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Fiber Arts This Saturday
June 22nd
The Fiber Arts group (knitting, crochet, hand work, etc.) meets the 4th Saturday each month from 10am-noon in Hadley Hall.
All skill levels are welcome and no commitment is needed. Just drop in when you can and enjoy the company and crafting. We hope you'll join us!
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Worship This Week
Please join us
in the Sanctuary
or online at 10am for the
Fifth Sunday
after Pentecost
Coffee hour will be held
after the service
in the Sanctuary.
The service will be live streamed
through Facebook Live here
or on 3CX here
Reader: Linda Tilden
Coffee hour host: Jane DeRosa
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Siwacki Family Baptism
What a beautiful baptism of all five of the Siwacki children!
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Rev Paige's Corner: Celebrating Juneteenth!
As a pastor - and particularly as an interim pastor, I am always interested in how people tell their stories - what is included and what is left out. There is a way that I find a bit of archeology can go a long way in understanding the culture of a congregation - whether that is digging through old annual reports or interviewing long time members. And it is really interesting to discover forgotten stories and to get to re-tell them.
As someone who has long been concerned about issues of racial justice and healing, I will confess to being embarrassed to discover that I had no idea what Juneteenth was about until about a year before it was declared as our latest federal holiday. The stories weren't in any of the history books I had in school, and I hadn't heard the stories of our second Independence Day in any community in which I traveled.
On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect freeing all people who were enslaved, but it took time for it to be enforced in Confederate states and even for news to reach people living in slavery. In fact, some slave owners in the southeast marched their slaves to west Texas in order to keep using their slave labor or to sell them to those in that area who would. It wasn't until June 19th, 1865 - over 2 years later - that Union Troops arrived in Galveston Bay and freed over 250,000 slaves - the last in this country. Slave owners in that area had known this was coming but were trying to hold on for one more harvest. News had been kept from the slaves.
The first generation of those emancipated moved quickly to reunify their families, to establish schools and even to run for office. The parent denominations of the United Church of Christ were active in the development of schools and colleges as one response.
Juneteenth has been celebrated since that time among southern African American Families with cookouts, barbeques, parades, and raucous family reunions. The color of Juneteenth celebrations in red - a color that was associated with resilience among other things. Eating red foods is one tradition.
So, I hope you have found a way to observe Juneteenth this week - even if it is just reading this and other articles and learning more of these stories. This is part of our American story!
Blessings and peace!
Rev Paige Besse-Rankin
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Calling all artistic and
talented friends!
As part of the Hampstead Garden Club's Garden Tour on July 13th, the Hampstead Congregational Church, UCC will be open as a rest stop, offering boxed lunches and hosting an Art in Bloom show in Hadley Hall. We will be welcoming many types of art to be submitted: paint, sculpture, drawing, photography and textiles.
All ages are welcome to display artwork. You will have the option of offering your piece for sale with a 10% commission going to the church capital campaign. Area floral designers will be interpreting the art in floral design. These may also be offered for sale with the same commission. Neither the art nor the floral piece is required to be for sale. If you are an artist and would like to participate with one, or multiple pieces, we are asking to have them submitted by June 30 so the floral designers can have time to plan their work. You may drop the pieces off at the church, or submit a clear photo by that day, with the art itself needed by July 12 for exhibition. Anyone interested submitting art or in doing a floral design, please contact Kari Allard by messenger for adult art and Terri Eddy Malcolm for kid’s art.
All are welcome, professionals and amateurs alike.
We are looking forward to making The Art in Bloom exhibit a fun community event as part of Hampstead's 275th anniversary celebration.
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Summer Office Hours Begin July 1st
Just a reminder that the summer office hours will begin on Monday, July 1st until August 31st.
Office hours will be:
Monday 9am-12pm
Wednesday 9am-12pm
Thursday 9am-1pm
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New AMAZON Wish List for
Saint Anne's Food Pantry
St. Anne's Pantry is seeing an increase in the number of families who shop with them. They've almost doubled the amount of families who shop weekly since this time last year. They try to keep their shelves stocked as much as they can.
They are reaching out for some help...donations are needed. They thought they would try an Amazon Wish List in addition to listing items here.
Thank you in advance for any donations.
Please no expired items and non-perishable items only please.
Drop off in the foyer of Hadley Hall.
Looking for the following: cereal(no oatmeal), coffee, tea, Ritz Crackers, Saltines, granola bars, Nutrigrain bars, cheese and crackers, peanut butter and crackers, canned Chef Boy r Dee, condiments, salad dressing, brownie/cake mix, Coffee/K-Cups, Quickbread/Muffin mixes, Easter Candy, Ensure, Scalloped/Au gratin potatoes.
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Talk this Sunday following worship
Our second Transition Talk has been postponed to June 23 (so people won't be tired out from the Strawberry Festival.) It will take place over Pizza lunch in Hadley Hall.
Who is our neighbor? A program called "Mission Insite" gives us a lot of demographic information, but it also tells us about what marketing groups are here (age, household type, economic realities and more). And then it gives us information about the trends of those groups with regards to what they are seeking in churches! Looking at this information can give us information about possibilities for ministry moving forward (which will also have an impact on the qualities we hope to find in the next pastor!)
Want a sneak peak at some of the data? Look at one of the reports here:
So come and learn about our neighbors!
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Question of the Week From the Transition Team
Friends,
One of the tasks of the Transition Team is to gather background information that will assist the
Search Committee in the preparation of our church profile. An effective church profile will provide a realistic view of where our church is going in the near future. The preparation of our church profile is important because it will help attract candidates for the “settled” pastor position who will bring the skills and enthusiasm we need to help us on our journey into the future.
The collection of this data requires much more than simple statistics or having the four transition team members sit around a table and review the questions that need to be answered. This data collection process benefits by having as many people in the congregation as possible participate.
Over the course of the next several weeks, the Transition Team (Rob Reeves, Barbara Wallack, Lynn D’Adamo and Rick Little) will share some of the questions from the Profile and hope that you will look at them, give them serious thought, and share your ideas and opinions with members of the team. You can speak with us one on one, or jot down your thoughts on paper and give it to us so that we can discuss that input at our regular meetings with Rev. Paige.
Here is the question for this week…
“Describe your congregation’s life of faith.”
For example, what beliefs and commitments are stated in your congregation’s purpose statement or membership vows? How is God most described in worship liturgy? In what ways would you describe the Holy Spirit in your midst?
Thanks so much for your involvement and feedback as the Transition Team moves forward with its work.
Rick Little
(for the Transition Team)
Share your feed back for this week's question here:
Answer Question of the Week 3
If you haven't had a chance to answer the first two questions, we would encourage you to click the links below to share your thoughts!
Answer first question here
Answer second questions here
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Steeple Lighting
Steeple Lit June 16th to June 23rd
In Loving Memory of
Matthew Griffin
Love, Your Family & Friends
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Steeple Lighting
Steeple lit June 24th – June 30th
On Behalf of the month of the
Sacred Heart
of Jesus
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Peace & Justice
A brief article from the Science Desk of the Washington Post caught my eye. The headline was “Tens of millions of acres of cropland lie abandoned, study shows”. The article described a study that analyzed satellite data and cropland information from the USAD between 1986 and 2018. The result was about 30.4 million acres of cropland went unused in the contiguous US. A large portion was in the Midwest
from Texas and New Mexico to South Dakota where the Ogallala Aquifer is drying out from pumping for
irrigation and droughts. But there were standout areas around the Mississippi, the Atlantic Coast, and
along the Canadian border in the Midwest to the Pacific coast.
About 53% of the land was converted to pasture. Smaller portions went to shrub and forest, wetlands, and “non-vegetated” lands. No reasons for why farmers stopped using the cropland were available. But of note, less than 20% of the abandoned land was enrolled in the USDA Conservation reserve Program which pays farmers to let certain lands remain out of production. Some speculated that the former cropland might overlap with formal conservation programs, but that is not the case.
Now the researchers want to understand why farmers took the land out of production because the data does not indicate that the rate of land being abandoned is not subsiding. That is when I looked at a report from the University of Wisconsin. It gave a great deal of detail on where the abandoned parcels are. The researchers are hoping that the map can be used to alleviate the tension between solar panels and energy crops with food production. The abandoned cropland that was not profitable or was excessively labor intensive to produce food might be perfect for these alternative climate related uses.
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Save the Date for Our Summer Picnic & Worship
We are planning to worship outside followed by a picnic and activities on July 28! Save the date for this fun time. More details coming next month.
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Music Corner by Herb Tardiff
What is a Xylophone?
The xylophone is a percussion instrument made of wooden bars, arranged much like the keys of a piano. The sound is generated by striking the bars with a mallet. These mallets have tips made of either hard or soft rubber, nylon, or plastic. A softer mallet will make the timbre more soft and gentle, while a harder mallet will produce a brighter sound. Resonators below the keys help project the sound. These tubes hang below each bar. Today, people typically make them out of aluminum. Xylophones are classified as idiophones, a group of instruments that create sound by vibrating. They have a range of three to four octaves. The xylophone produces a note one octave higher than the note written on the music sheet.
The history of the xylophone is quite extensive many different cultures in many different countries. The origins go back as for as 2000 BC. Each bar and resonator was hand carved to the exact pitch needed to make up the musical scale.
The earliest evidence of a true xylophone is from the 9th century in southeast Asia, while a similar hanging wood instrument, a type of harmonicon, is said by the Vienna Symphonic Library to have existed in 2000 BC in what is now part of China. The xylophone-like ranat was used in Hindu regions (kashta tharang).
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New Hampshire Conference UCC
Weekly News
We thought you might enjoy reading the NH Conference UCC weekly newsletter. You can read it with this link.
6/18/2024 Newsletter
Each week, we will update this section of our Weekly Word with the new link
for the current newsletter.
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To sign up for the next volunteer opportunity click here. If you are interested in volunteering contact Jane DeRosa via email at janederosa@comcast.net. | |
The Sonshine Soup Kitchen needs volunteers to prepare and package the food for "To Go Meals." We partner with Atkinson Congregational Church once a month on the 4th Wednesday of the month to help out from 3-6pm. | | |
Are you on Facebook? Do you follow Hampstead Congregational Church? Please like our page to know about all the great events in the church. Liking also supports our church when people check us out. If you are already connected, share our good news!
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Help Us Continue Our Mission at HCC | |
Want to get the word out about what’s happening at HCC? If you want to publicize your event or remind the congregation about something, please email the office (hcc1752@gmail.com) by Wednesday at noon so that your information can be included in that week’s Weekly Word. Feel free to send in information up to three weeks in advance of an upcoming event. We want all of the congregation (not just the Team leaders) to be empowered to get the word out about all the activities that are happening at Hampstead Congregational Church!
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Our Mailing Address:
61 Main Street
Hampstead, NH 03841
Church Summer Office hours: Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday 9:00am to Noon
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Hampstead Congregational Church Website
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