News from St. Nicholas with the Holy Innocents
Regular schedule begins today.
- Worship at 9 – the more formal liturgy
- 10 Education hour for children, youth, and adults
- Worship at 11 – the more informal liturgy
Bring a non-perishable food item to church.
Our food pantry will benefit greatly if we all remember to do this each Sunday. Place it on or beneath the grey table just inside the worship space.
Make yourself a name tag whenever you worship.
It will help us get to know one another faster, and it’s a great way to make guests feel welcome.
Lift every voice and sing…
Thanks to all who joined the choir this past Sunday and produced such a wonderful sound. If you’ve ever thought about joining the choir, now is a great time. Mary will be starting on February 11 as music director, and will be delighted to have you. In the weeks before Mary begins, Kris Abels (principal guest organist of the former Holy Innocents) and Amy Dolan (former music director at the former St. Nicholas) are filling in on piano to take some of the load off Betsy Swanson’s shoulders – although I currently
do not have an accompanist for January 28. Since this is such a hectic period, it will be helpful if choir members could arrive at 9 to run through the music. Betsy also has been holding choir practice on Wednesdays at 7 and will continue to do so until Mary arrives.
Visit to Buddhist Temple on February 3rd
A discussion during a recent Team Awesome teen education class revealed a desire by many to learn more about Buddhism and, in particular, to visit a Buddhist temple. On Saturday, February 3rd at 11 a.m., St. Nicholas with the Holy Innocents will be visiting the Shinnyo-en Japanese Buddhist Temple in Elk Grove Village for a service to celebrate the coming of spring. We will be throwing beans around the temple, but you’ll have to come to find out why! The service at will be followed by a tour of the temple, during
which visitors are invited to ask questions. The temple is located at 120 E. Devon Avenue in Elk Grove. For more information on Shinnyo-en Buddhism, and the religion in general, you are encouraged to visit http://www.shinnyo-en.org. Anyone wishing to attend should contact Ethan Jewett at jewett_ethan@yahoo.com, so that he can give the temple a final count of participants. Adults and children, as well as teens, are more than welcome to attend.
onebreadonebody.org
Be sure to check out our new combined and simplified web site – and to thank Ethan and Mike for a superb job on it.
Help needed to transport a family of 4 from Hoffman Estates to St. Nicholas with the Holy Innocents.
The Bollyn family – two adults, two children — does not have a car and will need a ride to get to the new building. They live just a couple of blocks from the Holy Innocents building. Let me know by email ASAP if you can help — onebreadonebody@sbcglobal.net.
Please join me for adult education at 10
We are going to spend the next several weeks discussing Growing Our New Church. Some of the discussion will be on the challenges of bringing our two previous congregations together as one new one. Even more of it will be on doing those things we need to be doing to grow. I will value greatly the participation of each of you. As I said Sunday, we have a great opportunity before us and, although I have many ideas on how to take advantage of this moment, the most important ideas are yours, because we can only do
this together, from the ground up. Children and youth who would like to share ideas are welcome to attend this session in lieu of their regular church school programs, which will also begin this week.
Our two liturgies…
Today we begin our regular schedule and I encourage you to try both the 9 and the 11 liturgies – maybe even in the same day. It’ll provide a chance to connect with different people, and give you a chance to feel your way into the two distinct styles of liturgy. As I said Sunday, they will be different, with the aim of meeting different needs in our new congregation, but even more importantly of reaching out to more new members. Rather than me trying to capture the differences in words, come and see…. …and a note
on contemplative quiet. One thing I hope will unite both liturgies is a warm, sacramental feel. Especially after Mary arrives, there will be preludes and postludes and I would be grateful if our conversations could be moved into the next room so that those who wish to enter or exit worship gradually and more contemplatively can do so. I realize especially for the social, extroverted St. Nicholas people that this will be a shift, and it will be made easier with a building addition. In the meantime, thanks for
trying. Finally, one bread, one body.
1. I was so proud of all of you on Sunday. What a great beginning to our new life together. It was a wonderful liturgy, with everyone letting go of some customary ways of doing things and opening their hands to accept the new things God is doing. The ice cream (thanks Karen, Mary Anne, and Ethan and Mike) and cake (thanks Manny and Douglas) and coffee (thanks Paul) were great afterwards. What made me proudest of all was that I heard absolutely no grumbling, grousing, or complaining about having to let go. What
an incredible and mature group of people you are!
2. This week we will move a little closer to establishing the norms and practices of each liturgy. With our space limitations and the chaos of coming together, it will be a few more weeks before everything is where I want it to be with each liturgy. Thank you for being so patient with the bedlam.
3. Finally, thanks to everyone who helped with the moving on Sunday. We have now moved everything from the Holy Innocents building that we want to come to this building. There remain items we intend to move to storage, but we will ask an Episcopal Charities agency to do that moving for us. Now we focus on the future, and what a bright future it can be.
— Steve
