This fall is a very busy one! We will soon post and announce so many new events at our webpage and at our Facebook page, but we will excitedly begin with this Sunday’s new church organ blessing and recital!
This will be our first post-pandemic year where we will open fully. We will bring back Small Groups and Light Fellowship after Sunday Mass, and new opportunities to deepen your faith and engage one another. A few fun events, too, like Beer & Hymns! We will begin with blessing our new church organ, hear a recital, prepare to honor St Francis with a beautiful and moving Transitus Service, blessing of the animals and his Feast Day in October. We will see our Annual Pumpkin Patch come to life, and we will add a new Wine and Scarecrow Cemetery Tour, too! Boo!! All Saints and All Souls will be remembered, and graves blessed, and the Silent Auction and a Christmas Concert will be enjoyed by us, too! A moving Advent and Camels at Christmas and a Book Club and a Senior Group, too, and so much more! It is all here at a place you love, because we have always loved you.
So many have forgotten how to church! Or, worse, they have fallen away from attending church since the pandemic began. But we believe that church is not a place you go; church is a place you become!
As church numbers have faded and pastors have left in a mass exodus; tired and worn out. Many of us have endured and believed even more strongly in church. Online services and worship had become the norm during the pandemic, and now, many sit back and never leave their homes to remember that they are the church! You, your family, and your friends all matter so much. Your combined attendance together is the church!
I will remind you gently that you cannot serve the church from your sofa. You cannot build real community from your living room. You will never fully experience the transcendental power of the Holy Spirit from your kitchen table! There is nothing like a room full of fellow believers, ready to live out their faith in the week ahead, while holding hands and singing with the voices on the first day of the week in a place they call their spiritual home! Together believers can change the world and their own lives by coming together!
Look, Catholic Christians are not called to be consumers. We are called to be contributors to that make up that is the Church! We don’t watch, we engage! We don’t sit back and let others preach. We preach by the walking of our hands and feet! We sacrifice, we pray, we encourage, we uplift, we weep, we sing, we mourn, we delight, and we lay hands on each other and the hurting. We break bread together and we hold Bread in our hands that IS the very Presence of the God we worship and adore and love. We can’t do that at home in an easy chair. We do this life together.
The church needs you. You need the church.
It is time to come home.
See you this Sunday!
Monsignor +Jim