Pastor Caroline's Weekly Update

October 10, 2008

Dear Members and Friends of First Church,

It was a delight to begin our brief sojourn together with our World Communion service last Sunday. Many thanks for your kind welcome, and for your patience with me as I begin to put names and faces together. (A special thanks to all the wearers of nametags! If you don't have a nametag, or have misplaced yours, please let Geri know, so that she can make you a new one.)

World Communion Sunday struck me as a particularly appropriate way to start this new chapter in your journey as a church. With its celebration of the connections that we share with Christians throughout the world, World Communion Sunday helps us to remember that the joys and struggles of every congregation, and of every individual within a congregation, are held in a larger framework. Even though we may not know our fellow worshipers in the next town over, or in the next state, or in the next country, we all hold something precious in common. We are bound together in a worldwide community of faith and love.

Indeed, as our Jewish brothers and sisters celebrate the High Holy Days - Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - we are reminded that we hold much in common with people of good will from a whole panoply of different faith traditions.

In my first days here in Bethany, I have also seen a couple of very wonderful, tangible signs of our connection with our wider denomination, the United Church of Christ:

The first is a note of congratulations that came to you all from the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. At the annual meeting of the Connecticut Conference on October 17-18, the First Church of Christ in Bethany will be recognized as one of ten churches in the Conference who have tithed to Our Church's Wider Mission (OCWM). Financial support of OCWM is an important expression of our covenantal ties with the wider UCC, and I commend you for your generosity and farsightedness in supporting it so faithfully.

We also received a note from our Conference Minister, the Rev. Davida Foy Crabtree, letting us know that, as part of the Conference's regular prayer rotation, members of the Connecticut Conference staff are especially holding us - you as a church and me as your temporary pastor - in their prayers this week. Davida asks, in turn, that we hold the Conference in our prayers.

In these troubled times in our world, such varied reminders of our deep interconnectedness with one another - in this church, in the UCC, in the church universal, and in the wider human family - are surely a gift. As the apostle Paul put it so beautifully, it is both our calling and our privilege to "rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep" (Romans 12:15). As we respond to this invitation of our faith, we remember that we are not alone but are upheld in a worldwide community of prayer, and carried safely on God's own wings.

See you in church!

Blessings and peace,

Caroline Murphy

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