Strong Faith, Strong Family, Strong Church
The Pastor’s Note
Dear Greenwood Memorial family,
Acts 2:42, 44-47: 42 They devoted themselves to the apostles ’teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. I offered this biblical text to the church in September 2020. I wrote that we as a church had faced bad news, but we had the GOOD NEWS of Jesus Christ. We needed that GOOD NEWS because CNN and FOX news presented more challenges for the world. Many of us expected that our pandemic experience would be limited to a especially when we got life-saving vaccines in the US. However, we are still facing the sad news of the pandemic’s effect on us all.
We faced unsetting news as a church. We had to close our church campus in March 2020. We had to find new ways to be the church and that was very hard. We grieved the loss of family, friends and community members to disease and tragedy. We cried together over the loss of Black lives. Many of us, in the church, have not revealed the pain we have experienced this year. We are still exploring ways to care for each
other.
The GOOD NEWS for us is that the members of the Greenwood Memorial community devoted themselves to fellowship and care of each other. We stayed connected through social media, and phone. We took Communion, breaking bread in our homes as the early Christians did in Acts. We didn’t neglect the study of the word of God. When we saw each other, we blessed each other with masks that could not hide our smiles. We sacrificed our gifts and time to help each other. Together, we prayed to our God who calmed our fears as we faced a new normal. We have never stopped offering our best as Greenwood Memorial. We have truly lived as twenty-first century disciples of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Now as we reunite after the summer, we enter the 2021 fall season not under our own power but by the power of Holy Spirit.
Let us pray to Holy Spirit for wisdom, insight, kindness and strength as we are renewed to do the work of the church.
Thank God for your KINGDOM work. I praise God for you all. Let us give God glory for making us a strong church.
“STRONG FAITH - STRONG FAMILY - STRONG CHURCH“
Rev. Dr. Imani Sheila Newsome-Camara