I don’t know about you, but I enjoyed New Years Day. I slept later than usual, watched Missouri beat Arkansas in the Cotton Bowl, took down all of the indoor Christmas decorations and helped clean the house. All of that was interspersed with playing with the kids and watching way too much TV.
I hope your New Years Day went well and I am praying that you will have a great year in 2008.
Bible Reading
This is a good time of the year to begin a Bible reading program. Whether you are currently reading, or have never read before, or have done some experimentation in the past; I encourage you to look at what you are doing with some fresh vision. I have personally found the SOAP method very helpful. It is a reading and journaling process that I wrote about earlier, so I won’t go through it again.
I did some searching today on the internet trying to find some good resources for you and me. I found a good many tools to help us read more. Here are some things I thought might be helpful to you.
Bible Gateway: http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/
Study Light: http://www.studylight.org/
Christianity Today: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bible
YouVersion: http://www.youversion.com/1yearbible.php
Each of these websites have plans that you can print, or plans to read your bible on line. I have several hard copies that will be available on Sunday. I realize I probably should have done this before New Years, but just like starting anything new, better late than never.
Small Groups
Beginning on Sunday Evening at 6:00 PM we will start a 6-week course on forgiveness. We will be meeting at the church building. Steve Miles will be leading this group through the scriptures and making practical application. Forgiveness is an important topic because past, present and future relationships provide us with opportunity to practice this discipline.
Beginning on Wednesday January 9 at 6:00 PM, Brian Studer will be leading a small group that meets at 845 S. Crawford. This is a cell group that will practice devoting themselves to fellowship, breaking bread, prayer and application of the scriptures. This group will also meet for 6-weeks.
Please make yourself available to either, or both of these important gatherings.
Outreach
I did some calculations for doing our FSCC welcome back outreach. If there are 180 students in the dorms and we give them 4 cookies each that is 60 dozen cookies! That is a lot of cookie dough. This outreach is scheduled for Sunday January 13. If you want to help by baking cookies, please let me know.
Alpha
We are scheduling an Alpha course to begin in late February. We have about 6 weeks to get things ready. If you are interested in this ministry we will be having an organizational meeting on Tuesday evening January 8 at the church building at 7:00 PM.
I am thrilled that we are being transformed by Jesus and changing the world around us. We are becoming a church that would truly be missed if we were not here.
Steve
