First United Methodist Church of Bristol, Tennessee

Your Weekly e-Newsletter and Events Schedule

Welcome to In-Person Worship Again….

If you are uncomfortable with worshiping in person or unable to join us for whatever reason, please tune in as we live-stream the service on Facebook.

> Enter the narthex doors beside the sanctuary.

> Wear a cloth mask that covers your mouth and nose continuously.

> Maintain at least six feet of space between yourself and anyone outside of your immediate household.

> Minimize your use of the lavatory and sanitize the spaces you use, and

> Exit the Sanctuary through the side doors closest to the parking lot.

Schedule Adjustment:

In-person worship at 11:00a.m. Sundays in the sanctuary can also be viewed on the church Facebook page.
If you have not connected to FUMC via Facebook, please go do that. You can also connect to Rev. Berg on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Instagram. He will try to share uplifting and empowering things on those media.

From the Pastor’s Pen
 September 22, 2021

Atop your shoulders, mounted by a slinky whose best trick is to locate all your daily stress and hold it in a death grip, is a hard shell that contains a hemisphere of mush. In that halved ball of grey noodles is all your potential for creativity, logic, communication, and function, bouncing back and forth with tee-tiny little electric impulses.

I have now exhausted my potential to describe brain function.

Some of y’all can do a lot better. Some of y’all can point out exactly where I’m wrong and why that’s a horrible set of images. Some of y’all just won’t appreciate my humor.

Shut up. I’m a lot funnier than you think.



But keep thinking anyway. You’ll do amazing things when you think. You’ll come up with ways to say things that haven’t occurred to people before. You’ll come up with a brilliant new invention nobody ever realized they needed, like a cat door. You’ll teach the rest of your lanky frame to do something it didn’t realize it could. You’ll figure out, a few weeks later, how to recover from doing that.

I just want to be thankful for the brain today, for science and vaccines and public health practices, for wonderful wordsmithing, for the constant back and forth of art and life, for all the deeply cool stuff the brain does. It keeps us in care for ourselves and for our neighbor in more ways than we really ought to try to list, and that’s a pretty nifty thing.

Love with all your mind, y’all. Be thankful for your brain.

Peace,
Brandon

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Last Sunday at First UMC

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Morning Prayer

Rev. Berg streams morning prayer live on Facebook on weekday mornings in the 8:00 am hour.
Share your prayer requests with him or join him online.

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It’s not too late to join us in a thought-provoking book study

From the Finance Committee:

Red Number Report from Finance

As of September 1, we were-$9,929.91 in our General Fund.  There are no more loans to count on.  If you have not had the opportunity to give to the church, please consider donating at this time.  There are three months left in our fiscal year to change the report to BLACK Numbers.

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It’s Charge Conference Time!

Charge Conference is the Election Season of the local United Methodist Church. The mission and the membership (that’s you!) of the local church is represented in the work of multiple teams, including (but not limited to):

Administrative Council

Finance Committee

Board of Trustees

Staff Parish Relations Committee

Lay Leadership Committee

Missions Team

Worship Team

I hope you’ll do a handful of things in preparation for this year’s Charge Conference.

1. Pray. We need the power and guidance of your prayer for us, but also because prayer (as noted below) guides you to…
2. Get Involved. The gifts you bring to Christ’s Body are unique and beautiful and important. You see the needs of our community and the gifts of our church in a way that nobody else does, and we need your voice, your hands, and your feet.
3. Be Present. Charge Conference is the one regularly scheduled time we, as a church, are democratic. This is when your vote counts loudly and clearly. This is also when we get to see what ministries and miracles other churches around us are celebrating, and that’s an exciting thing to hear!

So put Charge Conference on your calendar, and in the meantime, talk to your Lay Leadership Committee about how God is nudging you to get involved and active at FUMC Bristol this year. We need to hear from you.

The Lay Leadership Committee is:

Brandon Berg

Sue Dietz

Sandy Gorrell

Trinka Felty

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Calendar of Events

Sept 23-29, 2021

First United Methodist Church
Rev. Brandon Berg, Pastor (276.237.6498) 
322 Vance Dr., Bristol, TN 37620
www.fumcbristol.org

Our Vision – Building A Community Where Anyone Can Become A Deeply Committed Christian