Annual Banquet

November 2nd, 6-8 pm

at Shadow Lake

GNOC is our partner in ministry on Rochester’s Northeast Side where our Joy Family Medicine office is located.

Help us support our brothers and sisters!

let’s put aside the leprechauns and shamrocks and all the fanciful trappings that have come to surround the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day for a moment and consider the man himself. Who was Patrick, and what did he do?

A good place to find out is Thomas Cahill’s engrossing book, “How the Irish Saved Civilization” which clearly relates Patrick’s pivotal role in the remarkable story of Ireland’s part in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe. In the meantime, David Jeremiah’s meditation below can help get our thoughts going for the day:

We were given the opportunity to share about the witness and work of His Branches at a wonderfully missions-minded gathering yesterday afternoon and evening at the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Greece, NY. The event was called “Proclaiming Peace – Missions Works Home & Abroad” and we shared the podium with, as the title promised, gracious men and women serving both at here in Rochester and overseas.

Rev. Andrew Selle spoke from the Word and personal experience about peacemaking with examples from his own life and ministry in Africa, followed by Paul Whitehouse sharing the work of 441 Ministries here on Parcells Avenue and Mike Belmont presenting about the anointed work of the Open Door Mission in our midst. Booths about each ministry were set up where participants could inquire in more depth about the different works and ways they could be supportive.

After a tasty pot-blessing dinner hosted by the church, Rev. Eric Hausler shared about church planting ministry.  All of us were encouraged to a deeper commitment to serve and work together for our King and His Kingdom.

A video presentation

Mike shared the video below about the Open Door Mission that particularly struck a chord with me”

MCCF is hosting a Regional Conference

on Saturday, October 17

in Rochester, New York

and you don’t want to miss it!

Click here for the whole scoop, then sign up and invite your friends. And here’s a PDF brochure you can print and use to help us get the word out!

Light and Life – Being living letters in a post-Christian world

Our friend Rebecca Fadner got a birthday present Tuesday from eBay. A national online ad campaign launched featuring Kingdom Ventures Inc., the fair trade retailer she runs with her husband, Glenn.

The eBay Thanks You campaign launched Tuesday with videos on its YouTube eBay channel of the Michael J. Fox Foundation, designer Jonathan Adler, two for-profit companies, a customer and the Ogden-based Kingdom Ventures.

Glenn and Rebecca Fadner, who run Kingdom Ventures, say they’ve already watched the video a dozen or more times and are pleased with the final outcome.

They didn’t know what to expect. eBay contacted the Fadners in June and asked if they would be part of the video campaign. They don’t know how they were chosen and didn’t hear anything for more than a month, so they figured the project fell through.

Then in August, after agreeing to a date, eBay surprised them when 15 people “descended on our home,” to spend a day with them documenting their life stories and following them around Rochester to their favorite spots.

The final cut (see below) is a little more than a minute and a half.It tells the story of these high school sweethearts who decided they wanted to spend more time together after their children were grown and make a footprint with their retirements.

“We wanted to work together, to travel and make a difference in people’s lives,” says Glenn Fadner, who said he’d be in trouble if he disclosed his wife’s age on her birthday.

The two founded the company in 2005. Suppliers include Cambodian women rebuilding their lives after escaping from sex trafficking, and Kenyan artisans striving to build villages.

Featured on the eBay video is their Nicaraguan business that supplies mostly pine needle baskets. Glenn Fadner says when it’s a bad crop year, the families of the 27 women involved are hard hit. But through the basket selling, the women have been able to keep their children in school and buy solar panels for their homes, allowing a working light for the first time.

Placemats, baskets, trivets and other available handmade goods come from Nicaragua, Honduras, Thailand, Cambodia, Kenya and Turkey. The Fadners visit one country every year to meet with the artisans.

On Nov. 1st the Fadners are opening their seasonal forefront at 2542 Ridgeway Ave., the same location as last year. It will be open until Dec. 29. Goods are also available at kingdom-ventures.com.

Forty-four years ago two human beings changed history by walking on the surface of the moon. But what happened before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong exited the Lunar Module is perhaps even more amazing, if only because so few people know about it. “I’m talking about the fact that Buzz Aldrin took communion on the surface of the moon. Some months after his return, he wrote about it in Guideposts magazine.

And a few years ago I had the privilege of meeting him myself. I asked him about it and he confirmed the story to me, and I wrote about in my book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid to Ask).

The background to the story is that Aldrin was an elder at his Presbyterian Church in Texas during this period in his life, and knowing that he would soon be doing something unprecedented in human history, he felt he should mark the occasion somehow, and he asked his minister to help him. And so the minister consecrated a communion wafer and a small vial of communion wine. And Buzz Aldrin took them with him out of the Earth ‘s orbit and on to the surface of the moon

He and Armstrong had only been on the lunar surface for a few minutes when Aldrin made the following public statement: “This is the LM pilot. I ‘d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.” He then ended radio communication and there, on the silent surface of the moon, 250,000 miles from home, he read a verse from the Gospel of John, and he took communion. Here is his own account of what happened:

“In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit… Apart from me you can do nothing.’

“I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute [they] had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly.

“I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”

And of course, it ‘s interesting to think that some of the first words spoken on the moon were the words of Jesus Christ, who made the Earth and the moon – and Who, in the immortal words of Dante, is Himself the “Love that moves the Sun and other stars.”

~ article by Eric Metaxas

Buzz Aldrin (born Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr.; January 20, 1930) is an American astronaut, and the second person to walk on the Moon. He was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing in history.

Besides managing the dental clinic and teaching English, I am also involved in a women’s ministry of reconciliation. During a recent retreat we looked at principles of reconciliation during times of crisis when relationships are tested, and we tend to identify with one side or the other. As believers it is important to reach out to one another and make the effort to come together to pray together. Putting this principle into practice during the recent Gaza conflict, some of the women had taken the initiative, and we prayed as Israeli, Palestinian and ex-pat women for people on both sides of the conflict. Even in a small way we can make a difference by praying for God’s mercy and compassion; caring for widows, orphans and strangers; and speaking against injustice and violence on both sides.

Click here to read her full report.

This has been another year of change. As I was writing my last letter I did not know what would happen at the end of August. When Dr. Mousa told me he had to close his practice in Tiberias it meant that I would have no clinic or dentist to provide a dental program for the needy.

After helping many hundreds of the Lebanese with extensive dental care I expected at some time to gradually phase out the service, but not to suddenly stop with so little notice. The day I got the news I began to inform our patients, one of whom was a believer who had been referred by the pastor of a local fellowship. She thought the service was too important to lose and asked her pastor if he could help. To make a long story short, I discussed the project at length with the pastor and we agreed, with an initial six month commitment, to partner to support the service thus making it available to even more needy people referred by the fellowship as well as the Lebanese. This plan allowed Dr. Mousa to keep the clinic and continue working with us.

It is a solution I neither initiated nor thought possible so I can only thank God for it. As I reflect over the past 25 years of my ministry I can clearly see the Lord’s hand enabling and guiding me, even through circumstances that I could not anticipate and could not understand. Life is full of uncertainty, but we have confidence in the Lord.

Click here to read B’s 2008 Holiday newsletter.

July 1983, twenty five years ago, I traveled to the Middle East to begin a year of volunteer service. I am amazed as I consider how the Lord has kept me here and enabled me as a dental hygienist to provide dental services for hundreds of needy people in both Lebanon and Israel.

Much to my surprise, the dentist who has been working with me for the past eight years told me he can no longer continue and we are now trying to work out an alternate solution to continue to help the needy. I will write more in my next letter, but please keep this matter in prayer.

In an email accompanying her newsletter, BT adds:

I just mailed out the following letter, but have a revision for my e-mail list. I’ll write in more detail in my next letter, but the Lord has provided the means to continue the dental clinic and together with a local fellowship, to provide dental services to even more people in need of assistance, Israeli residents as well as the Lebanese. As we begin the new program from the first of September, please keep us in prayer.

Click here to read her full report.

This letter is long overdue, but finally I am sitting down to write. Over the past few months little has changed in news reports from the Middle East and the conflicts seem impossible to solve. Through the years that I served in Lebanon, and now among the displaced Lebanese in Israel, I have learned first hand what it means to live in the midst of conflict and instability. I have also learned that even if the news events reported are discouraging, there are many personal stories of hope.

Recently I attended a women’s conference and was challenged by the biblical teaching on the elements of justice, righteousness, mercy and peace in relation to reconciliation. As Arab, Jewish and international believers we had our faith in common, but still you must leave your comfort zone to face difficult issues and here there are personal stories of hope. Even in the midst of conflict we can make a difference in our communities, reach out to others and develop relationships.

Click here to read her full report.