PBPC Announcements

PBPC Family, Happy Advent! We have officially entered the Advent Season where we are waiting for Christ's coming, both as a child and his second coming, with eager anticipation. I hope you've picked up an Advent Devotional (there are still a few left and HERE's a digital copy if you prefer one). There's one section of the devotional I forgot to explain on Sunday - the Waiting Prayers. These are short simple prayers for you to memorize (if you so choose) and to pray when you find yourself in those situations. The hope of these prayers is two fold. First, that you might come to recognize the myriad of ways that we wait throughout our days. The second is that you might come to see those moments of waiting as invitations to prayer. The prayers offered in the devotional are not exhaustive - they are merely a starting place. In the next few weeks, you may find yourself waiting for something that's not covered in the waiting prayers. If so, write your own prayer! What wo...

PBPC Family, On Sunday, the Christian calendar starts anew. We begin our year with a period of waiting and longing, a season more traditionally known as Advent. As a church, we will lean into the practice and posture of waiting. As we wait for Advent to begin, I invite you to begin to tap into your own waiting and to find ways to enter into waiting, both individually and collectively. For instance, when you come on Sunday, you'll see that our sanctuary is decorated for Christmas ... but not quite. There are trees and garlands and a nativity, but ornaments, bright decorations and nativity figures are missing. This is intentional. For the rest of the world, Christmas begins in October. As the Halloween decorations clear the shelves they are quickly replaced by candy canes and Christmas trees. This begins the Christmas season, which usually ends on Dec 26. This is a time for shopping, browsing the mall, and decorating one's home for the holidays. In the Christian tradition, Chris...

PBPC Family, Thank you to everyone who was able to join us on Saturday for our Day of Discernment. It was a wonderful day filled with meaningful conversation and lively discussions on who we are as a congregation and where God might be calling us into the future. Here are a few highlights from the day. In an exercise on clarifying what we value as a congregation, we had near unanimous agreement. The three main values were Spiritual Growth, Community, and Helping. We will update this with more precise language that fits us in the future. We were reminded that we don't need to be a certain size or have a specific budget to follow God's call. We need only be the congregation God has created and is calling us to be. There is incredible freedom in this. We recognized that one of our strengths as a congregation is our community. We also discerned there is a desire to be more outward facing and more engaged with people outside our immediate congregation. At the tail end of the meeti...