This year marks our 15th celebration of Christmas Eve at the Maryland State Fairgrounds. Each year has looked a little different but, over time, a true tradition has emerged from what was once an audacious experiment. A tradition that many of our parishioners have grown to cherish. There are many dedicated devotees out there who […]
Tag: nativity
This week we begin one of my very favorite seasons of the year. To mark the season we are launching a new message series called “Light,” all about … light, which will also be the theme of our Christmas Eve celebration this year. As an Advent gift to our parishioners, we are distributing a little […]
Let us come before the LORD with thanksgiving. Psalm 95 This week we celebrated Stewardship Sunday, reflecting on the blessing our parish is to our members and in the life of the community. As part of the celebration, we invited members and “regulars” to make a financial commitment to the parish for 2020. And I […]
We usually say that “Kick-Off” weekend is the best weekend of the year, but “Stewardship” Weekend is a close second. That’s right, one of our staff’s (and our parishioner’s) favorite weekends of the year is the weekend when we ask for money. This coming weekend is Stewardship Weekend, the only weekend of the year that […]
Often, parish leaders have a major weakness when it comes to keeping their church campus and space attractive for guests. It’s the same problem you have with your house: when you spend so much time in a place, you become blind to its flaws and imperfections. You stop noticing: the dead shrubs along the […]
It seems like the fall season is a sprint. It just moves so quickly. And then, of course, the holidays are upon us, ready or not. In fact, we have a saying around here that beginning on the day after Halloween we need to be thinking and acting like Christmas is here. That’s why this […]
Recently, the Pew Research Center released an update to an ongoing study of religious identification and engagement among Americans. The results should sound familiar at this point: an increase in the number of people identifying as unaffiliated with any particular religion, increasingly infrequent church attendance, and declining religiosity among younger generations. Data like this should […]
This weekend, we are celebrating the release of our newest book Churchmoney: Rebuilding the Way We Fund Our Mission. The book is the story of our successes and failures with raising money at our parish and the practical lessons we learned along the way. The book came to be because we believe money is an […]
This weekend, our parish will celebrate our annual “Kick-Off” weekend. Kick-Off is meant to be just that: a celebration of a new year. We’ve found that most families, especially if kids are involved, plan their year from September to June. So, we go out of our way to make this weekend (the weekend after Labor […]
We are in the last week of a series of blog posts all about our values as a staff. This week, hospitality. We define hospitality as “wow-ing” people with extraordinary service. We want each guest who steps onto our campus to feel like every aspect of the experience was designed with them in mind. Here […]
