Family Ministry News
13 October, 2019
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
This Week in Sunday School.
The Tower of Babel
Sunday's story teaches about people who decide that they want to reach heaven by building a tower so high that it touches heaven. God sees their foolish desires and messes up their act by dividing them with different languages so that they cannot understand each other. In frustration at not being able to communicate, the people abandon their work on the tower and scatter over the earth.

The foolishness of the builders of the Tower of Babel is not that they wanted to reach God, but in the way they tried to do it. Often we want to be Godlike, but this is not the way. Our way to God is not found through our own efforts, but in dependence on God. As the biblical story unfolds, we watch time and again how God sends us the Law and the prophets and then God’s own Son, that we might be reconciled with God. And it will be in Jesus Christ that we will find our way to freedom and peace.

The story of tower of Babel found in Genesis, chapter 11, is an important part of our story because it serves as an opening bookend to a narrative that ends on the day of Pentecost, in Acts, chapter 2. In this early story from Genesis we see a frustrated God scattering the people with different languages; At Pentecost, we see God finding a way to (re)unite the people of differing languages as they hear the same message! It it here that our story begins.
THANK YOU!
A big thank you to the mother/ daughter team of Suzanne and Lila Cabot for leading Children's Church this past Sunday!

Suzanne lead worship, Lila read the readings and Mitchel Powell helped demonstrate the hand movements during the Children's Creed. This parent and teens team is a wonderful example of what a mutual family ministry might look like in the near future at Saint Barnabas Church.

In the service the children learned about St Francis of Assisi.

Interesting Facts for the Children about Saint Francis of Assisi
  • October 4th is observed as Saint Francis feast day.
  • Francis set up the first known Nativity scene to celebrate Christmas in 1220.
  • He believed that actions were the best example, telling his followers to "Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”
Additional facts:
  • It is said that he received the stigmata two years before he died. A stigmata is the wounds of Christ from the cross including his hands, feet, and side.
  • Francis traveled to the Holy Lands during the Crusades hoping to conquer the Muslims with love rather than war.


The Rev'd Sanford A Key,
(203) 661-5526.