Dear First Pres,

This Sunday we start our new summer schedule for Worship and Education Hour. We will worship at 9:00 a.m. and have our Education Hour at 10:20. I know that many of you already love the opportunity to have the whole church in one worship service, but let me remind all of us why we do it. As I’ve been making the case for the last few weeks in this letter, summer is a great time for building relationships. And that is what we want to encourage this summer around worship. Very rarely do mid-sized churches (like ours) get the chance to have everyone together. Only a privileged few of us (like me) get to see everyone who comes to worship each Sunday. Because of that, there are some of you who haven’t seen each other in a long time, and there are folks you don’t even know yet. Now, WednesdayNights@FPC and Community Groups have helped alleviate that phenomenon quite a bit, but there are plenty of regular worship attenders who haven’t been involved in either of those. So, having one worship service in the summer provides a great opportunity for you to connect with more people in our great congregation. 

But we aren’t just having worship services this summer. We’re also launching a summer Education Hour. There will be classes available for all of our kids (nursery through high school). And we will have a very important class for the adults called Activating God Space. I really do encourage everyone to stick around for this important hour of discipleship training. Not only does it provide opportunity for all of us to think about how to live out our call as the ambassadors for Christ in the world, but it is also a wonderful way to build relationship and unity in the congregation. There’s not a lot of opportunity for you to talk to each other during the worship service, that’s not the primary reason we are gathering in that time. But there will be plenty of opportunity to dialogue about living on mission during the Education Hour. So, please, take advantage of that.

All of this starts this Sunday, Father’s Day, June 19. If you regularly come at 11:00 a.m., I realize it is a big shift of your morning schedule. Thanks for making that adjustment as we live into our purpose this summer of being a church that engages together in Christ’s work of making disciples for the redeeming transformation of our city and world.

Blessings,