This Sunday (June 14) will be an out-of-the-box time of worship for Northminster! Instead of gathering inside the sanctuary this weekend, we’re going to explode out into the neighborhood around us!

At 9:30 a.m. we’re going to put our hands and feet to work, worshiping God by blessing our community. What exactly are we gonna be doing? We’ll clean up the alley between Cole St. and Dubois Dr. We’re going to repair fences, clear weeds, trim vegetation, and paint walls. By the time we finish, it will be a brand new alley!

If you’re not sure what to do with your kids, bring ‘em!  We’ve got a bounce-house and all kinds of fun activities for the kids.

At 12:30 p.m. we’ll finish our work and have lunch together in Congdon Hall to celebrate what God did through us that morning!

If you’re a regular at Northminster, I can’t wait to see you this Sunday!

If you’re not, you’re more than welcome to come give us a hand!

Pastor Markus

P.S. – Plan to arrive by about 9:15 so that we can be ready to work by 9:30…

Northminster would like to invite you to  join us as we journey with Jesus through his final week before Easter.

Thursday Communion Service, 7:00 p.m.:  This is traditionally known as Maundy Thursday—the night Jesus celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples.  In this service, we will experience the passion of Jesus through the use of our senses:  taste, touch, seeing, hearing, and smelling.

Good Friday Service, 7:00 p.m.:  In this service, we will journey through the suffering of Jesus toward the cross.  It will be a service of darkness, as we begin the service in full brightness and leave the service in total darkness, representing the darkness of the death of the Son of God.

Please don’t miss these opportunities to reflect on the sacrifice of Jesus this week.  Make it a priority—as a follower of Jesus—to walk with Jesus through his suffering and crucifixion.

And then on Easter morning let’s celebrate the resurrection with passion, with eagerness, and with deep love for our wonderful Savior!!

This Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, that season preceding Easter during which we begin to prepare ourselves for the death and resurrection of Jesus.

I want to invite you to Northminster’s Ash Wednesday service this Wednesday night at 7:00 p.m. (Feb. 25).

Some of you hear the words “Ash Wednesday Service” and think to yourselves, “Wow…  That sounds boring.”

But not at Northminster!  This service will engage your whole person–mind, spirit, and body!  It will be a time for reflection, meditation, and confession–and we will do this in a way that many of you may never before have done this.

If you are in a small group, come with your whole small group!  If you’re not in a small group, you come, too!  And if you’re a guest looking for a place to worship on Ash Wednesday–you are more than welcome to come join us!

And if you have kids, bring them!  Older kids will probably enjoy the service.  We’ll have childcare available for the younger kids.

I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday evening at 7:00 p.m.

Pastor Markus

The worship band at Northminster is more than just a collection of musicians who get together to practice and help lead worship on Sunday mornings.  We are a family that shares good times and troubled times.  We laugh and we pray.  We go places together like the Chris Tomlin concert coming this March to the Rock Church and to the Spirit West Coast celebration in May.  We meet each other in small groups to increase our understanding of our place in God’s plan for His church.  We are a collaboration of musicians, each of whom brings talents and suggestions to provide heartfelt and powerful worship experiences to our congregation.  We are all committed to bringing only our best before the throne of Christ.  We invite you to join us every Sunday morning at 9:30.  Come see what God is doing on the Mesa!  If you are a musician who feels God encouraging you to share your talents, please give us a call.  We will welcome your interest with prayer.  Northminster might just be the place where God wants you to be!

In addition to the Chris Tomlin concert and the Spirit West Coast celebration, coming events include a work-day to build a stronger platform in the sanctuary and a family off-road bike ride.  Call the church office for details.

This year, we will have one Christmas Eve Service at 7:00 p.m.  The service will be what we call a “Darkness to Light” service in which the lights in the sanctuary are gradually brought from–well–darkness to light!  It’s a neat way of experiencing in a visual way the coming of Jesus into our dark world.

The service will end with candle-lighing on the patio.

We hope that you’ll join us!

(If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call:  858-490-3995)

This Sunday—December 7—is an exciting day here at Northminster!  At 4:30 p.m., Nate Landis will be ordained as an evangelist within the Presbytery of San Diego—and we get to host the ordination service here at Northminster!

Here’s the other exciting part of this—once Nate is ordained he will officially be Northminster’s parish associate!  As an evangelist, he will continue to be involved in Urban Youth Collaborative, a San Diego based youth outreach organization that Nate founded a couple of years ago.  As our parish associate, he will be a resource to us as we continue to learn what it means to live missionally—and we will be a resource to him as we work with him to reach to meet both the physical and spiritual needs of our city.

Please come and support Nate on Sunday afternoon at 4:30 p.m. at Northminster.  This service will be both a time of great worship and the joy of witnessing what God is doing in Nate’s life.  After the service, we’ll have reception in Congdon Hall with lots of good food!

See you Sunday!

Pastor Markus Watson

Northminster is welcoming you, your neighbors and friends to a Christmas Music Sing Along!  Please join us Saturday, December 13th from 4:30-6:00pm as we come together to sing familiar holiday songs and carols in this wonderful holiday event.

Please come and enjoy music, cookies and refreshments!

Just a reminder that we will have a special VBS Celebration service this Sunday from 9:30-10:30 a.m.  We’ll have all kinds of good food before and after the service.  We will see some videos from the week and listen to the kids sing!  This Sunday will be all about our VBS kids!

Also, all families whose kids came to VBS this week will receive a free DVD with videos from this past week after the service!

In a Peanuts cartoon, Lucy demanded that Linus change TV channels, threatening him with her fist if he didn’t. “What makes you think you can walk right in here and take over?” asks Linus.

“These five fingers,” says Lucy. “Individually they’re nothing, but when I curl them together like this into a single unit, they form a weapon that is terrible to behold.”

“Which channel do you want?” asks Linus. Turning away, he looks at his fingers and says, “Why can’t you guys get organized like that?”

I don’t know about you, but I think there’s real wisdom in that little joke! As a church, being united is so important! Not that we’re gonna beat anyone up the way Lucy might, but there is real power in unity.

This weekend (June 1) is our first Sunday with a new worship schedule. This Sunday, we begin worshiping together. This Sunday, we begin a new phase in our journey of discovery—discovering who we are, who we can be, who God is calling us to be; discovering together God’s future for our church!

This coming together as a single worship service really has nothing to do with worship styles. Sure, there will be conversation, discussion, maybe even some tension, over the styles of worship that we’ll be experimenting with. But worship style is not the important thing.

What is important is that we are together, united as we move into God’s future for us. We certainly won’t always agree on whether we liked everything about a given worship service—but that would be true even if we all leaned one way or another in terms of worship style.

Instead, let’s focus on what we do agree on: 1) God loves us; 2) God has redeemed us through Jesus; and 3) the reason we, the church, exist is to give God glory and make God’s presence real to a hurting world.

I can’t imagine that any of us would disagree with that! As we move into the future, let’s focus on those things, asking God to help us live out those realities in our lives as we worship, serve, give, and love in every aspect of our lives.

–Pastor Markus Watson

The big question at Northminster right now is, of course: What’s going to happen with our worship services? Are we going to go back to one worship service? What would it look like? Would it be mostly contemporary? What does that mean? What would happen to the choir? What would happen to the staff positions that currently support the Heritage service? What time would the new service be?

These are all important questions that will have to be answered in time. And that’s the purpose for the open forum conversation held after the worship service on April 27. This is a big decision and I believe that everyone deserves to have his or her voice heard. It’s also why I invited everyone to share their feedback on the website (and I want to thank everyone who has shared their feedback).

There are, as I see it, two reasons to give everyone a chance to share their thoughts. The first is, as I mentioned above, to give each person a voice. We need to be in dialogue about these kinds of things, always open and willing to listen to each other, as well as to share honestly and lovingly with each other.

The second reason for allowing everyone to share their thoughts has to do with the role of Session (our board of elders). We are Presbyterians, and as Presbyterians we are led by the elders that we elect. The job of the elders is to discern the will of God. This is important—it is not to simply make a decision by majority vote, but to listen to the Spirit of God and then make a decision based on what they sense God is saying. And one of the critical ways by which elders can hear the Spirit of God is by listening to the people of God.

I believe God speaks through his people. That’s us! This doesn’t mean we will always agree on everything; and even our elders might not always agree on what they believe the will of God is. But we believe that God speaks through us and to us, and as we listen to God, God will make the way clear before us.

After our open forum conversation, Session will come together sometime in the following two weeks (I’ll be on vacation this week, so we won’t meet until sometime after May 4). At that time, we will talk about what we have heard from all of you and where we sense God may be taking us. At that time, the decision will be made as to whether or not we will reunite as one service and what that service will look like (though there will, of course, be flexibility to adapt in the future).

God is moving in some new ways at Northminster, and I am so excited about it! New people are visiting and coming back! People are joining our New Members Class! Some of you will be going on the mission trip to Mexico! And that’s just the beginning!

The wind of the Spirit is blowing at Northminster! Could a move to one service be part of the Spirit’s moving? We’ll see. But whatever happens, we can rest assured that God is with us. God has not left us and will never leave us or forsake us.

We can remember with joy the words of Jeremiah 29:11: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’” Amen!