All Saints' Celebration Sunday

Dear Friends,

After several weeks in which stewardship figured prominently in our preaching and worship, this Sunday will have a very different focus. This is All Saints Sunday, one of the biggest feasts in the life of the church and a day on which we will get to celebrate six people (four kids and two adults) who will be baptized into full membership in the Church. (We also all get to show up well-rested, as Daylight Savings Time comes to an end this week and we fall back to standard time.)

It's fitting to move to All Saints' immediately after our stewardship campaign ends. Stewardship is important, and those weeks force us to examine, pray, preach, and think about our money and resources in ways that – if we're all quite honest – we'd rather not. But it's also good to remember (and to celebrate and give thanks for) the reason God calls us to entrust our resources to the church to begin with: that people may become children of God, and so heirs of life itself.

I'm grateful for the good response to our stewardship campaign so far. You can find more exact up-to-date numbers below, but we're well on the way to our goal. If you haven't had a chance to turn in an Intention of Giving Card, please do so online or when you're at church this weekend.

Hitting our goal will really enable us to grow our balloon (click to see the sermon illustration). We aren't called to make a different St. Andrew's, but more of St. Andrew's, that more children of God would be called saints in this place.

In Christ,
Fr. Andrew

PS: There is a related feast to All Saints' often called All Souls' Day that is today, November 2. It is on this day that we remember all the faithful departed who have gone before (this feast is also the reason behind Dia de los Muertos -- Day of the Dead in hispanic cultures). At St. Andrew's, our Commemoration of All Faithful Departed service will be on November 21 at 7:00 pm in the Great Hall. This is always a beautiful, solemn, and wonderful service.