Our new children’s books on the topic of diversity have arrived! They are currently in a basket, complete with library check-out cards, right outside the sanctuary waiting to be borrowed and read! As the adults of our congregation read Waking Up White together, we now have resources for our children to participate in these important discussions on race and cultural differences. I invite you to take advantage! 
Posted in Children and Youth
New children’s books on diversity
Apple Picking!
Check out the photos from our apple picking adventure last Sunday! Pizza, pumpkins, donuts, hot cider, apples, tree climbing, and some very wet feet rounded out our wonderful afternoon together. Can’t wait for next year!
PreK/Kindergarten: God Lights the Way
This week we learned that God is like a light that guides and protects. We started our time together reciting an interactive chant using a flashlight. “Light of God, shine on _____ . Light of God, shine on me. Shine on everyone I see” and listening to a song, “God is with us”. We talked about how lighthouses are like God – sturdy, strong and a light that guides and protects. And we practiced the Bible verse, “You are the Light of the World”, tapping it out to help us to remember it. We watched a Vimeo called, “God is Always With Me: Pillar of Fire/Cloud” and acted it out. Then the children divided into “families” and packed pillowcases with clothes, books, utensils, toys, crayons & paper (necessities for traveling in the desert!). The Pillar of Cloud guided the families on their journey. When it disappeared, the families unpacked and rested. As the Pillar of Cloud reappeared, they packed up and continued on the journey. As it got dark, a Pillar of Fire appeared. The families unpacked and camped for the night and the Pillar of Fire gave them light. When the Cloud reappeared, they packed up AGAIN, traveled and finally reached their destination.
To represent the day and night, we had orange slice “Suns” and tortilla “Stars” for snack. We created our own pillars of fire or pillars of cloud with tissue paper. Some of the children even made one of each! Our books this week were about lighthouses and shining lights and some of our books from previous weeks’ themes : God providing us a safe place and God gathers us close. The theme for our next session, on October 9th, will be “Let Your Light Shine” when we will learn about ways to let our own lights shine.
Thank you for sharing your children!
Building Community: “Together, Not the Same”
“For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us.” Romans 12:4-6
What makes our youth community strong, safe, and fun? This is the question that the we have been exploring in September as we eat, play, pray, and study together. We kicked off the year with our annual game night/pizza party where we enjoyed team building games, yummy food, and the all-time favorites: Apples to Apples and Glow in the Dark Sardines. 
In class on Sunday mornings, the youth brainstormed attributes of positive community building based on their own experiences and then we read various passages in the Bible to discover that God has some very similar ideas about how we can best live and grow together.
Putting words into action, the youth group continued to strengthen their own community with a trip to Davis Farmland’s Mega Maze. Working together, with some added friendly competition between the boys and girls, they made their way with flashlights through 8 acres of corn and close to 3 miles of puzzling pathways. They then rewarded themselves with fall treats from the snack bar enjoyed around a cozy campfire. Warming up in body and spirit with roaring flames, story-telling, and lots of laughter, the gift of time together was treasured!
“Wise or Foolish?” Making choices with the Middlers
It was an all female cast in the Middler classroom on Sunday. We continued to emphasize the importance of questions over answers in attaining wisdom by asking each other the riddles we found inside our classroom Question Box. We then refilled the Box with our own questions and prayers. Questions about why bad things happen to people and why Jesus didn’t remain on earth were some of the submissions.
Special thanks to parent helper Betsy Martel and to all of the players who did a fabulous job dramatizing 3 scenes from the life of Israel’s second monarch, the wise King Solomon. There are some amazing videos to enjoy next week!
The scripture drama was followed by a deep discussion of why King Solomon went from a wise to a foolish leader during his reign. We wondered together why he chose to marry thousands of women, worshipping their gods and creating a gigantic army against the will of God. Was it because he forgot that the source of his wisdom was God? Or did the stress of leadership cause him to become mentally unstable? Or was he corrupted by his growing wealth and power? Many of us wanted to know more about the mysterious Queen of Sheba visited Solomon. Encyclopedia.com has a short article about her and there’s some great video from the history channel on YouTube if you’re interested and learning more with your child. We wrapped up class with a foolishly wise dirt cake snack and a CNN video about the foolish burkini law. What would the Queen of Sheba thought about that?!
Our Multiagers explored: What does a church need?
On our very first Sunday back together as a class, the Multiagers explored the story of King Solomon and the construction of the first temple of Jerusalem, almost 1000 years before the birth of Jesus. After our story, we looked at a series of photos from the Huffington Post titled “The World’s 50 Most Unusual Churches” then discussed what a church really needs to be a church. After listing bathrooms, lights, doors, an organ, and hymnals, the children settled on just three things you REALLY need to make a church: a leader, people, and a worship space. Armed with a large variety of materials, the Multiagers then designed their own worship spaces and talked about what was the most important thing to them: “people,” “decorations,” ”a garden,” “a place for the pastor to stand,” were just a few. What is the most important aspect of the church for YOU? 
Made and Remade
Our last Sunday in the garden for the summer included art projects for the kids, play dough for all, Chris singing at communion, back pack blessings, friendly fellowship, Sunday School and Youth registration, bubbles, and more! Here’s Hannah’s sermon and some pictures.
Psalm 139
Jeremiah 18:1-6
How can we become perfect?
This summer, I read a story about David: Michelangelo’s statue of the biblical hero who slew Goliath and went on to become one of the greatest kings of Israel.
When the writer of this story encountered David for the first time, he was a young adult on a European tour, and he was completely overwhelmed. “Perfect,” he thought. He stood there for hours, taking it all in: a marble figure 17 feet tall, three times the size of a human being, and astonishing in every way: strong and graceful, stone and yet soft, full of detail and elegantly simple.
“Perfect,” thought the writer. But, as he discovered later on, David is not perfect. Far from it. David was carved from a massive block of marble that was badly selected; it is full of holes and veins. As the marble travelled to Florence, it fell into a muddy ditch. Once it arrived, it sat outside for 30 years, becoming dirty, dry, and brittle.
It’s hard to believe that Michelangelo 
turned this beast of a block into a masterpiece. But he did. The people of Florence were very impressed, and David was installed as the key feature of their central square. But even after he was carved, David was not perfect. The center of gravity of the statue is slightly different than the center of gravity of the base. And over the years, the ground also shifted underneath the square in Florence where he was initially installed, so that David began to lean several degrees to the side. All this tilting did serious damage to his ankles. David now has hairline fractures that threaten his structural integrity.
David has suffered other injuries, too. His left arm was broken in half during a riot. His right little toe has been lost multiple times. Someone took a hammer to his left foot. Finally, David was moved inside a museum for protection. He is now perfectly upright, protected from weather and vandalism. Still, because of the flaws in his ankles, an earthquake could bring him tumbling down at any time.
How can we become perfect? Perfection is the goal, it seems. We are 
constantly offered products to help us conceal anything that our culture considers a physical imperfection. Even worse, we are taught to hide anything that might be considered an internal imperfection: grief, trauma, illness, addiction, betrayal, depression, unemployment, anger, debt. Messages within and outside of us urge us to be like David: larger and more beautiful than real life. And so we scramble to replace our missing toes, and repair our broken arms, and shore up the hairline fractures in our ankles, so that no one else finds out about them….so that we, too, might seem perfect.
Praise be to the living God, for she has something else in mind for us. When God forms the first people in the book of Genesis, she uses earth; clay. She molds this clay with her own hands. Then, she breathes into it, bringing us to life.
The passage from Jeremiah that we heard today reminds us that God is our potter not only at the beginning of time, but also throughout our lives. That clay that made us was never fired in a kiln. It has never become static or fixed, or hard and brittle like marble. We are a work in progress, soft and pliable, capable of being formed and reformed, converted and re-converted. No wonder it’s hard to give the impression that we are 17 feet of perfect marble. God made us to be small, beloved, imperfect and unfinished lumps of clay.
Sometimes we may wish that God was a bit more like Michelangelo, 
and we were a little more like David. Iconic beauty, international fame, and perpetual youth don’t sound so bad. But instead of fighting time and circumstance in the effort to keep up appearances, we get to embrace our inevitable change. God is our creator and recreator, and our life is an artistic partnership. We 
make plenty of mistakes along the way, the process is far from straightforward, but sometimes what starts out as a flaw or a tragedy can become the most beautiful part of a person. The goal we’re headed towards is not perfection or preservation or even completion, but a more responsive and joyful journey with God.
I brought some play dough with me today. For the next few minutes, I invite you to hold your clay in your hands, shaping it if you wish. Consider: how has God been molding you this year, this season, this summer? And, looking towards the fall, how do you long to be reformed by God?
O Lord, you are our potter. You formed us with your hands long ago, and breathe us into life. You search us and know us in every moment, and lay your hand upon us. You rework us into new vessels, as it seems good to you. Open our hearts, so that instead of being perfectly brittle or privately broken, we may embrace our imperfections and the movement of your spirit, and be remade again and again and again. Amen.
Pentecost and Confirmation Celebration
We celebrated the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the church, and 12 wonderful confirmation students on Sunday. What an exciting day! Take a look:
Spring Flings: Youth Engage in Service, Spiritual, and Social Outings
Spring has sprung! The warm, sunny weather may have been late this year but that didn’t dampen the spirits of our youth group. In April, we had a fun outing to Chunky’s dinner/theater in Nashua where we enjoyed tasty food and watched the suspenseful modern version of The Jungle Book. We also went to play with the kids at the Maynard Boys and Girls Club to help them out with their school vacation program. In early May, we joined the WCUC Easter in Action team to walk in the Minuteman Arc March and collectively raised over $2000.00 for this great organization. The next day, the youth learned about the Bread for the World organization and wrote letters to members of Congress advocating for increased funding to support better nutritional programs for women and children around the world. They then used what they had learned to help other members of congregation, young and old, write letters too!
Adding to all of this excitement, twelve of our older youth celebrated their year-long work in confirmation class as our younger youth are currently making plans to share their voices, gifts, and wisdom in Children and Youth Sunday which will be celebrated on June 5th.
In the midst of all of these social and service-related events, the youth have been meeting regularly to study God’s word, write in their prayer journals, and reflect together on how the Easter story of Jesus’s resurrection applies to us today.
SF Sunday 2016
Take a look at some images from our joyful Sunday Fellowship Sunday worship on May 1st, celebrating and led by our ministry of worship and friendship for all abilities:
