This Weekend: Investing for Life!

Dear Resurrection Family,

I’ve got some great things to share with you today, but before I do, let me remind you that Daylight Saving Time ends on Sunday. Don’t forget to set your clocks back one hour and enjoy an extra hour of sleep Saturday night before worship Sunday morning!

This Weekend in Worship

Keys to Financial Health and Joy

This weekend we kick off a three-week series titled Investing for Life focused on how we manage our money in a way that is life-giving. The Bible speaks often of this because getting it wrong, as St. Paul notes, “plunges many people into ruin.” My message this weekend will look at the keys to financial health and joy.

We’ll look at five simple tips/keys to improving your financial health – and with it your joy. These tips are found in both scripture and the wisdom offered by nearly all financial planners. These are things that we can and should teach our children and grandchildren, that are healthy habits for young adults, and that sustain us through the end of our lives. Bring a pen and paper to take notes. We’ll also have tools on our website that can help you in budgeting and planning.

Don’t miss this important series and, if you are a teenager or young adult, or if you have teens or young adults in your family, encourage them to join you – these messages could have a positive impact on the rest of their lives.

Veteran’s Day & Holy Communion in Worship

This is going to be a great weekend of worship. We’ll celebrate Holy Communion together, both in person and online. If you are joining us online or television, have bread or crackers and juice or water ready for Communion at the conclusion of the service.

We’ll also be observing Veterans Day, which is November 11, honoring those who have served our country. We’ll have veterans reading scriptures at most of our services, and in our traditional services we’ll premiere a new hymn written by Tom Lough, a United Methodist layman and an Army Veteran, called Ever Faithful to the Call. There’s a six minute story about Tom and the writing of the hymn that you can watch here.

Resurrection’s Role in Resettling Refugees

Last night one of our members was telling me about her work helping to prepare a home for a refugee family moving to Kansas City from the Congo. Linn was so excited because this family was coming from a refugee camp that she herself had visited as a part of one of our mission trips to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

We are engaged in a number of ministries for refugees in Kansas City and around the world. We’ve worked with UNICEF to provide grants for their work with refugees in Afghanistan and Lebanon. You’ve funded boreholes in refugee camps in Malawi to provide clean drinking water (and sent food and Bibles there as well). You have aided at-risk youth who are displaced in Honduras.

We’ve provided grants and deployed volunteers to Kansas City area agencies working with refugees being resettled here, including Catholic Charities, Jewish Vocational Services and Della Lamb, to help refugees from Afghanistan and the Congo to get a new start. You’ve helped furnish homes with the necessities – these families come with very little, and you’ve helped provide furniture, dishes, towels, beds and other essentials for them to make a new start. Some of you have been at the airport to welcome families when they get off the plane.

You are, by your love and care, helping these families experience the love of Christ in tangible ways. Thank you for all that you do.

Learn how you can get involved →

Annual Stewardship Focus

We’ll be thinking about how we “Invest for Life” as part of our annual stewardship campaign. November is when we ask those of you who consider Resurrection your church home to make a financial pledge for the coming year. Your pledge helps us plan ministry in the coming year, but more importantly, it is a personal act of worship and discipleship.

Each year we give away the coming year’s coffee mug to all who return a commitment card. I wanted you to see the mug. It has the Fruit of the Spirit printed on it to help you remember, pray for and seek to live them as you use the mug. We’ll be giving away these the third week of the month as a thank you gift for making your commitment.

You can learn more about stewardship at Resurrection and download some of the financial planning tools I’ll talk about this weekend on our Stewardship website.

Visit the Stewardship Website →

7:30 am Service at Resurrection Leawood

For all you early risers, the 7:30 am worship is going to continue! Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a trial of the 7:30 am traditional worship service in the Foundry and have experienced an incredible response.

If you’ve missed connecting with other people during worship, consider joining us for this service on Sunday mornings in the Building B Foundry. Then you can stick around and join a Sunday School class afterwards. We’ll also be looking at starting new classes for 7:30 am worshipers.

See our Sunday School Groups →

A Month of Thanksgiving and Serving Our Community

We kick off our annual Thanksgiving serving and donation opportunities this weekend. Resurrection will provide hot Thanksgiving meals and holiday groceries to families in need through several local ministry partners this year. You can serve in two ways:

1) Donate to pay for meals. $10 donation provides a meal for an individual or $50 donation can feed a family this Thanksgiving. Here’s the donation link.

2) Sign up to serve or volunteer with a local organization this month. If you are in the Kansas City area, here’s a link to find opportunities to serve with our local partners during Thanksgiving.

Have you ever considered leading a small group?

The Christian walk is not a solitary journey. Small groups are one way we connect with God and with each other by studying together and encouraging one another. We hope to launch new small groups – both meeting in person and online – in the new year, but we need people to step up to lead these groups.

If you’ve ever considered this, or if you’re just exploring the possibility, let us know and someone on our discipleship team will contact you to talk about this opportunity.

Let us know you’re interested →

Vespers: God and Suffering

Tuesdays at 7:30 pm

Join me for Vespers this Tuesday night at 7:30 pm on Facebook Live, on my Facebook page: Pastor Adam Hamilton on Facebook. You’ll also be able to view it on my Facebook page or on cor.org/next after Tuesday night. We’ll spend a bit of time focusing on how we make sense of God and suffering.

COR Worship Collective Releases New Music

The COR Worship Collective recently released recordings of 10 original songs called “Songs for Worship,” which were written by the Resurrection music community. The recordings include music that we have sung in worship over the past year such as “I Am Yours (The Wesley Covenant)” and “Because You Move.” The recordings are available and streaming everywhere you listen to music.

Listen on your favorite streaming service →

Remembering the Fruit of the Spirit

Finally, I shared a summary of what each of the Fruit of the Spirit mean with our staff and on Facebook this week. You might find this reminder helpful:

• Love: agape – selfless concern for others
• Joy: found despite circumstance through gratitude
• Peace: well-being grounded in faith, harmony with others
• Patience: having a long fuse, long suffering
• Kindness: from Greek for usefulness – doing what others need
• Goodness: from the Greek, agathos – inherently good
• Faithfulness: trust in God and being trustworthy
• Gentleness: velvet coated steel, strength that leads with kindness
• Self-control: strength to resist, yielding to God’s will.

There are different ways to define each Greek word behind the Fruit of the Spirit, but these are a brief summary of what we discussed in our sermon series.

Pray daily for the Spirit to produce these in you. Evaluate your life in the light of these. We can grow in each of these as we invite the Holy Spirit to work in us and we cultivate the Spirit’s work through worship/prayer, study of scripture alone and with others, serving others, generosity and bearing witness to our faith by word and deed (five essential spiritual practices in The Walk and our five expectations for membership).

I’m looking forward to worshiping with you this weekend!

In Christ’s Love,

Adam