PBPC Announcements

PBPC Family, This Sunday, a 18 members and friends of PBPC will be heading to Mission Springs for camp. Please pray for safe travels, lots of fun, and opportunities for deeper connections with God and others. For those not coming to camp, we invite you to worship at Oakland City Church (more info below). For those coming to camp, you should have received some simple packing instructions when you registered. If you have trouble finding that, please let me know and I can pass along their packing suggestions. Grace and Peace, Pastor Calvin Worship at Oakland City Church at 10:15am 2735 Macarthur Boulevard, Oakland Lectionary Readings for August 31 August 31 at Oakland City Church A number of PBPC people will be away for the Labor Day weekend. To lean into one goal for this year to cultivate partnerships with other churches, we will worship at Oakland City Church (2735 Macarthur Blvd). Their service starts at 10:15. If you need help getting to Oakland City Church, send me an email and I...

PBPC Family, On Sunday, I shared about the early Christian practice of catechesis. Catechesis as defined by Alex Fogelman in Making Disciples: Catechesis in History, Theology and Practice  " the art of instructing new believers in the faith, with a view toward comprehensive instruction in the basic tenets of belief, spirituality, and ethics." Catechesis, in the early church, focused on the primary teachings of Scripture; the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount, and the core tenets of the faith that eventually became the Apostle's Creed we still recite today. Throughout church history, a number of catechisms were created to instruct believers in the faith. These catechisms, the Heidelberg and Westminster, are included in the PCUSA Book of Confessions . These were written in a question + answer format to make it easily memorizable. The first question in the Heidelberg Catechism is: What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my...

PBPC Family, Receive.  Gratitude. Generosity. Rest. These are the four postures of faith I shared on Sunday. We receive from God. We respond in gratitude to God which then flows out of us in generosity to others. And then we rest, just as God rested on the seventh day after the work of creation. I believe these postures are embedded in the spiritual disciplines that Christians have practiced for 2,000 years. I didn't go into detail on how these postures are expressed in things like reading Scripture, communion, fasting, tithing, etc. I'll leave those as opportunities of exploration if you're so inclined. I do want to highlight prayer because I think, more than any other discipline, all four postures are intricately connected to prayer. Prayer is a discipline we've been leaning into as a church - through practicing a daily set time of prayer, gathering for prayer before Sunday service, and our weekly time of prayer during service. Prayer is the  core practice of the Chri...