Hello Cedar Ridge:
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are enjoying this season of Advent. Last Sunday during the worship services we made Advent Candles which we can use in our homes to celebrate this season of waiting and expectation. Please take advantage of the Advent Reflections that are available each week and can be used with friends and family throughout Advent to deepen our experience of Christ and the expectation of his birth.
I wanted to remind you about a couple of other great things happening during Advent:
Advent Coffeehouse: Tomorrow, Friday December 2nd we have our annual Advent Coffeehouse in the barn beginning at 7PM. Once again we’ll be partnering with our friends from Ipala, Guatemala who live locally and there’ll be some great Guatemalan seasonal food and live marimba music. Our very own Jon Lewis will also be performing and there’ll be coffee, Italian sodas, desserts and great company. Please bring a home made dessert to share. It’s also a great chance to buy fair-trade gifts for Christmas: Ten Thousand Villages will be there and we’ll have locally made Guatemalan crafts. You can also buy alternative gifts like certificates that represent a donation of school supplies to children in Ipala. We’ll also be selling honey from our beehives here at Cedar Ridge. So bring some cash and get ahead on your gift list.
Advent Day of Service: On Sunday December 11th at 10am we will all gather as one community for a brief worship service of 40 minutes and then we’ll go out to serve our community in a variety of ways. Check out the list of service projects on our website (click here) and feel free to contact the team leader for more information. Some projects have limited space so please be flexible about your choices on the day. There are additional projects to the ones below that are being coordinated by Discipleship Groups and they may also have space for more servers. These will be announced and described during the worship service. This year we will not be returning for lunch so as to give more flexibility and time for the service projects (we’ll share stories together the following Sunday).
We especially need folk to donate blood. Please sign up ahead of time for this by contacting Laura Moffitt at lauram@crcc.org.
Don’t miss these wonderful Advent experiences and may we all experience and share the peace of Christ this Christmas.
With love
Matthew
Matthew Dyer
Cedar Ridge Community Church