Taizé Worship Tonight!

Our second Taizé worship service of the spring will take place tonight (Tuesday) at 7:00 p.m. in the Christ Church chapel. If you haven't yet had the chance to attend Christ Church's new monthly worship service in the style of the Taizé community, tonight's service is a perfect opportunity! Taizé worship is quiet, contemplative, and peaceful, a renewing experience during hectic times.

Taizé Worship at Christ Church
Tuesday, April 25, 7:00pm
Christ Church Chapel

Homeless Family Mentoring

"We strive to meet the world around us in compassion and love." (CCUM Mission Statement)

The Social Action Work Area, with the support of the Administrative Board, has volunteered Christ Church United Methodist to mentor a homeless family. The program is called Family Rescue Ministry (FRM), coordinated through the Denver Rescue Mission, in partnership with the Metro Denver Community and the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness.

The following summary of CCUM's commitment is from the website:

• Organize a small group of two to five volunteers from your church.
• FRM provides the mentoring team initial training and offers continued support during the outreach.
• The mentoring team meets the family and, with the help of FRM, determines their relational, material, and spiritual needs.
• The mentoring team volunteers give a few hours each month to assist the family for approximately six months.
• A financial commitment of $1,200 toward first month's rent.

A 90-minute training session will be held at CCUM in June for people interested in the program and possibly becoming a part of a mentoring team. A support team, outside of the mentoring team, will be greatly needed to help fund-raise, pray, and possibly find ways to provide practical needs such as clothing and furniture. The program will "match" our church with a family based on our location, to be most convenient to the family's new home. The date of the training will be decided in May. Stay tuned!

Donald Messer preaching this Sunday

This Sunday, April 23, Dr. Donald Messer, co-author of Ending Hunger Now: A Challenge to Persons of Faith, will deliver a sermon on the topic of hunger and AIDS. Following the worship service, there will be a congregational discussion in the Fellowship Hall, which Dr. Messer will initiate with a brief PowerPoint presentation documenting the extent of hunger and AIDS in the world. UMW will prepare a lunch for the occasion, but it will be kept simple, in view of the topic. We hope you will join us to discuss this specific "challenge to persons of faith."

Did you know?
Over the years, we've been inundated with the statistics and the pictures of poverty around the world—so much so that many people have come to accept it as an unfortunate but unalterable state of affairs. The world today is more prosperous than it ever has been and the technological advances we have seen in recent years have created encouraging new opportunities to improve economies and reduce hunger.

Did you know that in our world today:

• One third of deaths—some 18 million people a year (50,000 people per day)—are due to poverrelatedted causes. That's 270 million people since 1990, the majority women and children, roughly equal to the population of the United States. (Reality of Aid, 2004)
• Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger and preventable diseases—that's over 30,000 per day and one every three seconds. (80 Million Lives, 2003/Bread for the World/UNICEF/World Health Organization)
• Over 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day with nearly half the world's population (2.8 billion) living on less than $2 a day. (UN HDR, 2003)
• 600 million children live in absolute poverty. (SCF, Beat Poverty, 2003)
• The three richest people in the world control more wealth than all 600 million people living in the world's poorest countries. (ChristianAid)
• Income per person in the poorest countries in Africa has fallen by a quarter in the last 20 years. (ChristianAid)
• 800 million people go to bed hungry every day. (FAO)
• Every year nearly 11 million children die before their fifth birthday. (UNICEF)
  

Rochester Boys Choir in CONCERT

Christ Church is excited to host the Rochester Boys Choir in a special concert event on Thursday, April 20, at 7:00 p.m. in the sanctuary. The visiting choir will perform an hour-long concert which will feature works by Benjamin Britten, Randall Thompson, and folk songs from around the United States. David Klement, the founder and director of the Rochester Boys Choir, is the Director of Music at the 2300-member Asbury First United Methodist Church in Rochester, NY.

Founded in January 2002, the Rochester Boys Choir is an independent, community-based family of choirs for boys with unchanged treble voices ages 7 and up. Talented boy singers are drawn from throughout the greater Rochester, new York metropolitan area. The choir’s mission is to train and encourage boys in the art of fine choral singing by promoting the boy choir tradition through a wide variety of public and private performances.

The Rochester Boys Choir concert at Christ Church is free and open to the public. There will be a goodwill offering to help offset the costs of the RBC tour to Colorado. Following the concert there will be a reception and opportunity to meet the young members of the choir. If you are interested in being an overnight host family for the boys and their adult chaperones, please contact Ben Riggs at the Christ Church office.

Photos from Easter Egg Hunt

Words are completely unnecessary to describe the sheer FUN of the annual Easter Egg Hunt at Christ Church -- this photo speaks for itself!

Special thanks go out to all who attended the Easter Egg Hunt and brought friends & neighbors, and also to the supremely hard-working members of the Children's Education committee who planned, prepared, and pulled off this annual event!

Click here to view all the great photos from the Easter Egg Hunt ("view as slideshow" is recommended!)

Photos from Maundy Thursday Seder

The Maundy Thursday Seder meal and Tenebrae service were a phenomenal success last week. Nearly 90 Christ Church adults and children attended the meal and service, well exceeding the expectations of the staff and Worship & the Arts committee.

Thank you to everyone who participated by setting up, donating food and supplies, preparing both symbolic foods and the scrumptious dinner, cleaning up afterwards, and being in supportive attendance at the first ever Seder meal at Christ Church!

Click here to view all the fantastic photos from the event ("view as slideshow" is recommended!)

Christ is Risen...

...Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
Happy Easter!

Seder for Maundy Thursday

This year Christ Church will commemorate Maundy Thursday, April 13, by hosting a Passover Seder Meal in the Fellowship Hall at 6:30 p.m., followed by a brief Tenebrae worship service in the Sanctuary. Passover is the oldest and most important religious festival in Judaism, commemorating God’s deliverance of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and the creation of the Israelite people. The Seder is a re-telling of the deliverance story utilizing ritual and symbolism throughout the course of the meal.

The Seder is an inter-generational family event; children of all ages are welcome and encouraged to attend and participate. To facilitate the organization of the Seder meal, please let us know that you are planning to attend by contacting the church office with your name and the number of people attending. Please also let us know if you are interested in helping prepare the meal, or would simply like to contribute ingredients or groceries.

Holy Week at Christ Church

Maundy Thursday, April 13
6:30 p.m. Passover Seder meal & Tenebrae worship service

Holy Saturday, April 15
1:30 p.m. Children’s Easter Egg Hunt

Easter Sunday, April 16
10:15 a.m. worship service

Photos from Mississippi

The Katrina Recovery Mission Team returned to Denver this week — exhausted, excited, and full of stories from their fantastic experience in Mississippi! John Jaruzel has graciously passed along his nearly 90 photos from the trip. Click here to view the entire photoset ("view as slideshow" is recommended!)

Reconciling Congregation Statement

On Sunday, May 7, the Christ Church congregation will be asked to vote on the Reconciling Congregation Statement printed below. That vote will be preceded by a short presentation about Reconciling Congregations, followed by a time for the congregation to offer comments and questions about what it will mean for Christ Church to become a Reconciling Congregation. On that Sunday also, Dr. Philip Wogaman, Interim President, Iliff School of Theology, will deliver a sermon on homosexuality and the United Methodist Church.

Reconciling Congregation Statement

Christ Church United Methodist is called to the ministry of reconciliation, as asserted in the United Methodist Book of Discipline. We celebrate our human family’s diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, age, faith history, economic status, marital status, physical and mental ability, and educational background.

We affirm that all people are created in the image of God and, as beloved children of God, all are worthy of God’s unconditional love and grace. We welcome the full inclusion of all people in the life and ministries of Christ Church United Methodist as we journey toward personal and social reconciliation and transformation, calling out the gifts of all.

We embrace as a gift the diversity of our congregation. We recognize that there are differences among us, but believe that we can love alike even though we may not think alike. We invite all people to join us in our faith journey toward greater love, understanding, and mutual respect.

What does it mean to be a Reconciling Congregation?

Reconciling Congregations are expected to:

1. Make a public statement of inclusion that particularly mentions “sexual orientation.” The idea of creating “Reconciling Congregations” originated as a specific response to the public stance against homosexuality that has been taken by the United Methodist Church. However, sexual orientation may be listed in the Reconciling Congregation Statement as one among a number of ways of identifying the diverse groups that are welcome in a Reconciling Congregation. In the CCUM statement, we have chosen to make it clear that Christ Church also welcomes persons of different “gender identity, race, ethnicity, age, faith history, economic status, marital status, physical and mental ability, and educational background.”

2. Indicate in some public way that we are a Reconciling Congregation. The Administrative Board recommends that we include the following statement in our bulletin:

We welcome the full inclusion of all people in the life and ministries of Christ Church United Methodist. We invite all people to join us in our faith journey toward greater love, understanding and mutual respect.

The Board has further recommended that we add the following sentence to the sign on Colorado Boulevard:

All are welcome in this place.

3. Designate one Sunday a year as a time to renew our commitment to being a Reconciling Congregation.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

I am amazed at my lifelong ignorance of homosexuality. I have spent my ministry dealing mostly with the uses, misuses and abuses of sex among heterosexuals. But I did not understand (or worry about) my energetic, popular youth fellowship leaders who did not date. I was grateful for the Wesleyan Service Guild women, some of whom lived together and cared for each other for 50 or 60 years. My grandmother housed schoolteachers who ate at the same table, slept in the same room and prayed together in church…. So I began to explore Scripture and to talk with homosexuals and their families…
—UMC Bishop Richard B. Wilke

If I were to give a one-sentence answer to the question [How I changed my mind], it would be: “I changed my mind when I changed my heart.” …So what are we to do if we are to change the mind of the UMC to make it more inclusive to all of God’s children? We change its heart. We help all of our people to experience the hurt, the pain, the trauma, the rejection which our present policy inflicts on good and faithful Christians.…We understand on an issue such as this that changing the heart is a prerequisite to changing the mind.
—Bishop Jack M. Tuell, United Methodist Church, Claremont, CA

The United Methodist Church is a church of great promise. It is a church we love and call home. As a multicultural caucus, United Methodists of Color For A Fully Inclusive Church (UMOC) is committed to seeing the church live out the gospel of inclusivity and preach the love of Christ throughout our society.
—United Methodists of Color for a Fully Inclusive Church