Sermon by Markus Watson on January 27, 2008

This is the second sermon in the series titled “Wow! That’s ‘Great!’”

Theme – Jesus’ great commandment is twofold: love God and love your neighbor. In other words, there is a vertical dimension (God) and a horizontal dimension (neighbor). Lots of churches emphasize the vertical dimension. This is good, but not when it excludes the horizontal dimension, not when we don’t focus at all on caring for the needs of our neighbors in a tangible way. Other churches emphasize the horizontal dimension. Again, this is good, but when this is the only emphasis, when there is no emphasis at all on loving God, these churches tend to become little more than social service organizations. A healthy church needs to focus on both dimensions: loving God and loving our neighbor.

This sermon may be downloaded to your local machine by right clicking (or control clicking on a Mac) on the link above and saving the mp3 file to your local hard drive.

It is recommended that you give Juice a try. Juice is an open source podcast receiver, allowing users to capture and listen to podcasts.

Parents’ Night Out is a monthly event, most often held on the fourth Friday of each month during the school year. During Parents’ Night out parents in our community are invited to bring their children to enjoy a fun and safe evening with us at Northminster while they enjoy a night out on the town! Children participating in our program are well supervised, provided with dinner and snacks, and enjoy many forms of entertainment. This program is open to all families and space is limited. Therefore, reservations are required and can be made by calling the church office at 858-490-3995 within two weeks of each event.

Parents’ Night Out is held here at Northminster between the hours of 6 and 10 p.m. and is open to potty trained children from 3 years old through the 5th grade. The cost per family is $10.00 for one child and $20.00 for two or more. The cost includes dinner, snacks, games and crafts.

Please join us!

Hi everybody! I am glad to be back in San Diego. I just finished two and a half weeks in Florida at the Young Life All Staff Conference, then a week of Winter Training. The All Staff Conference was amazing, with 4,000 Young Life staff people from around the world. Jack Hanna, Jeff Foxworthy, Donald Miller, Dale Bruner, Jars of Clay, Nicole C. Mullens, and Bill Stein were some of our special guests! At Winter Training I took a graduate level course, which was Practical Theology. I loved the class, and feel better equipped for ministry.

This week we jumped back into Young Life, Wyldlife, and lunch clubs! Monday night we had Campaigners, Wednesday lunch club at U.C. High, Wednesday night Wyldlife Campaigners, and Thursday Madison lunch club! It is great to see the kids and leaders again. One of the high school girls who went on the ski trip, Jessie, told me that she wants to be on staff with Young Life someday! We met Tuesday to discuss what that process might look like. Jonny Sherfy also hopes to be on Student Staff in the near future, as well as Stephen Wescott.

On a personal note, Matt (my boyfriend of three years, also a volunteer leader,) surprised me and came out to Florida for the last few days I was there, and proposed on the beach! We plan to get married in Lake Tahoe March 15! God Bless, Chelsea

Sermon by Markus Watson on January 20, 2008

This is the first sermon in the series titled “Wow! That’s ‘Great!’”

Theme – Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is. After some hemming and hawing, Peter finally says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” Jesus responds by blessing Peter and making the promise that “on this rock I will build my church.” What often gets lost in this promise is the fact that Jesus promises to build his church. And that promise is still good today! God promises to build his church—not only the worldwide church, but individual congregations as well. At Northminster, we can believe this promise, that Jesus will build his church.

This sermon may be downloaded to your local machine by right clicking (or control clicking on a Mac) on the link above and saving the mp3 file to your local hard drive.

It is recommended that you give Juice a try. Juice is an open source podcast receiver, allowing users to capture and listen to podcasts.

Today the children were delighted by a wonderful display of fire and ice put on by Mad Science of San Diego. As one of our many enrichment programs provided for our children by our parent group, Mad Science has been coming for many years to teach us the wonders of science.

Sermon by Nate Landis on January 13, 2008

Nate is founder and director of the Urban Youth Collaborative, a network of church and parachurch partnerships that holistically shares the good news of Jesus Christ with 400 students each week at 12 public schools in San Diego.

Nate filled in for Markus on the 6th and on the 13th. Markus will be retuning to the pulpit on January 20th.

This sermon may be downloaded to your local machine by right clicking (or control clicking on a Mac) on the link above and saving the mp3 file to your local hard drive.

If you wish to listen to this sermon as a podcast, it is recommended that you give Juice a try. Juice is an open source podcast receiver, allowing users to capture and listen to podcasts.

Happy New Year!

We wish all of you a happy, healthy 2008.

Welcome back to school! I am sure everyone is excited to get back into the routine of life. We are excited to be back and are looking forward to a great 2008 with your children.

On Monday and Tuesday, January 14^th and 15^th Mad Science will be here doing a show on Fire & Ice and Movie Special Effects. This enrichment program is courtesy of the fund raising efforts of the Parent Group. The preschool will be closed on January 21^st honoring Martin Luther King holiday and January 22^nd for a staff development day. Pizza days this month are January 10^th and January 18^th.

Thank you to everyone who donated toys and food to CCSA. We were able to provide toys for CCSA to give out to families who came off the street asking for something to give their children for Christmas. CCSA was extremely excited as the donations they had were already given out to other families. Thank you for remembering the reason for the season.

You will notice a transformation in the rooms to reflect winter. Even though we do not get snow on the ground here in San Diego, you might see some in the classrooms!

We would also like to remind the parents that if you exit the preschool onto Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, it is illegal to make a left turn as you exit from the parking lot. It is a blind corner and there is a double yellow line. Please make a safe right turn out of the church parking lot. We do have police on occasion who will cite you if you make a left turn while exiting the parking lot. Let’s make it a safe year!

We have a lot of jackets and other items in our lost in found in the office. Please stop by and see if any of it belongs to your children. We will be donating the bulk of them to Goodwill at the end of the month.

On behalf of the entire staff at Northminster Preschool, happy 2008 and we look forward to exciting things this New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Last weekend we got back from our Young Life Utah snowboarding trip. We took 9 kids. One of these kids was Phillip, who had never been to anything with Young Life before. He only heard about the trip through our lunch club at Madison High School.

Phillip is a senior and plays football and basketball. Two of my friends sponsored Phillip to go on the trip for free. He had never been snowboarding. He had never even seen snow before!

Skylar, one of our leaders, lent Phillip everything he needed for the trip- snowboard, boots, and clothes. All he had to do was to show up.

I wish you all could have seen Phillip’s excitement. He skipped the snowboarding lesson on the first day, and just went for it. He was out snowboarding more than any of us combined, and by day 3 was as good as the rest of us. When it was time to leave the mountain each day, some of us were so tired that we would be on the bus already, half an hour before it left. Phillip would come right from his last run, and hop on the bus about 5 minutes before it left, covered in snow. He didn’t want to miss a minute.

The last night of club, all the kids were invited into a relationship with Jesus. The other 8 of our kids had accepted Jesus into their lives, and were at all different places in their walks with God. Phillip loud and clear, was the first one you could hear repeating the worship leaders words of the prayer. When everyone was told they could open their eyes, there was Phillip’s hand raised (along with many, many others).

On the bus on the way home, he said to me across the aisle, “Chelsea, thank you.” “For what, Phillip?” “For making all of this happen.” Then he sang, somewhat off-key to the tune of Rockin around the Christmas tree — “Standing around on the Christmas tree,” just that line, over and over. It was pretty funny, and hard to miss his excitement and the impact this trip had on his life. I just had to share this story.

God Bless,
Chelsea

Sermon by Nate Landis on January 6, 2008

Nate is founder and director of the Urban Youth Collaborative, a network of church and parachurch partnerships that holistically shares the good news of Jesus Christ with 400 students each week at 12 public schools in San Diego.

Nate filled in for Markus on the 6th and will be preaching again on January 13th.

This sermon may be downloaded to your local machine by right clicking (or control clicking on a Mac) on the link above and saving the mp3 file to your local hard drive.

It is recommended that you give Juice a try. Juice is an open source podcast receiver, allowing users to capture and listen to podcasts.