And yet, as much as we desire control, feel empowered by control, and do our best to maintain control, it is interesting that scripture says very little about control. In his letters to early churches, Paul encouraged Christians to practice self-control, even designating this discipline as one of the Fruits of the Spirit. James echoed these words, exhorting early Christians to practice self-control by “taming the tongue.”

Travis challenged us earlier this year to incorporate Bible reading into our weekly habits. It’s important to model this behavior for our children and to help them build these habits as well. Use this Bible reading plan (click here) with your child of any age to cover important biblical stories for our youngest church members. Happy Reading!

Sunday, January 23^rd:

Wednesday Women will begin a new study February 2nd, which will connect readers to the history of Jesus' life and the stories of the Bible in a new way. It will follow season 1 of the television series The Chosen to discover, “What does it actually mean to be Chosen?” Join Susan Jones on Wednesday mornings from 10-11:30 am in the Disciple Center. Cost of the book is $16. Please sign up in the church office; books are available now.

The JOY Seniors are collecting non-perishable food items for the Soup for Seniors Drive during the month of January: soups, canned vegetables, canned fruit, crackers, peanut butter, Carnation Instant Breakfast, canned meats, tuna, and oatmeal. Low salt, nutritious items are preferred. Please place donations on the Missions Table near the Welcome Center or in the collection box inside the double doors of the New Ministries Building. If you want to make a monetary donation, one of the JOY Seniors will shop for you. Be sure to make out your check to "VBC Joy Seniors" and indicate "Soup for Seniors" in the memo line of the check or on the envelope with money in it. Thank you in advance for helping our elderly neighbors in need.

The next JOY Seniors Luncheon was originally scheduled for January 25th at noon in the gym; however, it has been postponed until February 22nd, so there's still plenty of time to sign up. The cost is $10/person. Sign up at the JOY Seniors table in the Welcome Center for beans, cornbread, baked potato, dessert, drink & fun!

All services were cancelled due to snow.

For many years, our church has used an outside service to deliver mass phone calls, texts, and voicemail messages to our congregation, especially when we have little time to communicate or we need to reach large numbers of people in an efficient manner. The past few days have been prime examples of our need to communicate on short notice. Over the past several years, we have been able to add other means of communication for our church family, such as mass emails and instantaneous notifications through our new VBC app. We also post important notices on our Facebook page. In order to be good stewards and minimize our communications costs, we are in the process of narrowing down the phone numbers in our phone database because so many in our church family prefer email and app notifications. If you currently receive your communications from VBC primarily through email, VBC app notifications, or Facebook and are willing to allow us to remove your number from this phone/text communications database, could you please email Kim Yonce or call the church office at 540-343-7685? (This action would not remove your phone number from our Realm database - only from mass phone informational calls.) If you want to continue to receive important VBC notification through phone call/text, there's nothing that you need to do. Thank you!

Christian sympathy is extended to Reed & Adrena Owens and family in the death of his brother, Jim Owens; and to Debra & David Semones and family in the death of her uncle.   

We need volunteers for Children's Worship and for open spots in our Nursery. We have combined those open volunteer positions into one sign-up sheet. Please consider helping us in these crucial ministries. Click here to sign up (dates available through the end of March). Thanks for serving!

Realm invitations have now been forwarded by email to all church members and regular participants for whom we have an email address on file. If you did not receive your invitation, please check your spam/junk folder; even though your invitation may have landed there, it is legitimate, and we invite you to create a login for Realm. If you do not find your invitation in your inbox or spam/junk folder, and you would like to create a Realm login, please contact the church office at 540-343-7685 or by emailing [email protected].

Please note: There are many church members and participants for whom we do not have an email address on file, either because they simply don't have an email address or because it has not been shared with us. We will soon be working our way alphabetically through those folks and automatically adding them to our "online directory" (see above). If you do NOT want to be added to our "online directory," please call the church office at 540-343-7685 and let us know. We will be happy to exclude you from the directory if you prefer.