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One of the core aims of CCO, the national college ministry which our parish partners with for our college ministries at UR and VCU, is for college students to gain a vision for following Christ in every area of life. One of the ways that we try to equip our students with this whole life vision for discipleship is through CCO’s annual Jubilee Conference.
Holy Week is nearly upon us. I want to take a few minutes to explain what it will be like to participate in the most important days of the year together. Please, if you can, read the following in its entirety.
While most of us are likely familiar with the concept of a private, personal fast, we may be less familiar with the concept of a corporate fast. Here are just a few (of the many) examples of corporate fasting in scripture.
In February and March, the Youth Fellowship team joined the Falls Church Anglican on their Breakaway retreats at Rockbridge for the first time. It was a great experience, and one that caused me to reflect on many levels. As soon as we traveled down the winding drive and pulled up at the Blue Ridge cabins, I was hit with nostalgia remembering my own days in high school going on retreats and staying in these very cabins. As the girls lugged what seemed like an impossible amount of luggage into the cabins, I hoped that this experience would be as meaningful for them as it had been for me.
Our parish professes that children are a vital part the body of Christ and are capable of a rich spiritual life. Our children’s ministry therefore takes care in how we teach children about the gospel, the Scriptures, and the Triune God, knowing that children are capable of receiving this eternal truth. But I wonder if we can overemphasize our role as teachers who input knowledge and truth in this setting and miss out on what we can receive when we lead children to consider what the Holy Spirit is teaching them directly in these sacred spaces.
On April 5 we will have the joy of celebrating the sacrament of baptism. Here’s who should consider participating.
Over the years, I have found confession, in all its forms, to be a deeply helpful and encouraging practice. I find that, once I get over my fears, God is more tender than I expected, my friends are more understanding than I anticipated, and the priest to whom I confess is utterly without judgement or condemnation.
Every March Redeemer members elect two members to join the vestry—our parish's governing body—for a three-year term. Any member in good standing can be nominated to serve on the vestry. If you are a member of Redeemer, we encourage you to prayerfully consider whom you might nominate for these important roles.
The Christmas season is only the beginning of the liturgical calendar’s narrative of the life of Christ. The story continues with Epiphany. “[N]ations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” (Isaiah 60:3) These prophetic words set the theme for the season of Epiphany, a meditation on the light of the world revealed to all people in our Savior, Jesus Christ. The word Epiphany means ‘the manifestation of God to man,’ and this season reflects on the many ways Christ manifested himself as the fully-God and fully-human Savior through his life and ministry. This guide is designed to walk you through the seasonal feasts that signify these Epiphany moments.
The answer to this question has undergone a dramatic shift in the past few decades. For hundreds of years the answer was a quick and easy “church holiday.” What else could celebrating the birth of our Savior be? Of course, there were family celebrations that often accompanied Christmas church celebrations, but these were understood to be secondary.
When I became a parent, I started noticing things I had never paid attention to before, like how loud life can be, how quickly things get messy, and how rarely anything goes according to plan. It has changed the way I see church life as well. We often put a lot of effort into keeping our worship services calm, our spaces neat, and our communities welcoming. Those are good desires, and there is nothing wrong with wanting beauty, peace, and order in the house of God. But sometimes, in pursuing those things, we can miss an important truth: the sacred often meets us right in the middle of our ordinary messiness.
When we talk about spiritual formation here in our parish, we often start with seven questions that every person—no matter what age—asks of themselves. Two in particular,“Who am I?” and “With whom do I belong?”, are questions that children encounter early in life.
Jack-o-lanterns, front porch skeletons, and cotton spiderwebs are everywhere this time of year. Here in Richmond, the Carytown Zombie Walk and Halloween on Hanover are major neighborhood events that attract thousands. It’s easy to assume we know Halloween. After all, “Halloween,” as our consumerist culture defines it, is all around us. But there is a deeper level of meaning to this spooky holiday than costumes and a sugar rush.
You may have already seen a sobering article this morning published by Washington Post about the ACNA's Archbishop, Steve Wood. If you feel a complicated mix of emotions: revulsion, anger, grief, worry, embarrassment, and more, you're not alone. We encourage you to join us in these next steps.
On Friday Evening, November 14, two of our CCO college ministers, Will Clark and Tee Feyrer, will be ordained to the diaconate at the annual Diocesan Synod!
Every week, just shy of three hundred Redeemer adults gather in small groups across the greater metro Richmond area. Some of these groups meet early in the morning before the work day hustle begins. Others meet later in the evening after little ones are bathed and fed and tucked away. Most groups meet over dinner, where a hundred of those little ones join their parents as they eat together at the dining table. And all of these groups are faithfully reading through the same scriptures each week and asking how God’s word to us is meant to shape how we live.
I am writing to you today with bittersweet news. Oldson Duclos, our Director of Community Care, and I have been in conversation for a few months about the form of ministry to which he senses a particular call. After much prayer and discernment, he has chosen to depart from Redeemer staff and move towards exciting plans he has for a new ministry here in the city.
It is my pleasure to introduce you to our new Senior Director of Music + Arts, Matt Spainhour!
Many of you will remember that our parish has been conducting a search process for this role over the past 6-9 months, and after receiving over 20 applications, interviewing 7 candidates, and hosting four interview weekends, our team agreed to extend an invitation to Matt.
The Spainhours come to us from Knoxville, TN, where Matt is married to Kelley and they have three beautiful children and a fourth due in November!
I’m writing to you from our Parish House at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday evening, September 23, where your Vestry has just concluded a thoughtful, prayerful, and very exciting meeting.
I’ll give you the headline and then a bit more detail.
Your Vestry has unanimously voted to close on 1801 Park Avenue!
On November 2 we will have the joy of celebrating the sacrament of baptism. Here’s who should consider participating.
As we anticipate our Vestry voting on whether or not to close on 1801 Park Ave. and prepare to fast and pray for wisdom and discernment in this process over the next two weeks, I want to share something that I’ve been thinking about because I wonder if some of you have been thinking about it too.
How do we cultivate an appropriately biblical and healthy mentality towards the idea of owning a church building?
It is a great privilege and honor to introduce myself to you as I begin my new role here at Redeemer. My name is Nathan Horner and I recently began working as Redeemer’s Church Planter-in-Residence. I will serve in this role for the next three years filling a variety of different positions and responsibilities as I continue to learn the knowledge and work required in church ministry.
Good afternoon! I hope you have navigated the school year relaunch and that your kids have handled the transition well.
I’m writing to you today as both a priest and father. As a priest, I have a responsibility to oversee our Youth Fellowship and the staff who lead it, and as a dad, I have two daughters that participate in the ministry.
We have a truly incredible year lined up and there are a lot of changes we have made that we hope will bless and benefit your students and your whole family.
I’m writing to you today with two things in mind: 1) An update on the due diligence process for 1801 Park Ave. and 2) A call to fasting and prayer for all of us.
First, an update. The due diligence process on 1801 Park Ave. has gone very well thus far.
I began volunteering at The Virginia Home in the summer of 2022. During college, serving people with disabilities was a personal priority—it shaped my experience and deepened my relationship with God. But in my senior year, COVID cut my time at school short, and those places of community and service were suddenly inaccessible. Isolated, I became more self-focused. I realized I did not want to give up time for others, preferring to pursue my own interests. Recognizing this, I knew I had to find a place to volunteer for the sake of my soul. So, I looked up our Redeemer community partners, and with experience working with people with disabilities, The Virginia Home felt like a natural fit.
The apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi is one of the most encouraging, joyful, and best-loved of all the New Testament epistles, and indeed, in the whole of scripture. Differing from the rigorous theological precision of Romans or the pastoral rebuke of 1 Corinthians, the letter to the Philippians is marked by affection, gratitude, exhortation, and encouragement.
Here in the month of August, I can feel the pressure of the fall schedule closing in. With it comes a familiar feeling of being intimidated by the challenges of keeping up with it all — maybe more honestly worded, the challenge of performing well. In a culture that puts immense pressure on us and our children to be extraordinary, the greater challenge might be to instead resist that impulse. In this aptly named season of Ordinary Time, the longest and most uneventful portion of the Christian calendar, we find the invitation to lean into our limitations and subsequently the grace it takes to sustain us in our work.
May I confess something to you? I have a love/hate relationship with Redeemer’s Foundations Class. Now, this class is my baby so let me explain! I have poured so much of my heart, energy, time, and love into this class over the past 8 years. I’ve edited and re-edited the content dozens of times and yet, every time I conclude another round of Foundations Class, I feel very mixed emotions. There are two things I absolutely love about the class…
As our parish leadership has been preparing for the fall semester, we have been doing some serious thinking and praying about how to best answer a perennial challenge: “How can we make it possible for every adult man and woman at Redeemer to be a part of a Small Group?”
Small Groups are not Redeemer’s invention (lots of churches do them), nor are they a recent innovation (Christians have intentionally met together to help each other grow in their faith since the earliest days of the Church).