Helen

ChurchRater – a good idea?

Communitas Collective, Writing 2 Responses »

Feb 122010

This is a copy of my latest post on the Communitas Collective blog

I’ve been helping with churchrater.com, a website where anyone and everyone can post their rating of any church in the US.

This week ChurchRater was featured on Seattle’s King5 news and written about in the Seattle Times.

This publicity has brought more more feedback, some of it negative. Christians are worried that ChurchRater will damage the church and nothing good can come out of it.

I know you don’t all participate in church anymore, but even so, what do you think? Is ChurchRater likely to hurt or help churches?

I won’t take it personally if you don’t approve of it so fire away.

2010 IMEA All State Honors Orchestra

General updates, Music No Responses »

Jan 312010

We drove down to Peoria yesterday to hear Ben play in the IMEA (Illinois Music Educators Association) All State Honors Orchestra concert. In the violin seating auditions Ben placed first and so he was concertmaster – very exciting! He had a couple of solos in Red Cape Tango (based on Superman) by Michael Daugherty – here are the excerpts with his solos:

Download Red Cape Tango (1st excerpt)

Download Red Cape Tango (2nd excerpt)

Here’s a more compressed video of the whole of Red Cape Tango (his solos are from about 2:15-3:15 and 9:45-10:45 minutes into the video):

Download Red Cape Tango

(Click on the photo of the orchestra at the top of this post to see a bigger version of it, then click ‘all sizes’, ‘original size’ to see the full size image)

The Emergency Clothes Closet

Communitas Collective, Writing 2 Responses »

Jan 292010

This is a copy of my latest post on the Communitas Collective blog

Recently the church I used to belong to started an Emergency Clothes Closet. This ministry offers free clothes to people in need in our community. They don’t have to have any connection with the church.

I’m excited about this because when I was part of the church it didn’t have any ministries meeting material needs in the community.

To be honest, this didn’t really hit me until after I left. I was thinking about what I did strongly believe in. Helping people in need was definitely on the list. Then I noticed that the people I knew from my former church who helped in that way weren’t doing it through a ministry of that church. Because there weren’t any.

I’m so pleased this has changed. One of the local newspapers has already written about The Closet. I hope The Closet will put Calvary Memorial Church on the map locally as a ‘caring church’.

Legalism and Grace

Communitas Collective, Writing No Responses »

Jan 152010

This is a copy of my latest post on the Communitas Collective blog.

Recently I was at the grocery store checking out. I realized I needed to go to the restroom and asked the checkout person if I could leave my cart there and go when she was all finished.

A lot of the checkout people there recognize me but I didn’t know this one, who looked rather young and new. She said “No, you can’t leave it here – you have to take it all the way down to Customer Service”. But then the person bagging my groceries, who did know me, said “Leave it right here – I’ll watch it until you get back”.

Because of Crohn’s I live with the anxiety that I might not make it to the restroom in time and so I try to get there as quickly as possible. I really appreciated the small kindness (from someone who didn’t know I had Crohn’s) that saved me the time of having to leave my cart in another place.

It’s amazing how much those small things can mean.