DEAR CHRIST CHURCH FRIENDS--
As many of you know from Sunday announcement time, we will be using a new service booklet for our worship during the season of Easter--and from time to time thereafter.
Our booklet contains the three liturgies from Enriching Our Worship (EOW), a supplemental worship resource approved by General Convention…..and two liturgies from the New Zealand Prayer Book.   The EOW services are familiar to us at Christ Church, but the New Zealand services are new to us.
Our very first prayer book (1789) recognized that from time to time the forms and usages of our worship may change, as long as the essence of the faith is preserved.  The services in our booklet do just that. They also expand the language and metaphors and images of our worship, thus giving us new understandings of our relationship with God and how God is present in our lives.
Bishop Knudsen encourages the congregations in Maine to experience these supplemental liturgies, adding them to the five we already use from our 1979 Book of Common Prayer.  I am indebted to The Rev. Carolyn Metzler, vicar of St. Thomas, Winn, for her encouragement and direction as we took her booklet and revised it to be "our own."
Please let me and our Worship Committee (Lynne Orsini, Karen Toner, Jim and Jeanne Byers, Thelma Cunningham) know your thoughts as we use this booklet. 
As I have written in the booklet's introduction: "In our worship, we give thanks and praise to God, we receive Jesus in the Eucharist each Sunday.  And it is my hope that as we pray these Eucharistic prayers, we will be fed and transformed, so together we can go out to feed and transform the world." 
What an Easter mission!!

DWYD Plus 1

DWYD plus 1- what is that all about? It means Do What You Do plus one. Can you, and will you make the commitment to do what you do now and add just one more "thing"?
Thanks to the generosity and commitment of Bishop Chilton Knudsen and Christ Church, Bonnie Trundy and Barbi Tinder participated in the Province One Conference on Stewardship, Evangelism and Congregational Development- "Toward Resurrection."
DWYD is just one of the "nuggets" of information we gained at the conference. Our challenge to each of you is: "will you add one more thing?" In line with the theme of the conference, how can you give of your time and talent to Christ Church? What can you take on for the stewardship of the earth or in support of the millennium development goals? We invite you to join us in this journey that we are taking one step at a time. The activity may be as simple as committing to using cloth bags at the grocery store as plastic bags take up to 100 years to break down in the landfill, or turning off the water while you brush your teeth or lather your hands. Can you compost your grass clippings and fruit and vegetable scraps? Will you volunteer to make altar bread when we do it again? Is there a clean up task that you will volunteer for?
We are not asking for you to take on the world, but a step at a time we will be creating change. We invite you to join us as we DWYD plus 1. If you would like to know more about the conference, please ask Barbi or Bonnie.

- Barbi Tinder