Bay Shore Church - Sermons and News from Bay Shore Community Congregational Church in Belmont Shore, California.

Every minister I’ve talked to in the last month or so has asked, “How are things going at your church?”  They don’t mean how’s my preaching, how’s attendance, or how’s the search for an Associate Minister going.  They mean how are we doing financially.

It is an awkward time to be having the annual pledge drive, but then, it’s done every year at this time, regardless of the economy.  Those who planned our proposed 2009 budget took that into consideration.

We are also on the verge of asking inviting you to make some donations through our church for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  We’ve already completed Third World Handarts, Alternative Christmas Market and Project Love.  Last Sunday and this week we distribute shopping bags with a list of suggestions for our Thanksgiving Sunday annual food drive for Woman to Woman.  On Saturday, November 22, Christian Outreach in Action is having a collection of food at the Marketplace at PCH & Second Street.  Their Festival of Grace fundraiser is Saturday, November 15.  And around Thanksgiving, the posters for our biggest gift-giving of the year occurs:  our Christmas families.  You will have an opportunity to do some Christmas shopping for local families who are down on their fortunes at this time.

Even in the midst of tough economic times, it is fun, even satisfying to shop for others who are less fortunate than ourselves.  When Peggy and I were shopping on Monday, it was no trouble to throw a box of cereal and a few extra cans of vegetables into the cart for the Woman to Woman drive.  My Kiwanis Club is adopting five families through two local elementary schools.  One seven-year-old girl wanted an art set, so we bought the same kit with extra paper and supplies that we bought for a Project Love girl.

Let’s face it.  There’s really nothing Peggy and I need for Christmas.  If we spent the money we’d spend on each other on food, gifts and clothing for people like those above, we would both be pretty satisfied, even happy!

“…for I was hungry and you gave me food…I was naked and you gave me clothing…”
–Matthew 25:35-36

I’m writing this on Tuesday morning, a short while after waiting 35 minutes to vote in the presidential election.  One poll worker said that by 8:00 a.m., they had as many voters as usually vote in an entire day!  Poll workers at the precinct voting in our Youth Center tell me they had a line around the corner this morning as well.  It’s exciting to see so many people take part in the democratic process that is part of our American life.  Many young voters were enthused to vote for the first time, and I saw several families take their children into the voting booths to witness the process, and participate in their own way.

By the time you read this, we will know who is the new president of the United States.  Knowing the make-up of our congregation, some of you will be delighted your candidate won; others will be deeply disappointed your candidate lost.  Either one senator will return to the Senate, or two will.  One candidate will be moving into the presidency, and one must concede.  Perhaps it can be done as gracefully as this quote, which Stephen Douglas reputedly said to Abraham Lincoln after the election of 1860:  “Partisan feelings must yield to patriotism.  I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.”  The race is over; now the governing must begin.

One proposition which had as much support and opposition as the presidential candidates was California Proposition 8, which would amend the California constitution to define marriage as only between one man and one woman.  Again, I know there were mixed views on this issue among our congregation.  Some of you will be elated at the results; others will be deeply disturbed.

I hope that after all the results are in, we can process what they mean for us, make our peace with the results, then get on to the important business of addressing our nation’s ills, its economic problems, and society’s needs.

It has been a long campaign, the most expensive on record.  When I heard figures of millions and billions spent on advertisements we heard over and over again, I could not help but wonder how much good some of that money could do if directed to charities and some of the very agencies the propositions were aimed at.  But, this is America, and thank God for that.  At least we have orderly transitions of power.

After my first Memorial Day at Bay Shore Church in 1987, a dear church member asked me why I didn’t say memorial prayers for those who had died. The answers were:  1)  no one told me that was apparently a custom here, and 2)  Memorial Day is for those who died in service to our country. I told her All Saints’ Sunday would be a good day in which to remember those who have died in the past year. Thus, a new custom was born.

This coming Sunday, we are offering two All Saints’ services. The first, at 9:30 a.m., will include the sacrament of communion, and an opportunity to remember those who died in the past year. First, I will read the names of our church members: Willa Gilmore, Myrtle Welge, Harry Kaul, Irene Neuharth, Jacquelyn Dodge, Albert Sykes, Albern Watts, and Bill Eastman. The church bell will toll once for each one in memory of their presence here.  Then I will read the names of your family members and friends who have died. There will be a white card in the worship bulletin on which you may print those names. Afterward, I will offer a prayer of thanksgiving for their lives.

At 5:00 p.m. in Gabrielson Chapel, we will have an All Saints’ Vesper service. This will be a more informal, yet still meaningful service. As you enter the chapel, you may light votive candles in memory of anyone who has died at any time.  Place them on the chapel altar. In the service, we will offer a memorial prayer, again giving God thanks for their lives.  The service will also have evening hymns we are unable to sing in morning worship. In choosing evening hymns, it took me back to my seminary days when I attended 4:00 p.m. vesper services at First Congregational Church, Berkeley. Julie and I were picking the very same hymns out of the same hymnal I used in the early ‘70s. It was nostalgic, in the best way, as many worship services evoke such feelings in us.

This is the second vesper service we have offered this fall. Fifty-seven persons attended the Taizé service on October 12, so we are anxious to see how this one is received. I hope if such a service sounds meaningful to you, you will join us.  Those who would enjoy a dusk service at close of day (especially as Daylight Savings Time will have ended) may find this service meets their needs.

Charlie Ensley
Senior Minister

Last week in this space I was going to write about our experience looking for a church to worship in while on vacation.  However, Laura Tschudin’s letter she sent me about looking for a church in Las Vegas was a thousand times more compelling than my story.

I look forward to sitting next to my wife in worship three or four times a year when I am on vacation.  And I look forward to being led in worship, versus being the one “up front” leading the service.  In the “old days” I would phone a church, but nowadays I type the church name into Google and look for their website.  While we were in Palm Desert earlier this month, I checked the websites to two churches I was interested in attending.  We had been to both previously, but I couldn’t remember the worship hours.  One church still had its summer worship times posted, though it was the second week in October.  The other church did not specify the difference between the services—traditional, blended or contemporary; choir singing or not.  One church had a link to the newsletter, but it was the summer issue; the other had only the September issue.  One church had biographies of all the staff, except for the senior minister, who had been there a while.

This is a good lesson for all of us who have some responsibility for websites.  My responsibility is posting my sermon online each Sunday after worship, making sure the listing of services on the calendar tab is up-to-date, and sending the Carillon to the webmaster.

Websites are how people look for information nowadays for nearly everything, including churches.  Our website received 604 hits in the past month.  I noticed an uptick just after the weekend.  Maybe that was persons looking at the sermon online.  Many of the couples who call for wedding information have already looked at our website.  For a memorial service last week, the family suggested people look for directions on our website.  In August, when we had church members die over two weekends, I announced their deaths in worship on Sunday before I could meet with their families to plan their services.  So I told the congregation they could click on the calendar tab, where I would post the time for the memorial service as soon as I knew it, which would be earlier then when folks received the Carillon.  And I imagine many of the candidates we are considering for Associate Minister have already checked out our website to learn about our church.

Almost all websites need some updating, ours included.  But they are sure more current than most anything else we can use to tell our story!
Senior Minister

I remember a woman in my first church, more than thirty years ago, remarking to me after worship, “I don’t know who writes those prayers of confession, but they sure must sin a lot.” I remember replying to her that there wasn’t anything in those prayers that didn’t apply to me. “Well, I don’t feel I sin,” she concluded.

After last week’s column on the topic of forgiveness, I did not plan to continue that theme until I read the daily devotion below, written by the Rev. Lillian Daniel, senior minister of the First Congregational Church, UCC, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and the author of Tell it Like it is: Reclaiming the Practice of Testimony. It brought back to me the memory of my long-ago parishioner - a very nice lady, really - and the fact that three decades later, the Rev. Daniels is answering much the same as I did. Here is her online devotional:

“Let it be known to you therefore, my brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you; by this Jesus everyone who believes is set free from all those sins from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses.”  –Acts 13:38-39

“Why do we have to do the confession every week in church? It’s such a downer.” That’s a question I hear periodically on a Sunday morning.

I’m an open-minded pastor, so I tell them we actually do not have to do it every Sunday. In fact, the first Sunday that comes up when they, and all the rest of the church members, have done nothing wrong in the last week, we can skip it. But given that I am a church member who has yet to have a week, even a day, without sin, I suspect that the prayer of confession will be with us for a while.

The prayer of confession is more than admitting what we have done wrong, or what we have left undone. It is also when we receive forgiveness.  Anyone who thinks this moment is a downer is not paying attention. This is the moment when, if we truly are sorry, we are granted new life in Christ. Mind you, this gift doesn’t come our way because we were sorry. It is bigger than our own actions. Forgiveness in Christ comes to us as something we did not earn, but was earned for us on the cross. Laws and rules help us to live well, but divine forgiveness lets us soar into a new day transformed.

Prayer: Let me examine myself as you examine me, Lord Christ. Allow me to see the mistakes I have made so that I can learn from them, and to see the possibilities for my life that you have always held for me. Amen.

Charlie Ensley
Senior Minister

A minister never knows how a sermon is going to affect someone. A few weeks ago, in a sermon on forgiveness, I spoke of a sermon on that subject I had given six years previously. It deeply impacted one member of our congregation, who has told me more than once over the ensuing years, “I’ve never forgiven you for that sermon on forgiveness!”

A similar thing happened this week, when someone who had something he had been living with for some years found that my recent sermon on forgiveness was just the impetus he needed to do something about forgiving another person. He had a plan, but wanted to run it by me before walking down the path of forgiveness.

Some Sundays I preach a sermon that I think might be particularly helpful to someone I know who is going through some situation. They say nothing at the door, but one or two others tell me I was preaching right to them! Or, I answer a sermon request that some-one gave me, having no idea who it was, and receive no feedback that whoever made it was even in worship to hear it that day!

At a recent meeting of some thirty ministers, one minister said, “I never preach a sermon that I don’t need to hear myself.” Amen to that, I thought. For I don’t get up there and pontificate on what I think “you people” ought to be doing if I’m not willing to admit it applies to me as well. Sometimes that’s where I get my own illustrations.

I also realize that sermons are “hit and miss”. Some Sundays they ‘hit’ you; they are just what you need to hear. Other Sundays the topic may hold little interest for you, nor apply to you, but they do to someone else.

While I’ve preached 1,387 sermons over 35 years (haven’t I already said everything there is to say?), sometimes sermon themes come right to me on Mondays when I do my next Sunday homework. Other times, I read and study and ponder and find myself standing outside the church on Tuesday morning wondering what a catchy title should be. With a Tuesday Carillon deadline, that day has been my deadline for nearly 22 years. No waiting until Friday!

Charlie Ensley
Senior Minister

Last Saturday afternoon, not too many hours after conducting Al Watts’ memorial service at our church, Peggy and I attended a B’not (plural of bat) Mitzvah at nearby Temple Israel. This was a double bat mitzvah (literally, daughter of the commandment) performed for and by two 12-13 year old girls as they claimed their Jewish faith. The two hour service included each of them reading from the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, in Hebrew. Not a phonetic transliteration, mind you, but the actually Hebrew words and letters with no punctuation on the handwritten Torah scroll.

The ceremony was as user friendly as possible, since such occasions are ones in which the boy (bar) or girl (bat) invite all their family and lots of friends. We were told after the reception that we had attended the middle school social function of the year! Those young people had a lot more energy to party than I did at 9 o’clock on a Saturday evening!

I told the rabbi that I remember taking our daughter Emily to a Girl Scout Sabbath at a Jewish temple in New York when she was maybe third grade. I was impressed then by the young Girl Scout who got up and read in Hebrew from the Torah. I was similarly impressed last Saturday when I saw two young women coming to maturity in their faith.

It takes a bit of courage for lay readers, but at least one of any age who reads from the Bible at our church gets to read it in plain English, and I send it to them in advance, so they don’t need to stand up there and look at some strange letters and try to figure out how to say them. And I suppose a bar or bat mitzvah is comparable to our rite of confirmation, when, after an appropriate amount of study, a teenager becomes a full member of the church.

Such rituals are important, for they ground us in our faith. Telling of my Saturday experience on Sunday afternoon to a Jewish friend, she said excitedly that she was not able to have her bat mitzvah until an adult, because it was not done at her temple for girls when she was younger.

While Saturday’s service was two hours, at the end of a long and draining day, I could easily follow the readings (translated) from Deuteronomy, Exodus and Psalms, for they are all ones we use in our church as we share the Jewish heritage that is at the foundation of our Christian faith. After all, Jesus was Jewish!

Charlie Ensley
Senior Minister

And Now May the Peace of Christ…

Early in December, I sit down to select poems to be read during our Christmas Eve services.  I read many lovely poems that are the right length for the service, but I have developed a rule:  if I do not understand it the first time through, and have to read it to myself a second or third time, I do not select it.  On Christmas Eve, you will only hear it read once, and not see it printed, so you have no opportunity to read it a second or third time to fully understand or savor its meaning.

The same is true for anything I say, or even quote in sermons.  They are oral/aural exercises, in which I speak/you hear.  Unless you pick up a printed copy the next week, or read it on the church website, you will only hear once what was said or quoted from the pulpit.

Last Sunday, I was speaking on the peace of Christ, and I concluded my sermon with what I thought was perhaps the best definition of what the peace of Christ might really mean in your life or mine.  William Adams Brown (1865-1943), Presbyterian clergyman and professor at Union Theological Seminary, wrote this (which I have reformatted to make it a little more readable):

• “The peace of Christ is the peace of trust in the cause we serve, when service seems to fail of its end.
• It is the peace of confidence in God when all the forces of the universe seem working for ends that are undivine.
• It is the peace which can accept unexplained mysteries, which can bear heartbreaking sorrows, which can see natural instincts thwarted, holy aspirations unrealized, Christlike purposes broken off, and yet be unperturbed.
• It is the peace of a Paul rejected by his countrymen.
• It is the peace of all those who have given their lives for causes too high and sacred for immediate success and who yet have been able to believe that even their failures were being overruled by God for good.”

I hope that you, upon closer reflection on the above, might truly find the peace of Christ to become real in your life.
Senior Minister

Fall = Mission Season

Recently, in his second week of work as the new executive director of National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (we know it as Woman to Woman), Rod Williams met with me at the behest of his board of directors.  They were conscious of our long covenant-al relationship with this Long Beach agency, and wanted to ensure it will continue.  In this issue, you will find a thank you note from Dixie Dohrmann, executive director of Christian Outreach in Action (COA), which we assist with our monthly dinners, frequent collection of clothing, donation of funds, and $200 a month in Smart & Final scrip.  The founder of Food Finders, Arlene Mercer, contacted me to thank us for the opportunity to speak in worship July 20, and our church’s donation to assist in their food distribution.

These agencies, and their directors, are grateful to you, the congregation of Bay Shore Church, for your continued support of their efforts to provide a better life for men, women and children here in Long Beach.  They serve people who are in recovery, those needing a transitional living place, the hungry and homeless, those undergoing a difficult time.  In these tough economic times, Bay Shore Church has continued to support these, and other agencies, with our regular support.  Regardless of whether there is grant funding available, our church has been a consistent and dependable support of their good work.

As all of our church activities resume in full swing this week—Sunday School, Chancel Choir, Bay Shore Bells, every commission meeting, fellowship groups—so too do we begin our mission season.  For years, I have observed that two-thirds of our mission projects are done in the period between Labor Day and Christmas.  We just completed the backpacks for Lincoln Elementary School.  October 5 is Neighbors in Need offering and Third World Handarts.  October 19 is CROP Hunger Walk, followed by Project Love.  November 2 is Third World Handarts.  November 23 is our annual canned food drive.  December 20 is the distribution of gifts, toys, clothing and furniture to our annual dozen adopted Christmas families.

Not ready for fall?  Sound like too much too soon?  The Missions Commission met a week ago to designate the dates for each of the above, who would be making announcements about them, and who would be in charge of each project.  We know that with the addition of our annual stewardship/pledge drive in the middle of this season, you need to make decisions about the projects in which you wish to participate.  I hope you will give thoughtful consideration to these opportunities, because it’s obvious from the thanks—such as above—directed our way, that people are depending on us.  And the people of Bay Shore Church always come through!  Bless you for it.

Senior Minister

There’s a headline we’ve all been waiting to see! After 18 months of negotiations with the City - sometimes stalled for no reason anyone can figure out - the City Council last Tuesday approved the church’s continued use of the parking lot at Livingston Drive and The Toledo, albeit on a limited basis.  We will have exclusive use of the lot from Noon Saturday through Noon Sunday. The rest of the week, the lot is City-controlled for community usage. As a condition of the new ten-year lease, with two five year renewal clauses, the church will tear-up and repave the lot, and do what landscaping we can within our budget. Last summer, the congregation approved up to $100,000 for this project. We have these funds set aside, a combination of discretionary and reserve funds. Nothing will come out of the church’s general budget for the parking lot.

The new lease becomes effective on Labor Day, September 1, after which we will begin to notify cars parked there they should be removed over the period of our weekend usage. The church will continue to examine designs and bids for repaving the lot.

A big vote of thanks goes to Doug Otto, church member and attorney, who gave dozens of hours of pro bono time and effort in the negotiations, stretching back to January 2007. Others who sat in on meetings and assisted where they could were Mike Jensen, Leslie Groene, Bill Lorbeer, Bill Hayter, and moderators Dede Gilmore and Dick Landes. We are grateful to all of these volunteers for their countless hours of meetings and assistance. We are also grateful to community members who, from the start of community meetings, were in favor of the church having continued use of the lot in its present location.

On another note, I was at the City Hall an hour early last Tuesday for the above Council meeting, so I went into the Downtown Library. It had many patrons inside, researching jobs on computers, doing school work, reading the wide variety of magazines, asking for assistance from research librarians, checking out books, videos and music. I join with Ray Bradbury and the letters to the editor I’ve read in the Press Telegram who decry a proposal to close the library. It serves an important and necessary role in a certain sector of our city, among people who might not otherwise have those resources readily available. It just goes to show you why we keep our church building in repair, so threat of closure is not an option.

Charlie Ensley
Senior Minister