Dear Colleagues and Friends,
This week I want to share a Christmas e-mail that our newly elected Stated Clerk, Clint Cottrell, also full-time pastor of Cypress Lake Presbyterian Church, Fort Myers, sent his congregation. Clint passes on a You Tube video that our retiring Stated Clerk, Craig Countiss, with all his new found free time found on the internet, sent to a number of us.(Note – Craig continues in retirement to serve part time at the Lehigh Acres Church and continues until the end of the year with Stated Clerk duties.) Our thanks to Craig for 20 years of faithful service and a welcome to Clint as he begins this part-time but important leadership role in the Presbytery… see below
Living in Advent Hope. Thanks be to God.
Graham
Graham Hart
graham@peaceriverpresbytery.org
From Clint Cottrell, pastor Cypress Lakes Presbyterian Church and newly elected Stated Clerk, Peace River Presbytery
This morning I got an incredible forward from the Rev. Craig Countiss, the minister at First, Lehigh Acres and also the outgoing Stated Clerk of our Presbytery. If you have 3 minutes, check this out on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/ExcentricPT. It tells the story of the birth of Jesus in a way that it might be told if Christ’s birth happened today, using the technology that is all around us.
It is amazing how our technology has advanced so much in recent years but yet it is also amazing how SO MUCH of it is about connecting to one another. Think about it: e-mail, IM (Instant Messaging), texting, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, “the cloud”, cell phones, etc. While the technology is new, the message is the same: people want and need to be connected! That is why Christmas is timeless!
Christmas is about “Immanuel”, God with us. God wanted a living, vibrant relationship with His people. This happened in the form of Jesus Christ, a living, vibrant human being who was born to a human mother and then grew up to walk, talk, live and teach with humans beings, one of us. Now, across the years, God still seeks a relationship with us through Christ. We can meet Jesus in the words of the Bible. We can meet Jesus in our prayers. We can meet him in church when the family of God gathers together to worship or study or even eat together. But there is more, God wants to be connected to all of his children (not just the folks in church on Sunday), to increase his “virtual” Facebook “friend page” (if you will!!!). That’s where we step in, where we recommend God to new friends...share the message.
