Monday Blog Posts

It’s a new year and I’ve decided to try to make this little church blog a weekly feature. I’ve recruited some help from Dan Szepesi and set a goal to keep the church website more active and up to date. For today let me try to just update you on where we are at this point in 2021.

We’ve started into a new book of the Bible on Sunday mornings! A couple of weeks ago we finished the book of Philippians and this week I will be preparing the third sermon in our series through Galatians. Galatians will be a wild ride. This epistle is passionate, interesting, deeply theological, and profoundly practical. I hope you’ll come excited to hear from God and grow with us in our knowledge of the gospel.

We have also begun Sunday evening worship. Sunday is the Lord’s day and we are blessed to be able to worship twice now on Sundays. The evening worship is a little different from the morning worship in that we have included a few new things. For one, we will be learning a new psalm each month so we can begin to incorporate more psalm singing into our regular worship. We’re also spending 52 weeks in the Heidelberg catechism this year with a small section read aloud each week. The rest of the liturgy is changed up somewhat, too.

The most important thing happening on Sunday nights is the preaching of the word. In January we have been been laying a foundation for Genesis. So far three of those five sermons have been preached. If you’ve missed them I’d like to encourage you to look for the link on the sermons page and give them a listen. If you’re more video-oriented than podcast-oriented you can find them on the church Facebook page. Just look for the Sunday night live-streams.

This year looks to be a busy and exciting year for our church. I hope you will be as much a part of it as you can. If you’re not a member we’d love for you to come visit! God bless and see you Sunday!

Gathering Again

As of May 10 (Mothers Day) our church is once again gathering together for worship in obedience to the commands of Christ. Hand sanitizers are available at the entrance, social distancing is encouraged, and masks are welcome but not required. Not all of our people have felt safe enough to return yet, and for them and others we have chosen to continue our live-streaming on Facebook.

UPDATE: Attendance has been wonderful. Last Sunday (6/7) we celebrated the sacrament of the Table for the first time since March. We have now entered chapter two of Paul’s letter to the Philippians.

This coming Sunday we will gather again for Sunday School at 10:00 am. Welcome!

Worship During the Pandemic

Hello, friends and members of Winnsboro Reformed Church. 

A lot has been happening over the last week to ten days and I wanted to keep you abreast of how the church is going to go forward in the next month or two in the wake of this unprecedented (in our lifetimes) event.

It has become more clear each day that normal activities, normal socializing, are just not a wise thing right now for anyone. Right now the people in the know, the people who are paid to think about and worry about and plan for things like this, are encouraging us to change our lives temporarily in order to put fewer lives in danger.

Several days ago they were recommending no gatherings of over fifty people. I joked at the time that they still hadn’t got small enough to affect us. But Monday the CDC was asking people not to gather in groups of even ten. So I think it would be wise to listen to the warnings, heed the advice, and for our neighbors’ sake, not do anything to irresponsibly spread this virus.

Thus it is with great sorrow that I’m announcing a temporary suspension of our Sunday morning gathering for worship. I don’t want to do it. I hate to do it. It goes against every conviction I have to shut down worship on the Lord’s day. It’s a terrible thing to do, but I think this time it is called for. 

Sometimes there are things that happen beyond our control, acts of God, that limit our normal ability to serve and worship and I think this is one of those times. I would be horrified to think that by our gathering together we had harmed someone unnecessarily. We are living through extraordinary events that call for extraordinary measures.

Now, while I say that we live in extraordinary times, I mean that in more than one way. Yes, a global pandemic will limit us temporarily from gathering together, but it cannot stop us from gathering together electronically. Have you ever thought about how amazing that is?

Live-streaming worship through social media can never replace the actual gathering of God’s people in accordance with the commands of Scripture to worship our triune God, but it can give us something while we wait out this pandemic. It’s not as good as the real deal but it is far better than nothing at all. 

Starting this week we will no longer be gathering, but we can still gather in our homes around our computers, laptops, tablets, or televisions and we can still participate in the worship from our various locations. It won’t be the same, but it can almost be the same if we will buy in.

We now have a church YouTube page and this is where you will find our livestream each Sunday at 11:00 am CDT. I will turn on the video a few minutes early and we will try to commence at 11:00 am sharp. You might think it’s going to be awkward praying the prayers, singing the hymns, reading the liturgy all in front of a computer screen, and trust me, I’m going to feel awkward leading it in front of a camera phone. But we’ll manage. And we’ll have some kind of worship, as a church, on the Lord’s day. That is vital. It’s a great time to be alive and be a servant of Christ.

Here is the link for the church YouTube page:

https://youtu.be/2ZBkR3N9-Dw

I put a welcome video up so that you’ll know you’re at the right place. Save the link so that you can find it quickly and easily and we will see you on Sunday. Also, feel free to share the link with others who may be looking for some good gospel/Christ-centered worship about now.

If you have any questions on how to make it all work feel free to contact me at:

WinnsboroReformedChurch@gmail.com

Grace,

Bro. James

Sunday Sermon Series - finishing out the summer and into fall.

We’ve been in the Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians on Sunday mornings since late last year. I’m happy to announce that we will be wrapping this series up in the month of August. Immediately following I will preach an introductory sermon to the book of Psalms followed by a selection of a couple of Psalms from book 1, including Psalms 1 and 2 and one or two others. After this we will spend twenty-two weeks in Psalm 119. This is a devotionally rich Psalm and I am looking forward to showing you Christ and the life of faith to which he has called us in this amazing long poem (the longest chapter in the Bible).

New Sunday Series

1 Thessalonians! Having spent the last six months plus going verse by verse through Hosea and Joel, we are very excited to open up the New Testament again, this time in the Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians. We will go verse by verse straight through these two wonderful little books and get a solid look at the earliest recorded codified teaching of the apostles. The gospel will be in full view, as well as how we are to live our lives in this present age while we wait for the coming of the next. Come join us!

New Series on Wednesday nights!

On the Wednesday following Thanksgiving (Dec. 1) Bro. James began a new series from the book of Galatians. We are going through the entire book verse by verse. These studies are informal, take place in the fellowship hall, and all the notes are up on the television screen. Questions and comments are welcome during the study which is in a small group format. Come and see what God is saying to us through the book of Galatians! Dress casual and bring an open mind to the word.