Communiqué A Bimonthly Ministry of Christ Church Episcopal, Norcross, Georgia Una revista bimestral ministerio de Cristo Iglesia Episcopal, Norcross, Georgia Volume 1, Issue 1 - April/May 2012 RESURRECTION IN THIS ISSUE PARISH SPOTLIGHT Martha Gentry A New Look at Resurrection Vally Sharpe OUR RECTOR REFLECTS Are Christians an Elite Group? MISSION FOCUS Why Do I Go to Haiti? Terry Franzen UPCOMING EVENTS APRIL/MAY CALENDAR Lord, Remember Us! The Rev. Jeff Cave
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CommuniquéA Bimonthly Ministry of Christ Church Episcopal, Norcross, Georgia
Una revista bimestral ministerio de Cristo Iglesia Episcopal, Norcross, GeorgiaVolume 1, Issue 1 - April/May 2012
The Rev. Jeff CaveAssociate Rector - Hispanic Services
The Rev. Nora Cruz-DiazDeacon
Aitor RecaldeVestry Liaison
Vally SharpePublisher/Managing Editor
Dennis MarksEditor
Communiqué is produced bimonthly as a ministry of Christ Church, Norcross, distributed free to parishioners as well as to individuals and families of in the greater Norcross and Peachtree Corners areas.
To subscribe to Communiqué in either print or electonic format, please email Beth
Donations in support of the costs of printing and other expenses associated with production are always welcome, as are responses to the columns and articles herein. To make a donation, please send a check to the address above, noting that the contribution is to support the ministry or visit our website at:
www.ccnorcross.org
VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1
Welcome to the inaugural issue of the “new” Communiqué. In the coming months, it is our hope to expand the contents beyond what you see here, including articles written for and by the children and youth of our parish, a book review, a section in Spanish devoted to the needs of our Hispanic congregation, and reflections from any and all parishioners about issues as diverse as the spiritual life of our parish, the role of our church community in the civic communities we inhabit, and how we are bridging the gaps between our work lives and our faith journeys.
Deadlines for the submission of articles are the 10th of the month preceding the first month of the proposed issue as follows:
• June/July issue - May 10• August/September - July 10• October/November - September 10• December/January - November 10• February/March - January 10• April/May - March 10
For event announcements, please keep in mind that each issue will cover a two-month time period.
We hope you are uplifted and enouraged by what you see here. Let us know what you think.
Vally
THE PAINTING ON THE COVER
The cover art is a photograph of a painting of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in St. George’s Parish, Bermuda. The church in the painting was the first Protestant church erected in the Western Hemisphere and is believed to be the longest continually operating Anglican parish. The original painting by Alfred Birdsey is shown, courtesy of Martha Gentry.
Welcome
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Are Christians an Elite Group?When David and I moved to Gwinnett County in 1983, we joined St.
John Neumann Catholic Church in Lilburn, an island among a sea of Baptist and Methodist churches. At that time, Gwinnett County was, for the most part, culturally and religiously homogenous. Rumblings about the construction of a synagogue in Snellville were met with mild resistance, but little else altered the landscape of a predominantly Christian “bedroom community” of Atlanta.
How much Gwinnett County has changed in the 30 years since our arrival! I am reminded of this every day as I drive past the Hindu Temple on Rockbridge Road: a vast, elegant, edifice nestled behind the
Walgreens and across from the Publix. Whereas a Catholic among Protestants was about as diverse as you could get in the Gwinnett of 1983, today our diversity includes nearly all the world religions.
With the inevitable social and cultural change that comes with living in a transportation hub like Atlanta, we have a unique opportunity to learn about the beliefs and customs of others who are very different than ourselves. Although social change evokes anxiety, it also affords us time to reconsider our own faith practices.
For instance, in recent weeks as I have driven by the Mandir, I have found myself pondering what it really means to be Christian. In his book, The Real Jesus, New Testament Scholar, Luke Timothy Johnson writes, “Christianity in its classic form has not based itself on the ministry of Jesus but on the resurrection of Jesus —the claim that after his crucifixion and burial Jesus entered into the powerful life of God, and shares that life (whose symbol is the Holy Spirit) with those who can receive it.”
Many Biblical scholars and theologians question the historicity of the resurrection of Christ. Luke Johnson seeks to understand what the early Christians meant by their resurrection experience. He explains that the resurrection is not a claim that Jesus did not die; it is not a claim that Jesus was resuscitated; it is not a claim that Jesus rose up out of the grave and went on, business as usual. “It is not something that merely happened to Jesus;” he says, “it is something that also happened to his followers.”
Through Jesus’ resurrection, he entered into the full power of new life in God and brings us right along with him in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are now, as St. Paul puts it, “In Christ.” Does that make us an elite group? Does my Hindu neighbor need to know a special code in order to participate with us? No. As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” As a people “in Christ,” we open our arms to our brothers and sisters with goodness, generosity, hospitality, peace and love. And it is through the power of Jesus’ resurrection that this is at all possible.
Alleluia, Christ is Risen!
The Rev. Ceci Duke
OUR RECTOR REFLECTS
Ceci
OUR RECTOR REFLECTS
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BUILDING A LIFE OF FAITH
Join Us in Morning PrayerMike Wood
As a way to develop a more intentional prayer community, Christ Church began Morning Prayer services at the first of Lent. These weekday services currently begin at 9:00 a.m., except on Wednesdays, when the service starts at 7:30 a.m. These daily Morning Prayer services assure that
Christ Church, as a covenant community, has one or a group offering prayer to our resurrected Lord on behalf of every parishioner by name, those with particular needs, our local parish as a whole, the entire church as the body of Christ, and our nation and the nations of the world.
We need you. So far, only a few parishioners have participated, with the officiants leading the services. Realizing that in our busy schedules, it is sometimes difficult to manage the logistics of our lives, we believe that parishioners who fall into one of the following categories may be available to participate more readily than others:
Those who commute to work on Wednesdays and could be at the church for 25 minutes and still get to work at a good time.
Those who work from home and could take 35 – 45 minutes (or more) to get to the church and back home.Parents who take their children to school and still have time to join the service on weekdays other than
Wednesday. (Feel free to bring a preschooler.)Retirees and others whose time is more flexible.
Because the morning services are more informal than our Sunday services, anyone who attends may read one or more of the lessons. If an officiant asks you (and you wish to read), please accept. No matter what, we pray that you will consider participating in this holy time in whatever manner suits you. Bring a neighbor, friend, or coworker. Our worship and prayers will be pleasing to the Lord and also will benefit our church family.
Advancing Authentic LeadershipLeading from the heart…and making a difference.
Congratulations to the latest graduates of Advancing Authentic Leadership! Thirteen more people have now joined the 45 graduates of past classes who are still present and very active at Christ Church. Since it was first begun here in 1993, this year’s class was the 13th group to participate, the first since 2003-04.
Through the years, over 300 current and former members of Christ Church have completed the multi-session weekly course. And the impact has reached outside our church—we have shared it with other Episcopal parishes as well.
The foundation of AAL is the belief that we all seek a deeper spiritual awareness—of who we are, our relationship with God, our neighbors, and the world. The mentor team seeks to put together sessions that address the aim of AAL…to be an inward journey toward spiritual wholeness, with the emphasis on toward. The journey is a life-long one; our vision, also an on-going challenge, guides us; and we seek a world in which men and women act out of their own spiritual centers as authentic leaders in home, community, church, and work—in ways that help others come to a realization of their God-given abilities and talents.
When asked, this year’s graduates said they enjoyed…looking at leadership from new perspectives; growing in their understanding of what it takes to build community; thinking about their life’s vision and mission; and deepening relationships. (One even came back for a repeat.)
—Carolyn Collins, Mentor and member of the original team that created AAL
L-R: Front row – Sherre Yager, Annette Stewart, Maria Chapman, Diane Lynch; Middle row – Rev John Ray - Mentor, Doug Nurse, Gwen Seeliger, Kathy Smith, Jim Wilson, Marti Hladish, Carolyn Collins – Mentor; Back row – Walt Thompson & Betsy Pickren – Mentors, Steve Smith, Charles Dowdell, John Hladish, Steve Franzen, Dennis Marks – Mentor. Not pictured Ed Thayer - Mentor
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Lord, Remember Us!Excerpted with Permission from the Homily of the Rev. Jeff Cave
First Sunday of Lent, 2012
It seems odd that God needs reminders, but apparently it is so. In the charming story of Noah, we are told that when God sees the rainbow, it will trigger his recollection of the covenant he made with Noah. Albert Schweitzer once wrote that “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” And a rainbow is just that, a remarkable coincidence; it all depends on your vantage point, the moisture in the air, and the angle of the sun. It really has no enduring reality; but for a brief moment it is dazzling, uncanny, like other events in our lives that come as sheer surprises, such as old friends turning up, triggering a chain of pleasant memories. And perhaps—who knows—this is one way God works: it is often the way of scientific break-throughs, it certainly is the way of human reconciliations, and we pray for those moments when the surprise of coincidence and commonality erase old enmities and stand-offs.
The rainbow is for God an “Oh, yes! I mustn’t forget what I promised to poor old Noah and his family. No more floods! But I set conditions: and, well, did Noah say he agreed to them? I can’t remember. (In fact, Genesis doesn’t say he did.) Oh yes; poor fellow became a prosperous first farmer, and he was so happy, he drank too much, and he lived 350 years! So I guess he did! The rainbow worked.”
Yes, God needs to be reminded, and that is why we pray, and why we sing, and why we chant our litanies and our “Holy, Holy, Holies,” our Sanctuses. Heaven and earth indeed are full of the Glory of God.
It is a time to remember that God needs to be reminded that we care, that we do, in fact, have a sense of proportionality, that we know we must actively partner with our ultimate partner in the process of procreating and recreating and renewing the face of the earth and washing our faces as that marvelous Ash Wednesday gospel tells us we must do.
“Remember me only according to your faithful love for the sake of your goodness, Lord.” Remember us, indeed!
ACTION IN CONTEMPLATION
Stewardship as ResurrectionCharlie Post
When we talk of a resurrected Christ or a “Born Again” Christian, we’re talking about transformation, about becoming a new person or a new type of person. So it is when a Christian grasps the concept of stewardship for the first time. I know because it happened to me.
Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves. We do that by caring about them and caring for them, by sharing our time, talents, and treasure with those in need, just as we would want them to help us in our time of need.
When we give of ourselves (our time, talents, and treasure) we are transformed into a new and better form of person. By doing so we escape the prison of selfishness and self-absorption. We literally and spiritually come closer to God, which is, after all, the sole purpose of our existence.
So don’t wait to be asked to give of yourself. Seek out opportunities to become a giver. And marvel at the change in your life.
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I’m half idealist, half pragmatist. What that means in Christian terms is that I’m both a “John” Christian and a “Thomas” Christian—I can get lost in the mystery of my own visions but I sometimes need proof from my sensations, too.
It wasn’t always that way. I was born a 100% idealist. I read the New Testament, especially the “red letter” words, and imagined a world like the kingdom of heaven Jesus talked about—a place where all people treated each other with kindness and gentleness, even in correction; a place where everyone had enough to eat and a place to sleep; a place where no one died.
And then I grew up. From age nine until I was 17, beginning with my beloved grandfather, who died suddenly of a heart attack, I would lose eight people to whom I was closely attached—accidents, cancer, even murder. My idealism faded until at age 19 I walked away from both it and the “organized” church.
It was not just the reality of death that did it—it was the reality that even those who called themselves “Christian” in my sphere did not seem at all concerned with acting on Mondays and Tuesdays or Thursdays in a manner that befitted the kingdom of God they espoused on Sundays. In retrospect, I think I fell prey to what Henri Nouwen called the “nuclear man” syndrome. Until the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thought of the future was tinged with excitement and hope. Afterward, for the majority of us, looking forward with unadulterated joy to a world beckoning with promise became impossible. Today was not guaranteed, much less tomorrow.
In the midst of the malaise, though, I met Alleyne, a woman who shared my heart. The youth lay leader of the Methodist church in our town, she was a mother/sister/friend in my young life, and I sought her counsel and her love. In her thirties at the time, with five children younger than I, she actually talked about spiritual things every day and consciously tried to act in love toward others as she understood Jesus to have done. It wasn’t that she never made mistakes—in fact, it would be she, after a series of events including the death of my father, who would nail the last nail in the coffin of my idealism…and my love affair with “church.”
Thirty years would pass, during which my now 100% pragmatic side watched, almost as a bystander to my own life. The remaining dreams of my childhood—of what my life and the world could be like—crumbled.
And then, in 2004, quite by “accident,” I was reconnected to the anchor and confidante of my adolescence. Both much older and wiser, Alleyne and I began to knit our relationship back together—she was a writer and so was I. Though I wasn’t interested in attending church services of any kind, which she accepted, I was more than willing to help her in her mission—she was still a lay leader, having grown in her influence. Within
Who Will Win?A New Look at Resurrection
Newgrange in Ireland, a 5000-year-old tomb that the sun enlightens only once per year.
Vally Sharpe
FEATURE ARTICLE
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a week or so of our first meeting after all those years, we were back at it—verbally sparring over theological issues and loving every minute of it. She wrote me that she had not been so energized in years; my best friend told me that a light had appeared in my eyes that she’d never seen before. My idealism, now tempered with age and experience, returned.
And then tragedy struck. At 65, Alleyne was diagnosed with a form of cancer for which the mortality rate was unspeakable. She went into remission for a while, but within a year, the cancer came roaring back with a vengeance. When she knew without question that she would not survive, she started sending me snippets—emails, reflections, letters, thoughts she had written in her journal—and photographs from a trip to Ireland that my best friend and I had taken her on. She wanted to memorialize the last days of her journey in a book.
While she was passing from chronos to kairos, as she said in one of her last pieces, I was dying all over again—the light that had reappeared in my eyes burned down to a fragile flicker. In one of our last conversations, we talked about her belief in an afterlife. I asked her, if she found it to be possible when she reached “the other side,” to send me a sign. She had awakened in me the desire to believe in the mystery again. The reality I’d seen, the reality in front of me, was too harsh.
I was out of state at a book launch in Ohio when she died. I was supposed to deliver a eulogy at her funeral, but no one could find my cell phone number and I didn’t check my email. Upon firing up my computer the morning after I got home to learn I had missed it all, I dropped everything and drove to Madison to see her husband. We sat in their living room—Tom in the chair she had always occupied when journaling—and he told me about her last day, the messages from all those who loved her, the celebration of her life at the funeral. And then he asked me if I’d seen the bird.
“Bird? What bird?” I asked, confused. I shook my head and followed him outside. After a minute or so, we located it. A large white dove sat on the roof, directly over the room we’d been in.
When I drove back to Atlanta that night, I was angry, paralyzed, demolished. For the fifth time in my life, I had been denied the chance to say goodbye to someone I loved. In grief, I sat for days on my patio in the early morning and waited in the darkness for the sun to rise. Sometimes I talked to God, sometimes to her. “Why did you leave while I was away? Why did you go without telling me goodbye?” The voice that responded in my head was hers. “I didn’t leave you. I sent you a dove, didn’t I?”
After that, I couldn’t bring myself to work on anything except her book. I called Tom every other day to check on him. Whether or not he had seen the bird became the first topic of our conversations.
Weeks passed. I continued laying out the book and the dove hung around. Kathleen, Alleyne’s daughter, took a photograph of the bird in the sycamore tree where it roosted each night.
On December 8, nine weeks after my friend’s death, I uploaded the final files to the printer. On December 9, the bird was gone. Four years have gone by, but no one has seen the dove again.
Coincidence? Wishful thinking? I don’t know. The pragmatist in me would certainly argue for that explanation. But there’s more to the story, the part the idealist in me hangs onto. Six days after the bird disappeared, I was given and received communion for the first time in 30 years. And two weeks after that, I slipped into the back pew of an Episcopal church on Holcomb Bridge Road in Norcross. You know the one.
Mystery or no, I am my own proof of the resurrection. And, as did my friend, I will bank the rest of my life on the belief that there is an afterlife of the spirit—in the face of knowledge that I may be way off base, especially about the details. But it doesn’t matter.
Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. He’s done it over and over for centuries, not once a year, but on every single day, in every single heart. Together, in Christ, we try, we fail, we die, we get knocked down, we get up, we keep going, no matter what—because we do it with a hope that cannot be extinguished.
That, even this pragmatist knows for sure.
A NEW LOOK AT RESURRECTION
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“That’s Ivy Cottage,” said Martha Gentry, pointing at a painting hanging on the wall of her room at Wesley Woods. “We lived there for a while when we were in Bermuda.”
I was caught by surprise. Ceci had gone to visit with “Miss Martha” and I had asked to tag along, but, of the many things I’d heard about her since coming to Christ Church, that she’d lived in Bermuda wasn’t one
of them. Nor, for that matter, had I known that Martha had loved archaeology and journalism, but not been able to go to college to study them. Instead, two months before her high school graduation, she’d transferred to a high school with night classes so she could take a full-time apprenticeship with a Washington, D.C. optical company. It was 1938, in the midst of the Great Depression and the job was an offer she couldn’t refuse — it paid $13 per week.
I quickly learned that those stories only scratched the surface. After leaving the optical company, she had worked as a secretary for the Ecuadorean Ambassador to the U.S.—Colón Eloy Alfaro, son of the man who had liberated Ecuador from Catholic rule and later become its president. “I learned Spanish,” she reported. “He didn’t trust Ecuadoreans with his personal business.”
At the end of WWII in Europe, Martha left the ambassador to work at UNRRA, the United Nations Relief & Rehabilitation Administration, which was established to “provide food, fuel, clothing, shelter and other basic necessities, medical and other essential services” to displaced Europeans. “All the non-Axis countries were part of it and each of the states sent whatever they could,” she explained. “We sent it overseas on large ships. I remember the Chileans sent nitrates for fertilizer. And the state of Louisiana had a bumper crop of sweet potatoes one year.”
I settled in, beginning to understand where her unyielding passion for the Christ Church Thrift Shop had found its origin.
Martha told us that, in her early 20s, she was briefly engaged to a young man from Richmond, Va., and that she had also been wooed by an Army cadet. During a weekend in West Point, they’d danced the night away in the empty ballroom of the Thayer Hotel. “He brought along a record player and a ‘plebe’ to operate it,” she said, “and he played ‘Begin the Beguine’ over and over.” The cadet asked her to marry him, but she said no. He would be killed in action in 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.
She had fallen for Bill Gentry while in high school, and though they corresponded throughout the war, they would not see each other again until he, a Marine, returned from the Pacific. He’d been in China—Tsingtao—when the Japanese had surrendered. Bill proposed several times, only to be rejected, and he finally told
Afternoons with Martha Gentry
PARISH SPOTLIGHT
Stories from anUnforgettable Life
by Vally Sharpe
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her that if they were ever to marry, she’d have to ask him. In 1948, when Bill became assistant manager of a hotel in Bermuda, she did.
After their wedding in Washington, D.C., Martha joined him in Bermuda, where they remained for a total of 11 years, interrupted by a year on Long Island when he was opening sales offices up and down the East Coast for a Bermuda hotel.
Though a “cradle Episcopalian,” Martha was also baptized in the Presbyterian Church, at the insistence of her paternal grandmother, but she never went to services there. Confirmed at Trinity Episcopal Church in Takoma Park, Md., she later joined a church closer
to her job in the District—St. Stephen and the Incarnation. St. Stephen’s would be the church where Bill and she would be married. (She thought the name an odd combination, as did Ceci, until she learned it resulted from the merging of two parishes into one.)
Four daughters would be born to the couple in 5½ years, one who would be baptized at St. Stephen’s, with Bishop “Andrew” Y.Y. Tsu assisting. (Bishop Tsu, an Episcopal bishop in China during WWII, was widely known as “the Bishop of Burma Road.”) She would later work for the Lord Bishop of Bermuda and the Azores, A.L.E. Williams, known as “Beery Bill” at Oxford. She remembers an air show by the “Blue Angels”—every time they exceeded Mach 1, the glass in the bishop’s office would rattle.
Martha worked, also, in various capacities in hotels where Bill was employed, but I’m guessing her favorite job was as a staff writer for Bermuda’s oldest newspaper, The Royal Gazette. For four years, she wrote about past days on the islands and the history of education in Bermuda, and interviewed famous tourists who came there on holiday. Among them were opera star Patrice Munsel, and popular songwriter Arthur Schwartz (“Dancing in the Dark”). Another assignment was a series, “Know Your Clergy,” for which she interviewed every clergyman in all of Bermuda. One wrote her a poem in thanks for her article.
An active member of Christ Church almost from its inception, Martha’s hearing and sight and balance are not what they used to be, but her spirit is indestructible. Life taught her that survival requires adaptability to change: from Takoma Park to her arrival at Wesley Woods, she counts 22 moves, many of which she accomplished with four children in tow. The family followed Bill from Bermuda to Grand Island, near Niagara Falls, and lived in numerous cities and towns in the eastern U.S. before finally settling for good in the Atlanta area. She lost Bill to cancer in 1997 and her “miracle” baby sister a couple of years ago.
It is mind-boggling to ponder the things Martha has seen in her 90+ years—economic depression, a world war, television, a moon walk, computers, the internet, and now, the iPhone. But most unforgettable is the obvious wisdom she acquired along the way—and the twinkle in her eyes when she talks about Bermuda.
The parish of Christ Church has been blessed by the presence of Martha Gentry. And on two very special afternoons, so was I. I’ll be back for more stories, and soon.
PARISH SPOTLIGHT
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MISSION FOCUS
Why Do I Go to Haiti?by Terry Franzen
I have been privileged to travel to Haiti twice per year since 2007 as part of our Christ Church team. Christ Church partners with an Episcopal mission church and school of the Diocese of Haiti—St. Joseph’s of Arimethea.
My “doing” job while there is to run the pharmacy for mobile medical and dental clinics at the community we serve, high in the mountains above Leogane, the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake.
Yes, a lawyer serving as a pharmacist! My qualifications include organizational skills, ability to read a doctor’s handwriting, whether in English, French, or Haitian Creole, tireless energy and a sense of humor. More important than “doing,” however, is “being”—with the people that I have come to love.
I’m often asked to describe Haiti. A one word answer is impossible. So, let me describe a walk to the beach after a long day’s work.
The beach is about 45 minutes, strolling, from our guesthouse. Out the gate, right at the road, take the second real street to the left, then left at the fork. I walk out of the town and into sugar cane fields, past men with machetes, cows, chickens, sheep, goats, and naked children yelling, “Hey, you!” or “Blan!” or “Foto!” and then grabbing my hand to walk with me.
I greet people along the way with “Bonswa,” and get a smiling “Bonswa” in return: from an old woman smoking a pipe, a completely naked two-year old, a mother nursing her baby, young men weaving mats from the sugar cane reeds, a boy pulling a car made from a plastic pop bottle, young girls braiding each other’s hair, men working at the cane distillery, another leading his cows home, an old woman sitting outside her tarp tent in the “camp,” and even young motorcycle machismos speeding by.
I walk past houses that are complete rubble and metal-framed 8x10 houses in mid construction, old homes made of stone and woven banana leaf walls that withstood the power of the quake while “fancy” houses collapsed with nothing left but a pile of dust, and the tent camps—tarps emblazoned with “USAID: A gift from the American people,” “Taiwanese Government
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MISSION FOCUS
Aid,” “Samaritan’s Purse,” and many others from people around the world who care about those they may never see.
The smells of Haiti are many—musty smoke from burning trash, acrid diesel fumes, stinky garbage along the road, slightly alcoholic smoke from the cane distillery, saltiness of the sea, urine from the outhouse, and the freshness of an approaching storm.
The sounds of Haiti are cacophonous—Christian rock music from an early church service, loud voices in a language I understand only “petit, petit,” and the constant blare of horns, barking dogs, crowing roosters, mooing cows, bleating sheep, grunting pigs.
But mostly, Haiti is not sights or smells or sounds. It’s people – doing the best they can with what they have, thankful for water and some food, grateful for any job, going back to school, having a dry spot in a thunderous storm, medical care, surviving the quake.
Why do I go to Haiti? Because, from the first time I came here, I’ve had no choice. I joke that I have to atone for being a lawyer or for that “C” in calculus that convinced an 18-year-
old that she’d never get into medical school. But the truth is that my soul requires it. I have a deep need to help the people I have grown to love.
When a young mother is holding her baby, limp in her arms from disease and heat, and she looks at me with eyes filled with pain, despair, and worry, I have no choice but to do what little I can to help. When children walk hours to reach a mountainside school, now held under a tarp because the building is leaning and cracked from the quake, I have no choice. When a young man is attacked and viciously beaten for the truck he is driving, I have no choice. When Jennifer, an 8-year old who lives in a lean-to outside my guesthouse, greets me with a hug, a smile and slips her hand into mine…I have no choice.
So, when I travel to Haiti, I do what I can, return home to my family, friends, job, and responsibilities and start planning my next trip to Haiti…
And I pray that you will find you have no choice but to join me.
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MISSION - THE IMPACT GROUP
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Phase I is Complete!A little less than a year ago, Rainbow Village hosted a ground
breaking ceremony for Phase I construction of a Family Service Center and two 6-unit apartment buildings. This first phase allows all of the families now living in Rainbow Village’s homes in Duluth and Norcross to come together on one campus, thus creating an even greater sense of community and transforming impact for the families they serve.
On April 20 at 12:00 pm, there will be a blessing and ribbon cutting of the newly completed Phase I at 3427 Duluth Highway 120, Duluth, Georgia!! Immediately following the program, lunch will be provided by Clyde and Sandra Strickland and Gwinnett Medical Center. Tours of the new facility will take place until 7:00 pm. Please RSVP to Erica Allen at 770-497-1888, Ext 10, or [email protected] if you wish to be a part of this celebration.
One week later, volunteers from Rainbow Village’s “faith partner” churches in Gwinnett and Fulton Counties (of which Christ Church is one) will help families move from the old complex into their new residences. Christ Church volunteers are working with Rainbow Village and the other churches to identify those items our designated family will need most for their scheduled move-in. As soon as we gather the list of “housewarming” items, we will seek your help and donations of those items that will be most beneficial and useful to the family and the move-in process.
ANNUAL GOLF CLASSIC on MAY 7, at TPC SUGARLOAF
Also, the 7th Annual Rainbow Village Golf Classic fundraiser will be held Monday, May 7, 2012, at TPC Sugarloaf with a shotgun start at 12:00pm. There are great prizes for the winners, great raffle prizes, and a fabulous dinner provided by Outback Steakhouse, Johns Creek. If you wish to learn more and/or participate, please visit the Rainbow Village website:
www.rainbowvillage.org/events/2012-golf-classic
and register now to golf and/or be a sponsor. For more information about the Golf Classic, contact Sandra Cathy at 770-497-1888 x 13.
VOLUNTEERS WELCOME
Rainbow Village ministry volunteers from Christ Church are always welcome. Please visit the Rainbow Village website to learn more about the work that is led by Nancy Yancey and her staff, and ways you can help: www.rainbowvillage.org/get-involved/ways-to-volunteer.
If you have further questions about any of the above, please feel free to ask some of Christ Church’s Rainbow Village volunteers who serve in various capacities, including Rita Boughrum, Molly Kress, Connie Leff, Mary Halliburton, Marlaine Barnes, Carol and Jack Brocksmith, and Pat and Mike Corkum or one of the Rainbow Village board members from Christ Church—Ken Boughrum or Frank Rinker.
MISSION - RAINBOW VILLAGE
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CHILDREN AND YOUTH EVENTS
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Journey to Adulthood
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CHILDREN AND YOUTH EVENTS
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Godly Play and WorkshopCycles
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UPCOMING EVENTS AT CHRIST CHURCH
A Night on the Red CarpetDinner, Silent & Live Auctions
The J2A youth will complete their journeys to confirmation (April 29 at the Cathedral of St. Philip), and cap off the two-year process by traveling to England this summer, where they will tour the landmarks of Anglicanism.
Buy your tickets today for “A Night on the Red Carpet,” an evening of dinner, as well as both silent and live auctions, the proceeds from which will help fund the J2A pilgrimage to the worldwide home of our faith tradition. Donations of items or services for either auction are welcome—and tax deductible. (A receipt for your records will be provided at your request.)
Tickets for the event, which are $15 each, are available for purchase from any one of the J2A youth or via the church website at http://ccn.episcopalatlanta.org.
Ladies’ Easter Bonnet Tea, Sunday, April 15 - 4:00 pmAn Old-Fashioned English Tea
with Soloists from the Christ Church Players& Taste-Bud Ticklers from the Bleu House
Ashton Wilson, Amy Pridgen, Alden Pridgen, Daphne Gary, and Mamie Pridgen are looking forward with great anticipation to the
