Dear Friends,

This upcoming Sunday is the return of a special day in our annual community rhythms. We’ll celebrate Promotion Sunday, when we mark the successful completion of different stages of education by folks in our congregation.

People completing these degrees and certificates are of all different ages—but this kind of day makes us particularly mindful of the ways that we grow over the years, and especially how we have a responsibility to care for young people who are moving through the stages of life toward adulthood.

Just as we think about nurturing those who are growing in faith in our midst, Jesus also worried about his followers and how they could connect to God and the wider community of faithfulness. This Sunday we’ll reflect on a particular moment where Jesus expressed these concerns, and we’ll see what we can learn from that story.

Faithfully,

Hardy

Please join us immediately following the Sunday service for our Coffee Hour

(in-person in Trinity Court or online via Zoom).

bit.ly/SVPCCoffeeHour

Theme for Sunday

“…religious formation is not an accident. Teenagers reporting high degrees of religious devotion did not get that way on their own; their faith is the legacy of communities that have invested time, energy, and love in them, and where the religious faith of adults (especially parents) inspires the faith of their children.”

Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian

John 17:20-26

“I’m not praying only for them but also for those who believe in me because of their word. I pray they will be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. I pray that they also will be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me. I’ve given them the glory that you gave me so that they can be one just as we are one. I’m in them and you are in me so that they will be made perfectly one. Then the world will know that you sent me and that you have loved them just as you loved me.

“Father, I want those you gave me to be with me where I am. Then they can see my glory, which you gave me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

“Righteous Father, even the world didn’t know you, but I’ve known you, and these believers know that you sent me. I’ve made your name known to them and will continue to make it known so that your love for me will be in them, and I myself will be in them.”