have is the "just enough" syndrome I'll call it. You know what I mean. We do just enough to get by. We come to worship just enough to feel like we've been. We call or write our loved one just enough or we say just enough or we give just enough to feel temporarily satisfied with our offering. We rarely empty ourselves totally for God or others.
At Christmas God gave Himself fully for us. He didn't hold back, hedge, offer just enough, He gave it all, He gave us His only Son. What would happen if we gave more this Christmas? What if we chose to write a letter to a loved one and poured ourselves out? What if we gave more by saying "thank you" and "I love you" to those who need to hear that from us? What if we gave more of our resources to the ministry of the church to close out the year right?
All of our giving is a faithful response to the God who gave us everything. What would it mean for you and me to give more this Christmas?

Spend Less

During the Advent season, I'm reflecting on four values with you in this newsletter column. They come from the "Advent Conspiracy" material we are studying in the Creed Young Adult Sunday school class.
Worship Fully
Spend Less
Give More
Love All
Last week I wrote about worshipping fully. This week is one of the harder ones...spend less. One would think that during this period of economic struggle in the country spending less would be easier. I'm curious to see if we spend the average of 3 billion dollars on Christmas gifts that we have as a nation in recent years.
It seems that we are slowly climbing out of the economic hole we are in right now. Interestingly one of the pieces of advice we hear to get the economic machine moving again is to spend. Spending gets the economy moving again, businesses profit, many through the economic food chain receive benefit from a spend-heavy Christmas season.
In personal terms, people's jobs stay relevant and therefore they keep their jobs and can support their families. Livelihood is at stake.
So what spiritual reason might we have for spending less this Advent? The authors of Advent Conspiracy suggest that what we spend our money on is sometimes frivolous and even wasteful. Rather than giving fewer presents but meaningful ones, we sometimes give with the thought that more is better. I agree with the authors that more is not always better. Most importantly, spending less allows the opportunity to give more, which I'll write about next week.
In short, the challenging but ultimately rewarding word is that God's economy might be asking of us something different than our economy might be this Christmas. Spending less could be an opportunity to give more of what truly matters. Let's pray together about this as we shop for Christmas this year.

Worship Fully

In this season of Advent I'm sharing with the Creed Sunday school class some study on something called "The Advent Conspiracy." This is a study that lifts up four values that I want to offer during these weeks of Advent with you in this space. They are to -
Worship fully
Spend less
Give more
Love all
To worship fully is to acknowlege that Christmas is about God's gift of Jesus to the world and the way we recognize that greatest of gift is through worship. If we don't make space and time to worship God fully, our Christmas is being spent worshipping something else be it stuff, shopping, food, toys, whatever. The point that the authors of Advent Conspiracy make is that we worship something the question is, is it Jesus? God gave to us in Jesus, what matters most, His presence. When we worship we give what matters most - our presence.
When we look at the Christmas story we see clearly that it is about worshipping the God made flesh in the Christ-child. Those who came to that manger long ago, worshipped. Lowly, grungy, common shepherds and three wise men. Some came with something in their hands (gold, frankencense, myrhh) but all brought themselves.
Let's bring our whole selves and worship God fully this Advent/Christmas season.
For more info about "Advent Conspiracy" check out the Tyler County Booster community newspaper this week and www.adventconspiracy.org