🎉NEW-sletter
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HAPPY WEDNESDAY!
👋🏽 Hey there, Redeemer family! We're finally switching things up with this newsletter (We've sent the same thing every week since our church launched back in 2015👀).
We want this to be a more intentional space where we can provide encouragement, share stories, and actually see ministry happen. In these weekly emails, we'll share quick devotionals, tell stories about God at work in and through the people of Redeemer, and provide helpful tips and resources to help us all follow Jesus better.
We're excited about this change and hope you are too. Feel free to reply to this email if you have any comments or questions!
Let's get started!
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The devil’s substitute for joy is entertainment.”
Leonard Ravenhill
THE GOOD STUFF
LENT DEVOTIONAL 01: SEASON OF LENT
Rhythm - a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound.
We all have rhythms in our life. Daily. Weekly. Yearly patterns. We have repeated patterns of work and rest and play and coffee and other things. These repeated patterns also happened in the traditional Christian calendar. Some of you may be able to rattle off all the ‘things’ in the liturgical calendar with Easter and Christmas being the most well-known. But we’re going to focus our next 40 days on the traditional, repeated pattern of Lent.
Lent is a period of 40 days (based on Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness) in preparation for Good Friday and Easter. Traditionally this involved a fast of some kind and a breaking of the fast for Easter. Some of you are going to have strong feelings towards Lent... positive or negative. But whatever feelings you may have toward Lent, our goal over the next 40 days is to enter into a time of specific and intense focus of “surveying the cross, lamenting our sin, and resting in Jesus’ righteousness.”
APPLICATION
Each week through lent, we'll send out a devotional in this email with a different focus. The goal of the next 6 weeks is to prepare our hearts for Good Friday and Easter and to specifically focus on a deeper holiness and a greater passion for Jesus in our own hearts. The ways you do that are up to you. Maybe it is fasting from something (food, caffeine, media, social media, etc.). Maybe it’s reading through the gospels in 40 days, one gospel in 40 days, or memorizing specific scriptures. Whatever it might be for you, let’s all do something. Let’s commit together to spend the next 40 days seeking to know and love Jesus more deeply!
DJ Blatherwick | Worship Pastor
P.S. Join us tonight at 6pm for our first Lent Worship set on YouTube.
STORY
THE RETURN OF THE KIDS
346 days.
346 days since Redeemer Kids met on March 8, 2020, the last Sunday before COVID-19 shut things down and shifted our worship services online. Ah, the good ole days...
But our kids ministry team didn't take the shut down as a vacation, they kicked it into high gear. They created 50 online lessons for our families to be able to worship together. They hosted 8 weeks of Facebook Live devotionals and organized two resource drive-throughs for parents to come and pick up materials designed to help them disciple their kids. When our adult services were able to start again in July, Redeemer Kids packed 100+ activity bags each week for kids to engage with the weekly lesson. They geared up for and crushed a relaunch in October but were only able to meet for two glorious weeks before COVID reared its ugly head again. Over 350 birthday cards were sent to kids in our church, and leads and volunteers in the ministry intentionally prayed for and reached out to families to let them know they were loved.
All of this happened because the Redeemer Kids Dream Team rallied around one mission: “Glorify God by making disciples.” They decided that this ministry doesn’t exist to keep kids busy while their parents worship. Its primary function is not to pass out candy and toys, but to make Jesus-following disciples of children. And even further, to equip parents to be the primary disciple-makers of their children. Now that is ministry! And that is worth celebrating, even through a year that was challenging and unexpected.
And after almost an entire year, we are excited to announce that Redeemer Kids will be back live and in-person starting THIS WEEK!🎉 Kids services will be provided during our first and second service (8:30 + 10:00 am). Check out this video to learn more about the reopening this weekend.
We are so thankful for our Redeemer Kids team and the work they did over this last year, and we know that they cannot wait to love on your kids in-person on Sunday. Be sure to thank them for all their work when you see them! If you are interested in joining the dream team of volunteers devoted to making disciples of these kids, click here.
STAFF PICKS
LISTEN
Want to listen to worship music while you shovel snow this week but don't want to have to take off your gloves every 5 minutes to find a new song? Check out The Worship Initiative on Spotify or Apple Music. They've released 23 albums since 2014, so you could shovel your driveway and your neighbor's without running out of songs to worship with.
- Jake Zurawski, Creative Arts & Communications Director
READ
Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcy
Nancy Pearcey does an excellent job showing how the philosophy of our day separates the body from the soul. She explains how this dualistic perspective is the root of a plethora of major problems in our society such as gender confusion, abortions, euthanasia, eating disorders, the hook-up culture, and more. Learning the root of these problems has shifted the way I talk about them and point people who are struggling in these areas to Christ.
- Jeremy Hendon, Seminary Resident - Young Adults