WEEKLY CALENDAR

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
10 a.m. R.L. Pope Class by Allen Brown via Facebook and on WGOS AM 1070
11 a.m. Live Worship Online via Facebook and on WGOS AM 1070
** NEW **  6 p.m. Evening Vespers Service on the Church Lawn
Youth: Virtual Zoom Games

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 14
9:00-11:00 a.m. Internet Access Remote Learning Cafe (Fellowship Hall)
10:00 a.m. “10@10” Weekday Devotions via Facebook
5:00-7:00 p.m.  Internet Access Remote Learning Cafe (Fellowship Hall)

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 15
8:00 a.m. Men’s Prayer Meeting Online via Zoom (contact Brian Russell)
9:00-11:00 a.m. Internet Access Remote Learning Cafe (Fellowship Hall)
10:00 a.m. “10@10” Weekday Devotions via Facebook
5:00-7:00 p.m.  Internet Access Remote Learning Cafe (Fellowship Hall)
5:30 p.m.  Yoga (Jarrett Hall)

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 16
The Weekly Update via Facebook
10:00 a.m. “10@10” Weekday Devotions via Facebook
6:00 p.m. Youth Small Groups via Zoom (contact Rodney Denton)

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 17
9:00-11:00 a.m. Internet Access Remote Learning Cafe (Fellowship Hall)
10:00 a.m. “10@10” Weekday Devotions via Facebook
1:30-6:00 p.m. Red Cross Blood Drive
5:00-7:00 p.m.  Internet Access Remote Learning Cafe (Fellowship Hall)

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 18
10:00 a.m. “10@10” Weekday Devotions via Facebook

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 20
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
10 a.m. R.L. Pope Class by Harold Vannoy via Facebook and on WGOS AM 1070
11 a.m. Live Worship Online via Facebook and on WGOS AM 1070
6 p.m. Evening Vespers Outdoors (See announcement below.)
Youth: Virtual Zoom Games

UPCOMING DATES
SEPT. 30  CCM MONTHLY DROP-OFF EVENT

PRAYER CONCERNS

If you or a loved one would like to be added to the prayer list, please contact Lorna McCullough at 336-259-5814. If you put a name on the list, please keep in touch to let us know how that person is doing, as names are removed after three weeks.

During the coming week, please pray for…

Susan Kennedy and family
Margie Collins
Katie Ballard, Eddie Branson, and the family of Jeanette Branson
Charlotte Rorie
Brandon Rorie and family
Carol Kaiser
Nancy McLain
Josef Walker
Sam Branson
Dean Sharpe-Austin
Kay Eanes
Jim and Barbara Westmoreland
Grant Brinkley and Family
Finley Price Family
Robert Miller
Andrea Cain and Family
Dave Ogren
Dallas Hutchens
Tyler Oldaker
Tim Priska
Chris Eddinger
Tracy Brinkley
Peace and justice in our nation, state, and city
Our First Responders, Medical Community, and Essential Workers
All those affected by COVID-19
Our UM Missionaries
All Military Personnel
The United Methodist Church

We extend our prayers and sympathy to Susan Kennedy and family on the death of Susan’ husband, Mike Kennedy, September 1, 2020. The obituary for Mike can be read at
jcgreenandsons.com/obituary/Michael-Dexter-Kennedy.

OUTDOOR VESPERS SERVICE TO BEGIN   

We are pleased to offer an additional opportunity for you to share in worship! On Sunday September 13 at 6:00 p.m.,  you are invited to bring your lawn chair and come join others for a time of worship on the church lawn. We will sing familiar hymns and share prayers, scripture readings, and a homily. We hope you will dress casually and find this time to be both inspirational and relaxing. This service allows us to gather safely, yet still come together for worship. Our plans are to continue the service each Sunday evening until the time that we can safely return to the sanctuary.

We will continue live-streaming worship at 11:00 a.m. each Sunday morning on Facebook Live and WGOS 1070 AM.

SCHOOL SUPPLIES DRIVE 

It’s Back to School time and we are collecting needed supplies for area students. Collection bins are set up outside of the church reception door at the Mission Racks for easy drop-off. Thank you for your generosity helping students with the learning materials they need.

• Paper
• Notebooks
• Glue Sticks
• Folders
• Safety Scissors
• Crayons
• Markers
• Erasers
• Highlighters
• Colored Pencils
• Hand sanitizer
• Sanitizing wipes

WE NEED YOU!

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

School will begin for the Thomasville City Schools on August 17, but the school buildings will remain empty. Students will learn remotely for a while. It will be imperative for children to have access to the Internet and there are some who do not. We are pleased to partner with TCS to provide an Internet access site for remote learning for students. We will open the church for two-hour periods on select days during the week for students needing Internet access.

In order to accomplish this, we will need church folks who will give a couple hours of their time to be present. This is not a tutoring service. Students will sign up, and we will limit the number of children at each session. All safety precautions will be followed. Tables will be set up to ensure social distancing, and students will be expected to wear masks, wash their hands prior to entering, and have their temperature taken. Children K-8 must be accompanied by an adult.

The church will be open on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday 9-11 a.m. and 5-7 p.m.  Two volunteers will be needed for each session. To sign up please use the Signup Genius link here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/70A0545A8AF28A02-remote.

STUDENT REMOTE LEARNING INTERNET ACCESS CAFE  

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or call the office at 336-472-7718.

A/V VOLUNTEERS NEEDED FOR WORSHIP 

Do you enjoy photography? Interested in the latest information technology? We need a few good men and women to train as video camera operators. If you have any interest in helping us take this step forward in virtual broadcasting, please notify Susan Frye (sfrye@mumctville.org or 336-472-7718) or Harold Vannoy (hvobwnknob@gmail.com or 336-240-9524) who will get you in touch with the right persons. We will need this help in the near future to execute this critical outreach mission. Thank you!

R.L. POPE CLASS NEW ONLINE LESSONS

SUNDAYS AT 10:00 A.M. on WGOS

The R. L. Pope Class is excited to announce the return of new, weekly online lessons. Tune in to WGOS on your radio or computer.

Teaching Schedule:
September 13   Allen Brown
September 20 Harold Vannoy
September 27   Richard Herman

PUMPKIN UPDATE

There is mixed news in the pumpkin department. We have made the decision not to host a pumpkin patch in 2020. We do this with the health of the many volunteers in mind–both those who download and those who manage the pumpkin sales and interact with the public. We WILL be setting up our traditional fall harvest photo backdrop in the church yard, and it will be available for photo ops October 10 through November 1. We regret that the change in plans will come as a disappointment, and we appreciate your understanding of a difficult decision. We eagerly anticipate the return of our pumpkin patch in October 2021.

CLERGY AND STAFF ARE AVAILABLE

You may contact members of the staff directly or by calling the church office at 336-472-7718 and following the instructions on the recording. Here is a list of staff phone extensions and email addresses, for reference:

Danny Leonard, Senior Minister – Ext. 16; dleonard@mumctville.org
Rodney Denton, Minister of Youth and Young Adults – Ext. 18; rdenton@mumctville.org
Lynda Hepler, Minister of Children and Families – Ext. 11; lhepler@mumctville.org
Brian Russell, Director of Contemporary Worship – Ext. 20; brussell@mumctville.org
Danny Frye, Director of Music – Ext. 12; dfrye@mumctville.org
Susan Frye, Secretary – Ext. 14; sfrye@mumctville.org
Peggy May, Financial Secretary/Treasurer – Ext. 13; pmay@mumctville.org
Jarry Oldaker, Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds – Ext. 17; joldaker@mumctville.org

FINANCIAL GIVING OPTIONS WHILE THE OFFICE IS CLOSED

Thank you for your ongoing generosity to Memorial. While the office is closed, there are three options for making gifts to Memorial:

The address for mailing checks is:
Memorial UMC
P.O. Box 428
Thomasville, NC 27361-0428

Online gifts can be made securely at https://onrealm.org/mumctville/give/now which can also be accessed from our website homepage.

Electronic funds transfer (EFT) giving can be set up for your recurring tithe. For information on how to arrange this, please email or leave a message for Peggy May, Financial Secretary, at pmay@mumctville.org or 336-472-7718.

FEATURED DEVOTION

We close this week’s eNews with a 10@10 devotion shared by Rodney Denton on July 24, 2020.

Sow What?

Today I want to talk about gardening, specifically the planting and harvesting parts. Earlier this Spring, when this pandemic was still sort of fun and it looked like its effects would be short-lived, I mentioned in my 10 @ 10 that my wife had started working in our yard and planting bulbs and seeds and all sorts of strangely named plants and flowers. This is without a doubt the most yard care and gardening we have done at a home of our own since we got married in 1993. In fact, we just recently ate our first tomato of the season, the cucumbers are almost ready to be eaten, and there is beauty in the form of flowers blooming everywhere.  

I want to especially thank those of you who have helped to feed my wife’s newfound addiction by supplying us with Cana lilies, Black-eyed Susans, Celosias (Cock’s comb), Bearded Irises… and much more, including the advice to keep them from dying. AND I also want to thank Susan (you know who you are) for the advice to “just get out of the way” and let my wife’s new passion just happen, because once things start blooming and we see how beautiful the blooms are, there is just no stopping it. Again, thanks for all the support. I was just wondering when I get my wife back, because right now every moment of free time is spent watering these “babies,” weeding the beds, cursing the squirrels for eating the veggies, praying for rain, planning the next step of conquering the backyard flower beds as if it were some sort of military offensive, and then, of course, enjoying the fruits of all of this labor. So, when exactly does this whole process end?

It really doesn’t matter; I really am just grateful that she is happy and that our back yard is more than just a “natural area.” But as I survey all these blooms and prepare to enjoy the harvest of the veggies, I am reminded of a Bible verse from Galatians 6: 7-10:

7 Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. 8 Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. 9 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. 10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.

I sort of like this idea of reaping what you sow or harvesting what you plant. In a more figurative sense, the actions that you take today affect the quality of your life in the future. Any good farmer knows that the variety of the seeds that you plant is always going to be the fruit that you will be harvesting in the future. You won’t be planting weeds and hope for watermelons; and if you plant tulip bulbs, you won’t be growing a thorny cactus instead. The more seeds of hope we sow, the more hopeful we feel. The more seeds of love we sow, the more we see love in the world. The more seeds of peace we plant, the more peace we will grow in our own hearts. The more joy you give, the more joy you will receive. I think you get the picture.   

Now, let me just say right here that this may sound very similar to the Hindu concept of karma, which is sort of a buzz word in our culture right now. HOWEVER… I believe that the biblical understanding of sowing and reaping is a little different from what most people in our culture refer to as karma, which I understand is more of a concept of “cosmic cause-and-effect,” including reincarnation. Karma is sort of based on the idea of the more good you do, the better your life will be; the more painful things you do, the more painful your life will be. The popular concept of karma is similar to an incident which played out the other night during one of our family board game nights. We were playing Monopoly, and Daelyn would not sell or trade a property to Gracen that he needed to complete a coveted “color set” that would allow him to build houses and rake in all kinds of Monopoly rental money. No matter what he would offer, she would not give in. He got pretty upset with her stubbornness. The very next round, Daelyn rolled the dice and landed on one of my properties which I had built a hotel on, which meant that she then owed me a large sum of money! Gracen, still angry over the failed property deal from earlier, immediately chimed in, saying, “I guess it was karma!” 

Now, this version of karma, that somehow the roll of the dice can be affected by your past actions, is very different from Biblical reaping and sowing. Reaping and sowing is less about luck and fate and more about how the seeds of our thoughts, attitudes, and actions in the present have an effect on the harvest of our future values, reputation, and character. In other words, how we live our lives now (the sowing part), has a direct impact on the quality of our lives in the future (the harvesting part). That does not mean that we will not experience bad luck, difficult situations, and unfortunate circumstances, but it does mean that when we do face these trials (and we will), the relationships and the respect and the ways we have responded in the past is often reciprocated back to us with the same quality in the future.   The problem is sometimes the reaping of a situation can be distanced so far from the sowing that we may fail to make a connection between the two situations. Let me give you an example.

I have been a Youth Minister for my entire 23-year ministry career; and in that time, I have had some successes and some disappointments, but one of my more unusual highlights happened over the course of a few years early in my ministry. At the very first church that I served, a church named Mount Zion UMC in Cornelius, NC, I organized a small accountability group of 8-12 teenagers who met in my living room on Wednesday evenings with my wife and me. Each week we would meet and discuss our week, encourage one another, and pray for one another. We typically maintained a core group of kids who came regularly, but from time to time we would have friends of our “regulars” come for short periods of time. Some would stick around and become regulars themselves; some would not. Overall, this is one of my favorite aspects of my ministry with youth because of the way I get to personally know the kids, their struggles, their fears, their achievements; and it’s a time to sow seeds that will hopefully grow and produce fruit sometime down the road. It’s a great time to build relationships that go much deeper than Sunday night activities like dodgeball and laser tag. This is also a part of my ministry that I have continued here at Memorial. 

I left Mount Zion in 2000 after three years there to serve a church in South Carolina. Some of my time at the South Carolina church could be characterized as “rough at times,” and during an exceptionally difficult time in my ministry that had me raising questions about my abilities in ministry and my place in the Church, I received a very well-timed letter in the mail out of the blue. Now, through the years, I have received plenty of encouraging letters, notes, and personal messages, but this letter sort of stood out because it was simply signed, “Cathy.” And, to be honest, I couldn’t exactly remember who “Cathy” was.  I looked for the letter while I was writing this in order to make sure I got the details correct but could not find it. I do remember that it was clearly from a former youth at Mount Zion, but it took a little detective work to jog my memory and figure out exactly who it was from. As it turns out, it was one of those friends of one of our “regulars” who came only once or twice to our small group; and since she had a church of her own, she just never really got connected in any permanent way. But, I do remember that in the letter she shared how the acceptance and care she had experienced at our small group came at a really important time for her and changed the way she felt about herself. It was a thank you letter for our teen small group ministry. She went on in the letter to explain that she was graduating from college and engaged to get married to a young man who was going to Divinity School, and she just wanted to let me know that my wife and I had had a positive impact on her. Now, let me be clear about this… I do not remember what I said to her, and I am not even sure what she was going through at that time… The situation is a “God thing” that I simply feel was like: I was there, but things were happening even in spite of my presence. 

The point for me was that there is this sort of random girl out there who I just briefly crossed paths with, and, because I tried my best to be faithful to sow the seeds of grace and love (what our passage this morning calls “doing good”), I ended up reaping this encouraging harvest “…at [just] the proper time” –just when I needed it. No fate or luck or weird sort of unconnected roll of the dice; the same quality of grace and encouragement that I tried to sow in another person’s life was returned to me, was a harvest at just the time that I needed it the most. “We reap what we sow.” I often wonder, if my attitude at Small Group had been different, or if I had been in a bad mood that day, or I had just treated Cathy with anything less than I did because she was not one of my “regular” kids, if I would have ever gotten a letter at all, much less a message to keep trying my best in the exact time that I needed to hear her much appreciated words of affirmation. Now, there are definitely plenty of times when I have failed and grown weary of doing the right thing, I don’t want to give you the impression that I have any of this figured out. But what I do know is that I have found when I am intentional about being faithful to do the right thing and be kind to others, God finds a way to use people in my life to eventually work my challenging situations out. 

The interesting thing is that the farming language and imagery used in this verse, I believe, is quite intentional and a perfect illustration to this complex issue. Sowing and reaping would be a very familiar process that a first century audience, dependent on agriculture to survive, would understand very well.  What I’m trying to say is that with our instant gratification mindset, we might expect to be able to sow seeds and then immediately reap the benefits, and we so often get discouraged if we see no initial benefits to our good behavior. But for a farmer or an amateur botanist, as my wife has become, the process of sowing and reaping is anything but instant.  Instead, we may sow many, many seeds, and then there is a waiting period before the harvest comes. We may plant bulbs in the fall in order for a flower to bloom in the Spring; and we plant seeds in the Spring for summer fruits and veggies. There are even plants that only bloom every 10, 20, and 40 years; talk about the discipline of patience! This is true of doing good as well! We plant lots of “doing good” seeds, and then we must be patient to WAIT to reap the harvest.   

So, my point this morning is that we need to pay attention to what sort of seeds we are planting in this world. And just like I asked earlier about this new passion for gardening that my wife has fallen into, “When exactly does this whole process end?” I hope that the answer is never and that you will continue to plant those seeds, get rid of those weeds, and be patient, because God has a way of surprising us with a harvest of grace, love, and beauty just when we need it. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Please join us for our study and worship this Sunday, at 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Facebook Live and WGOS 1070. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, take care of each, other and stay healthy, people!

YOU CAN WATCH AND READ ALL 10 @ 10 DEVOTIONS HERE.