The growing diversity at Hope Fellowship Church gives me great joy. It is an exciting and enticing preview of the great multitude of worshipers from every nation, tribe, people and language that John, the Revelator, saw in his vision.
I walked into the nursery on Wednesday morning and was greeted by the joyful sight and sound of twenty-four active pre-schoolers. They were playing happily, pushing toy trucks, racing cars, building towers or dressing dolls.
One year ago, with much enthusiasm and fanfare, we put our bi-weekly newsletter, the Hope Fellowship Sun, on-line. A few people expressed their preference for printed copies, so we made that available to them. Evelyn, our church administrator, was thrilled because on-line copies are in vivid colour as opposed to our black and white printed copies.
It's Your Breath in Our Lungs “We are on the doorstep of heaven in PICU,” my sister wrote. It was December 11. Her son had been on a ventilator in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of Minneapolis Children’s Hospital since a life-saving surgery five days earlier. His limbs were frozen while his body waged silent war against a chest infection and asthmatic attack — one lung collapsed and the other full of fluid. Four years old and battling for breath
Dear Friends and Family: Warm greetings from Isiro DRC. We trust that things are well? Interesting—as you are moving into your “cold-white” season, we are moving into our “hot and dry” season.
This fall, after much prayer and discussion, the elders and deacons unanimously agreed to sponsor 2 Syrian refugee families, up to 8 people. A budget of $70,000 was set, with half coming from existing resources and half coming from a special collection on January 24, 2015.
In November, the praise team responsible for the Christmas Eve service selected songs and began thinking about different “sounds, rhythms and feels” for the familiar carols that they had chosen.
They have outlasted Eaton’s which went bankrupt in 1999. They’ve been handled by four to five thousand people on approximately two hundred occasions. They have lost their gloss and suffered lots of damage. They have sparked nostalgic conversations and brought people back to simpler times. Some have been lost or “borrowed.”