4/15/2007

It's been a busy few weeks at the Power House in Baltimore, Maryland.

It started out Sunday with our Easter celebrations. We had a good mix of people in the group on Sunday with our regular crowd, some guests from out of town, a couple people we hadn't seen for a while, and several first-time visitors from the neighborhood. During the service we walked through Holy Week in scripture and song then concluded with a short message.

We had a good mix of people at Kids' Church, too. We even had one girl who had moved away around 6 years ago show up. We used our Resurrection Eggs to tell the story of Easter then made a craft together.

Throughout the day people talked about family gatherings scheduled for the afternoon. Needless to say, this resulted in a very small gathering for Evening Worship. It was good that we were there, though, as we had a person who we hadn't seen in nearly a year come for Easter celebrations.

I learned on Wednesday that Jean had died. Her daughter Sissy had left the message on the church answering machine. In the confusion and because they didn't know how to make funeral arrangements the family had lost track of Jean's body. Fortunately, she had been taken to St. Agnes Hospital where Ron works so he was able to spend some time working through the hospital's system. We were able to learn her fate but not able to retrieve her.

We had a smaller group at Wednesday's Adult Disciples group. People were upset about Jean, Bobby being put in jail, Pep Boys Auto Supply Store closing (with members and friends losing their jobs), a stabbing murder that had happened in the neighborhood, a police-involved shooting near the grocery store that we'd seen on the news prior to coming over, and several other traumatic things that we scrapped the lesson, spent some time talking about things, then had a long prayer time together.

I learned from Sissy that in the confusion about Jean that they didn't get a death certificate. I spent some time working with the hospital to track down the status of the certificate. Once we knew it had been filed we were able to contact Vital Statistics and order a copy.

We've been doing a lot of preparation work for the upcoming summer youth camp this week. Tamara and Jenn made some headway in staffing and getting the paperwork ready for distribution. I worked on figuring out how many kids we should send to camp and how much funding we'll need to make it happen. Right now we have funds available to send about 3 kids. We're going to need to come up with another $3100 to pay for all the kids who have qualified to go to camp.

We had a backload of errands to run this week. We weren't able to do many during Holy Week and the week of World Conference but were able to get the bulk of errands caught up this week.

While out running errands I met up with the school crossing guard whose corner is by the church. I learned that her house had caught fire and that they'd lost everything. They had a place to stay temporarily but were still in need of many things. I pointed her in the direction of some places that could help more quickly than we could on the most critical items and invited her to come by the church to see how we could help beyond that.

During the day on Thursday the builders came out to repair the wall that had been damaged by the leak. Hopefully this is completely taken care of now.

We hadn't had Men's Group in several weeks so it was good to get back together this week. We resumed the study of our book and caught up with each other's lives.

We were able to confirm some plans this week for visitors coming to the congregation. Barb Kernohan will be coming down from Canada for a week in May. Susanne Carver is going to bring a group from New England to work with our Bible School in August.

Friday night brought Pizza Church. Each group learned from the Easter story and the Senior High group concluded its study of the Gospel of Luke. Also during that time Todd delivered an exercise bike from a church member in Virginia.

We had our monthly Solid Rock Cafe on Saturday evening. We had a few new kids in the group.

Looking ahead to next week we'll be back to our regular schedule of activities. In addition, we have our monthly priesthood meeting after Evening Worship this Sunday. I'll also be attending an urban ministries event at Loyola on Monday.

Along with the individuals and activities mentioned, please keep the following individuals in the forefront of your prayers:

Mark
Bradley
Theresa
Florence
Juwan
Tayvia
Yasmin
Billy

Thank you for your continued prayer support.

Jeff and everyone at
The Power House
"Building the Kingdom of God Here and Now"
PowerHouseMD@Juno.com
www.pigtownchurch.org