A friendly chili contest – March 10

Just for kicks, the church council proposed and has set a date for our next chili lunch and friendly competition. A certain member of the council happens to be the twice, maybe three times champion! Is it time for a new chili champ? All of us, bar one, think so!

The plan is simple. Bring a crock pot or a regular pot of chili to church in the morning. The oven will be on and set to very low. Pop your pot in the oven or plug it in and join us for worship. We’ll have the coffee on following worship while we get set up downstairs. We’ll start eating at 11:30.

We do hope you can join us and bring along a chili to sample!

CROP Walk Update

On Sunday afternoon, October 1, a group of 16 set off on our annual CROP Walk around the river. We were walking to raise money for Church World Service’s ongoing initiative to help end hunger. It was a beautiful early autumn day, the sun was shining and spirits happy as we ambled along, making new connections with each other and sharing stories. We will be sending $1500 to Church World Service as a result of our efforts. As is their practice, they will return a percentage to the Waterbury Area Food Shelf, now known as the Waterbury Common Market.

Strawberry Festival 2023 – Sign up to Help!

Our last celebration of the lovely, lovely strawberry was 4 years ago. It was our 46th annual. The world has changed a bit since then. We’ve grown a little more wary. We’ve lost traditions or let them slide. At a Board of Finance Meeting a few months ago, in conversation about setting our budget, several thousand dollars of which come from special events like the Strawberry Supper, we all felt an urgency in restoring this tradition. I don’t have an actual record of each year, but I think that the last 4 misses broke an uninterrupted string of strawberry festivals dating back to 1973.

Not only that, we are fundamentally about community. It is part of our DNA, not merely to be conserving community and tradition, but to be developing it — to be part of the process of trying to become a people who care for each other and look out for each other, who create spaces that are shared and enjoyable and by so doing help bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice. Anyway, it’s back!

You can sign up to help and we encourage you to do so sooner rather than later. The sign up program, if you give it your email address (and it already has lots of yours), will send you a reminder.

Here’s the Sign Up Genius Link. If you need help, give us a call at the church 244-6606.

https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0A44A9AB2DA1FC1-2023

The Wrap on Tag Sale 2022

With lovely weather to grace our tag sale as well, I am happy to report that it was a success! We collected the usual amount of stuff to sell and we sold or gave away most of it. (We did not however, manage to get rid of the rather large media cabinet — see picture — if you’d like it, come to the church and take it). And we made our fairly typical profit of about $2300, meeting our budget expectations.

Thank you to Lew Petit who organized the event and stayed with it to the very end. He spent about 10 hours here on Saturday and Sunday making sure things were getting sold. We had several other volunteers helping out as well. Many thanks to Cindy Senning, Lori Morse, Karen Petit, Dean King, Diane Leavitt, Betsy Ainsworth, Erin Mooney, Deb Utton and Jill Chase.

Thanks, Lori for the photos, as well!

Lew and his partner, managing the show!
Looking for a home.
A tag sale’s best friend.