With this in mind, we welcome Deacon Tom Smith who will be sharing his knowledge with us about this entity we call the Episcopal Church. We shall begin this program starting this week, the first Sunday of Advent, November 27th after the 10am Liturgy. We’ll gather in the Noah’s Ark Room.
Bring your coffee, snacks and an open mind and heart as we delve deeper into a better and more enlightened understanding of our Church and our role in this community of faith. All are welcome!
We can never be too prepared…this proved so true this past weekend. Unfortunately, the leader of our Children’s Formation for this past Sunday took ill. Blessedly, the ever ready and well trained Val Gruenwald and Benny Delgado stepped in most admirably and led the children in a lively conversation. The Gospel story of Lazarus is a rather complex and delicate subject. Yet, Val and Benny did a wonderful job.
Our Children’s Formation is off and running. We have plenty of room for more youngsters. Bring the family, grand kids and friends…the doors of St. Nicholas are always open.
Bible Study Sundays…we will begin our Bible study after the Sunday morning 10am liturgy on May 1. We will focus on the Gospel for the following week. In preparation for our study on May 1, You will find the May 8 gospel at this link.
Grab a cup of coffee and pastry and bring your imagination. All are welcome!
(Blog editor’s note: Coffee, tea, and cookies will be available for all; shy persons take heart!)
There have been a lot of amazing changes at St Nicholas over the past year, and now seems as good a time as any to break the silence and get back into the swing of things.
First off, we’re back on a 2-service schedule after the summer’s excursion into several different musical genres, and the early service at 9am is back with traditional music in a somewhat more “High Church” way than we’ve done previously at St Nicholas, using some of the brass and altar clothes from the former Holy Innocents mission parish that became one with St Nicholas several years ago. The later service at 11am will continue to use the more contemporary music and is popular with families that have small children. The “Yummy Hour” takes place after both services, but the Education Hour also takes place inbetween, with a couple of adult discussion groups and committees meeting, plus activities for young people.
Second of all, we’re visibly growing, as the building project continues at a faster pace than projected (once the project got approved and actually started, that is)!
Flickr: Church Addition and Subtraction
The addition will give us much-needed program space for youth education, meeting space, and choir storage, along with a planned re-sale shop that will be coming soon. The new addition will be named Holy Innocents Hall, and we’re all looking forward to the many new ways we’ll expand into the space.
Flickr: Construction Outside, God Inside
With the construction activity and a major floor plan change inside, the main entrance will be moved and the current entrance is blocked off, so that we currently have to direct people “round the back” to the rear entrance. We’ll end up with a wheelchair accessible entry way WITH A RAMP to get down the interior stairs to the worship space. Much of the interior is taken up with the construction changes, aside from the kitchen and the actual sanctuary, but at least we now have access to the restrooms again and don’t have to traipse across the back lawn to the vicarage, where the Second Family Food Pantry is located.
With the new program year, we’ve got a lot planned and the music programming will be showcasing a lot of new pieces going into All Saints and then Advent.
There will be 2 morning services on All Saints rather than one evening service, as it falls on a Sunday, and special music is planned. During October, the Memory Tree will be displayed; members and visitors may write the names of loved ones who’ve passed away on the banner and they will be remembered in our prayers.
Special music is also planned for every Sunday in Advent, which begins just after Thanksgiving.
Bishop Lee is coming! He will be with us on December 6th, the Feast of St Nicholas, which also falls on a Sunday this year. There will be a single service that day, probably at 10am. We previously were honored to have Bishop Lee with us for the reception of Fr. Manny Borg into the Episcopal Church, which was a wonderfully festive and emotional event for all of us. He will help us celebrate our saint’s festival, and also have a look at the progress the addition is making toward completion. Sometime after New Year’s, the building will be certified for occupation and there will be some kind of celebration and dedication planned.
We haven’t forgotten about our beloved pets! Although the Feast of St Francis falls in early October, it’s been decided that with all the hubbub of the construction project, the annual Blessing of the Animals will be moved to sometime in May, when the weather will be better. We’ll be able to use the outdoor altar if it’s a nice day, too.
From Steve Gruenewald, director of Adult Education:
Folks –
As usual, summer is upon us before we’re ready for it. At the small gathering we had last Sunday, the group was not inclined to completely stop meeting until Fall if we can work it out; but of course we know that people have vacations, and regular weekend activities, and most are not likely to show up every week. A suggestion was made that we try to meet every third Sunday – that is, meet once, skip twice – at 9:00, before the summer Mass. We would start doing this the week after Father’s Day, June 24 – with the conflicting schedules we already knew of, that seemed like a reasonable date to shoot for.
This is all tentative. Please reply if you are interested in attending over the summer on some such schedule (including those who were there last week), and especially please reply if you’d be generally interested in attending but would like to suggest a different way of going about it (day, night, frequency, etc.). We are open to whatever will suit the most people. Look at your calendars and let me know. The suggested schedule would include June 24, July 15, August 5 and 26, but again, we are open to other ideas. Whatever we decide on, it will change if there is a consensus of active members.
For those who weren’t there, we have wrapped up the discussion of Hinduism and would like next to spend our next session talking about Native American religions. No one has volunteered for this topic. If no one else does, I will prepare the information, but if anyone has an interest in it, please speak up! We are not going to spend a lot of time on this section, so you needn’t consider it a major research project.
– Steve G
My apologies to any readers of Innocents: A Blog who still remain, vainly watching for a posting on the church blog via Bloglines or one of the other many “RSS feed aggregators” used to read blogs. A lot has happened since the last posting on the site, as I have been otherwise occupied (translation: I was just avoiding it, due to a lack of motivation, inspiration, or a wish to avoid perspiration, since my workspace at home was a little warm recently with all the hot.
I posted a few news items from the Episcopal News Service concerning General Convention and have been following events since then – Father Ted traveled to Convention and was out of town, and as it happens so was I: a family emergency prompted a trip to Salt Lake City and I was attempting to stay current while dealing with issues of life and death. During that time Fr. Ted and I tried to connect by cell phone, demonstrating the wonder and frustration of modern technology; cell phones are incredible tools for pastoral care, IF you can get a decent signal.
Since then, things have been moving quickly at Holy Innocents. We had another monthly food distribution and gave a few bags of groceries away to the needy. We had the second “Mass on the Grass” outdoor Eucharist at the corner of Salem Blvd and Schaumburg Road… and we said goodbye to Father Ted, who had an unbelievable opportunity come his way, and so we at Holy Innocents were faced with the prospect of being without clergy once again. However, due to his work over the last 2 years helping us to reach out to other small Episcopalian congregations in the area, Ted felt comfortable in confiding in Fr. Steven Martz, vicar of St Nicholas, and Fr. Steven and our Bishop’s Committee have agreed that he will be coming to Holy Innocents and conducting Sunday services starting next week, after which he will go over to St Nicholas to preside at their Sunday service.
This necessitates a TIME CHANGE for Holy Innocents: Sunday services will be at 9am, starting August 20.
While the early start time will be difficult at first, it will be a lot cooler that much earlier in the morning; this summer’s sweltering weather means that attending services at Holy Innocents involves almost as much perspiration as it does inspiration. In light of this, “Sunday coffee hour” has temporarily become “Sunday iced tea and juice hour,” and we’ve moved the refreshments back to the undercroft (basement), where it’s cooler.
St Nicholas, who are excited as a parish at the prospect of cooperating with Holy Innocents, has a number of interesting and exciting projects in progress – today, for example, they are holding a CAR WASH at the Walmart on Meacham Road in Elk Grove Village, which runs until 5pm today. They also have a community garden and are interested in providing fresh vegetables for our next food distribution on Tuesday, August 15th. One monthly event that they offer is the Labyrinth Walk on the third Friday of the month – the next one is this Friday, August 18th.
Rather than having various “supply clergy” from the Diocese come to us at the time we were used to meeting, the Bishop’s Committee felt that the continuity of sharing Fr.Steven with St Nicholas would be helpful for us in many ways. Although our liturgical styles are very different, he will happily adjust when he is with us. The earlier time will be difficult to get used to for some of us, but we will have some time now to decide our course in the coming year. We have several choices to make, but for now we will be worshiping together with Fr. Steven, and getting to know him and the parishioners at St Nicholas at a number of joint events to be planned.
Father Ted will be starting a pastoral care program at a hospital in the western suburbs of Chicago; this is an amazing and almost miraculous chance for him to help people who are suffering spiritual and physical pain. We know that he will excel and we wish him the very best of luck, and of course we will keep him and Mark in our prayers. Many of us at Holy Innocents have had occasion recently to call on Fr. Ted for pastoral care, so we know that he will bring comfort and peace to patients and family members, and he will help staff members cope with the stresses of their jobs as well.
St Columba, which was our “yoked” or partner parish, has decided to become a satellite of a larger Hispanic parish farther to the west, and they may be doing something very worthwhile and exciting with their property in the near future. We also wish them well and will pray for them.