Dear St. Luke’s,
I was able to watch worship online this week and wow, did the Holy Spirit show up and show out in a powerful Sunday of worship and praise for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The gospel choir was brought back together and it was as if they hadn’t missed a beat! If you missed worshipping with us, watch the Facebook LIVE video here.
The annual East Winter Garden Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade moved downtown this year and what a wonderful turn out. It was a great community day of fellowship, learning and honoring a faithful man of God who had the courage and conviction to lead us toward living more truly as God’s Neighbors and leading our country to embrace the ideals of equality and freedom for all. Thank you to everyone who made this weekend celebration so special and powerful.
We are so excited to have the Bethune-Cookman University Chorale returning to lead our Sunday worship this weekend. Bethune-Cookman is one of our Florida United Methodist colleges and a part of the HBCU (Historically Black College University) beginning in 1904. Mary McLeod Bethune began the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls with $1.50 and five students. She was able to help the training institute become an accredited high school and then in 1923 the school merged with the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, to become a coed high school. It was in 1924 that the school became associated with the United Methodist Church. In 1941, the school became chartered as a four-year liberal arts college, achieving University status in 2007 by Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed.
We are excited to see these young people lead us in worship on Sunday and hope you will invite friends and neighbors to come for this magnificent choral concert. This is an opportunity as well to bring students you may know who are in the college search! There will be no Sunday School this week, so we invite children and youth to worship with us and their families. Childcare will be available for infants-kindergarteners. We will be combined into three services in the Sanctuary on Sunday (8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.) so everyone will have a chance to see these students share their talents with us. (no worship in Founder’s Hall) We will be taking up a second offering in addition to your tithes to the church, this will be a special offering to be used by the Bethune-Cookman music department for funding and scholarships for students. The only way to experience this special musical worship service is in-person, no live stream this Sunday.
Next Sunday we begin a three-week series looking at God’s Cul-de-sac. Strange title maybe, but consider the reasons people move to a cul-de-sac. Community, safety, a place where families can support one another. What would God’s Cul-de-sac be like and how would the neighbors make a difference by investing in one another’s lives? We will be spending three weeks on the lectionary Scripture for this particular week – working from the gospel lesson Luke 5:1-11; Old testament reading Isaiah 6:1-8 and then the epistle reading 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. Join us and consider the call God has on our life to invest in our neighbors and others.
Grace and peace,
Jenn.
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