Our Lent schedule starts with our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper on February 21st at 6pm. The Cost will be $8 Per Person, $20 for a family. Bring the family for a heaping helping of Pancakes, Bacon, Sausage, and all the fixings!
Our Ash Wednesday Service will be held on Feb. 22nd at 6 pm. The choir will hold their regular Wednesday practice following the service.
We’ll be holding four Advent Services in the coming Days. This coming Sunday is our annual Christmas cantata, “The Thrill of Hope”.
On Tuesday, December 20th at 6:30pm we’ll be holding our Blue Christmas Service. A Blue Christmas worship service provides the opportunity for us to gather to carve out a time of quiet reflection, to honor the emotions of the season that are not so joyful, and to be reminded that we are not alone in this season.
Join us for our Christmas Eve Candlelight Service at 5:30pm. Christmas Morning we’ll be holding our regular Sunday worship service at 11am. We hope you join us for all these wonderful services! And don’t forget to bring a friend!
Samual Polanco is no stranger to the power of walls.
Samual, a 2022 graduate of the Menaul School — a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)-related, grades 6–12 college preparatory school in Albuquerque, New Mexico — has known and seen walls, both literal and figurative, that separated him and others throughout his life. Now, he credits his experience at Menaul as being instrumental in breaking down life’s many barriers.
His education at Menaul was made possible, in part, by gifts to the PC(USA)’s Christmas Joy Offering, which helps provide scholarships to students. A Presbyterian tradition since the 1930s, the annual offering distributes gifts equally to the Assistance Program of the Board of Pensions and to Presbyterian-related schools and colleges equipping communities of color. Menaul’s student body is currently represented by 21 different countries.
“When I first came to Menaul, I was able to explore the ideas I wanted to explore, learn what I wanted to learn and just be myself. And that’s what Menaul has done for all of us. We can just be ourselves here,” Samual said.
This past April, the 35 members of the class of 2022, including Samual, became student volunteers through Frontera de Cristo, a Presbyterian border ministry whose mission is to build relationships and understanding across borders. The students spent five days on the U.S.-Mexico border for the school’s traditional “mission week.”
John Sitler, who teaches Upper School religious studies at Menaul praised Samual and his friends, Michael Hedenberg and Abi Nyase, as among their class’s top leaders. They were all profoundly moved by what they saw and heard during mission week, especially walking the Migrant Trail to the border wall.
“It may sound like a cliché, but one thing the students got out of the experience of seeing this ‘scar’ on the earth is that the most dangerous walls are the walls in our mind,” John said. Menaul teaches breaking down walls toward our common humanity to be like Jesus, who broke down dividing walls and welcomed everyone.
John continued, “We teach that faith is to be lived out in the world. Because so many young people today see the church as building walls to isolate and separate, we at Menaul are all about opening doors to the richness of God’s Creation.”
Abi said, “To support Menaul is to support kids who are going to be the future leaders of our country.” Our gifts to the Christmas Joy Offering take down walls, break barriers, and build potential and future leaders of the Church. Please give what you can; for when we all do a little, it adds up to a lot. You can give through our congregation during the Christmas Eve Service, by credit card online at pcusa.org/christmasjoy, or you can text CHRISTMASJOY to 91999
The Annual PW Bake Sale returns! Need a pie, cake, rolls, or a selection of other baked goods for your Thanksgiving feast? Stop by on Saturday, Nov. 19th and pick up some delicious treats while helping our Presbyterian Women fund their mission campaigns! We’ll see you there!!!!
The words of Isaiah 55 convey a profound message to us during A Season of Peace:
For you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace.
Go out in joy. When we look around our world these days, it is sometimes hard to feel joyful. Yet joy inherently embraces optimism. Joy is the companion of faith and hope. In our polarized world torn by war, famine, and marginalization of the poor and disenfranchised, we are in desperate need of joyful and brave people who are willing to ask the hard questions and live the difficult solutions that make peace possible.
Be led forth in peace. Through the Peace & Global Witness Offering, we connect with each other, as the Church, together, to confront systems of injustice and promote reconciliation in places around the world and right here at home.
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Central Presbyterian Church is proud to announce we’ll be holding a Back to School Bash! We’ll have free food, drinks, and school supplies for those in need! We’ll also have a bounce house for children to play on! We hope to see you there!
“We plan and God laughs” is identified as a Yiddish proverb, the title of a book or two and the headline of multiple online articles meant to help people navigate periods in life when personal plans seem to disintegrate in front of our eyes. When we hear or read the proverb, it can be difficult not to nod along, especially when the phrase encapsulates something most of us have experienced: a perfected resume or proposal sent, but no word back; a flawless itinerary dissolved by the smallest delay; an event set to begin, upended by a storm; a setback or an entirely “new normal.”
As much as we might nod along, or wince at our own experience, the proverb points us in the other direction, too. And if not the proverb, Scripture certainly does.
In the Book of Jeremiah, the tone and task are predominantly focused on God’s judgment, but then Jeremiah shares the statement: “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans … to give you a future with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). These words were sent by the prophet Jeremiah to the Israelites who had been taken into Babylonian exile. These striking, comforting words reminded them that, despite their experience of the present, God’s gesture, thoughts and plans for them — and for us — are peaceful, abundant and hopeful. “We plan and God laughs”? Perhaps. But it is just as possible that “we plan, and God imagines a future with so much more.”
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Holy Week starts next Sunday with our Palm Sunday Service. Holy Week continues with our Maundy Thursday Service at 6pm. This will be a small service with a soup/sandwich potluck meal. We will have 2 opportunities to worship on Good Friday. The Sanctuary will be open for quiet mediation from 11am till 2pm . Our Worship service will begin at 6pm. Our Easter Services will start at 8:00am with a Easter Breakfast. An Easter Egg hunt is happening at 9:00am. And our Easter Morning Cantata Service will take place at 11am. Please make note of this slight change from our usual Easter start times. We’ll be celebrating the One Great Hour of Sharing offering on Easter Sunday. For information can be found below. We hope to see you as we celebrate this Holy Week.
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Our Lent schedule starts with our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper on March 1st at 6pm. We’ll be holding our Ash Wednesday Service at 6pm on March 2nd. We hope to see you there!
We were able to raise over one hundred dollars and over one hundred breakfast food items during the Souper Bowl of Caring! We Donate our breakfast foods to the local school district and the monetary donations have been sent to Neighbor to Neighbor of Pine Bluff.
In the story of God, as we tell it, there is a barrier that exists between the Created world and its Creator. A wall. Sin, we say, separates us from God, and separation from God is unbearable.
And our story goes on to say that God, seeing that we had no hope in ourselves of getting over, or through or around what separates us, offered us a gift in Jesus Christ who opens a door — a door we could not open ourselves.
What a gift!
But the story goes on to say that Jesus is the perfect gift; not only opening a door but coming through it. Our story says God is with us.
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Central Presbyterian Church 