Welcome to MPC Connected! With our church family separated, we will be communicating with you throughout the week in a more intentional way, including emails from Max and Jeff, opportunities to serve others, and more. Enjoy!
Greetings MPC!
Jeff here. We hope the week is finishing up well for you.
How to Join Us for Worship
As a reminder, the church building will be closed to everyone except those directly involved with leading and administering the service. So, please stay home but tune in to our livestream at 10:30. We'll be streaming again at www.meadowcroftchurch.org/live. Max will be preaching on John 10:7-21 - The Good Shepherd. You can preview Sunday's songs by clicking here.
Between Two Sundays
New episode is up! We talked about a question from last week's sermon, why we love being a "confessional" church, our May song of the month, and took a break for some 1980s advertising trivia. Can anyone beat my score of 6/10?
Gathering information on eventually re-opening
We want you to know we are closely monitoring news from our government and from our denomination in terms of plans for eventually re-opening. I sat in on two zoom meetings/calls this week:
The first was with the Pennsylvania Department of Health. As some of you may be aware, the state re-opening plan includes slotting counties into "red," "yellow," and "green" zones. They emphasized that they would be going county-by-county in terms of moving places from the "red" zone (where we are now) to the "yellow" zone. In the yellow zone, there would be limitations of gatherings to 25 people, and these gatherings would be encouraged to have continued social-distancing and mask-wearing. After that, our county would (hopefully) move to the "green" zone, where there would be no specific recommendations to churches, but we would be encouraged to consider how we can best safely resume gathering. Understandably, the state officials were hesitant to issue any sort of specific time estimates for when counties like ours would be moving from one zone to the next.
The second meeting was a group of PCA pastors from different areas of the country. This call was helpful in terms of getting resource recommendations, etc. Since the pastors were spread out throughout the country, there wasn't a lot in terms of specific recommendations for us in terms of timing. Since many areas are "ahead" of ours in terms of timing, we will probably have the chance to glean wisdom from them as they move ahead.
I'm planning to continue to be part of meetings and calls like this in the weeks to come as we gather information. We'd appreciate your prayers for wisdom and patience and unity during this season. We truly do not know what to expect and do not have any specific timetables as of now. If you have specific questions, feel free to reach out to me.
That's all for now. We will "see" you on Sunday and be in touch again on Monday. Please reach out if you need anything.
Jeff
Though we are separated during this unique season, we want you to know we are available. We will be doing our best to stay in touch in many ways, but if you need prayer or just need someone to talk to, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. You can always send a prayer request to Donna (mpcadminteam@gmail.com). You can also email or call Max or Jeff or any of our elders. Max's email is mbenfer@meadowcroftchurch.org and his phone # is 484-886-7726. Jeff's email is jeff@meadowcroftchurch.org and his phone number is 540-818-6215.