Category: Events

After worship this coming Sunday morning (12/17), you will have the opportunity, alongside catching up with friends and pewmates, over coffee, tea, and cookies, to do a little last minute shopping, and with a conscience to boot!
Cindy Sending and our youngest youth group will host an alternative gift fair, which is an opportunity to purchase gifts for friends and family at the last moment, by giving a gift in their name to one of three cool charities.  We will give you a card to send to your family member or friend, saying that you’ve donated to “x” charity in their honor. The three charities are:

1. Heifer Project International — This organization has been around for decades and also leverages the power of small gifts to multiply across time and geographic region by harnessing the power of animals to provide and reproduce and people to share.
2. World Bicycle Relief Organization — Another relatively new organization, this charity is dedicated to the idea that bicycles are the means for a vast majority of people in this world to get a leg up. In the vast majority of areas of the world, walking is the one guaranteed mode of transport.  A bicycle offers the real and immediate benefit through access to goods, services and especially education for women. “Powered by the remarkable human spirit, bicycles are a catalyst to possibilities.”
3. Healthy Homeworks — The newest charity on our list, Healthy Homeworks was started by two friends of Peter’s in Portland, ME.  The project began because Amy and Nate Smith wanted to purchase property to make available for rental in the up and coming community of Lewiston, ME.  When they got there they discovered that the  properties were infested with bed bugs.  Healthy Homeworks provides free beds to anyone willing to provide 6 -8 hours of sweat equity.  They come into the factory in Lewiston and build a bed for themselves and two other beds to sell.

Please come and do your last minute Christmas shopping with us!

For over 15 years, as soon as the weather starts getting cold and wet,  we line up from the church to the food shelf, and in a show of solidarity pass bags of food from person to person to fill the shelves at the other end. This year we’re doing it as the weather gets warmer. Why?
This year, we are doing holding our Food Chain in the late spring because the summer months are especially difficult for the Food Shelf:  1) Donations are low since the seasons of giving happen in the late fall and winter, and 2) Once school is out and families who had been relying on free and reduced school lunch programs (federally sponsored, based on need) begin using the food shelf a bit more heavily. We hope to help keep it stocked at a time when the food-shelf is running through food.
Secondly, there are many who feel that food-shelves are a waste of good people’s time and energy.  We can at least, by our actions indicate we think otherwise.  There are a good many other people who simply don’t think about the food-shelf and the plight of the hungry families in our town.  Again, without comment, our actions suggest that here is a group of people concerned for all members of our community.
You can help by bringing a bag or two to share in the effort, starting as soon as this Sunday.  That bag can be filled with anything you’d likely want to have stocked in your kitchen shelves.
Here are some needed items:

• Snacks (like a variety of crackers)
• Canned chicken
• Hearty Soups
• Jam (other than grape!)
• Salt and Pepper
• Canned fruit and apple sauce
• Pastas other than spaghetti
• Black beans
• Baked beans

The Food Chain is scheduled for June 10, 2018 following worship.