In case you missed it on November 29th, we showed the following video message from Rob Morris, the president of Love 146 upon the completion of our $200,000 goal of raising money for Love 146! And while you’re at it, check out the new website for Love 146.
[pro-player width="480" height="240"]http://truenorthblog.net/content/video/robTY.mp4[/pro-player]
Does the game of “Life” ever just “Boggle” your mind? Do you feel like everything has a “Monopoly” on your time? Can you picture yourself having a major “Outburst” screaming “Yahtzee” and making different “Guesstures”? Do you ever feel like an “Old Maid” and just want to “Go Fish” or get a “Clue”?
During the month of January, True North will be doing a sermon series on “Board Games”. We are asking for families to host a GAME NIGHT in their home and join in the “Operation”. It is as easy as “Candyland”. You pick the date and time you are willing to host and we’ll take care of getting families in their “Scattergories”…
Please contact Stacie Painter at if you are interested in joining the game!
Building community within our church is no “Trivial Pursuit”!
This Christmas we’ve come up with a great way to give kids and adults an opportunity to be generous with gifts received. It’s called One Gift!
We are inviting kids and adults to give up “one gift” and donate money to Love146. Each Christmas we receive a multitude of gifts from various friends and family members. One Gift is an opportunity for adults and kids to use those gifts to impact children in need, and practice generosity.
One Gift works great with kids because it speaks their language and works within their currency.
Every dollar goes directly to Love146. All donations are tax deductible. Love146 is an organization that works with human trafficking, specifically working to abolish child sex slavery and exploitation. For more information about Love146 go to www.love146.org
If you have any questions about One Gift please email Dominick@truenorthchurch.net.
**An Important Note for Parents** If you’re going to encourage your children to participate in One Gift, there is only one rule: The child MUST be the one to make the choice if he/she wants to give up a gift. Also Love146 is an organization that deals with some very adult issues. We need to be careful with the words that we use when we talk to our kids about Love146. The way our UpTown staff explains Love146 to children is as follows: “Love146 is an organization that helps children who were hurt to get well and stay safe.”
Come join us for our annual Thanksgiving Eve service, Wed. November 25th 7:30 PM.
Almost as good as Grandma’s homemade mashed potatoes…
Prodigal House, a ministry program of Long Island Youth for Christ, provides emergency and short-term residential housing for teenage boys ages 12-16. (For more on Prodigal House visit their website.)
On Dec. 5th, from 10AM-3PM there is going to be a fundraiser for Prodigal House at Hibernian Hall (80 magnolia Drive, Selden, NY). If you would like to be a vendor at this event, donate items for the bake sale or volunteer to help out, please contact Katie Morrison!
The following is an awesome outreach opportunity being put together by our college & young adults. If you have additional questions please contact Dan Fruhauf or Matt Senior.
This is an initiative to lend a warm hand to people in bitter need. During the cold months of the year the Subways of New York grow in number of homeless people seeking shelter and especially warmth. It is a blessing and an opportunity to serve these people who need love and compassion.
On November 15th and 22nd, we are looking to invite you to donate sleeping bags that will be delivered and handed out to the homeless in the NYC subways. Since True North is the kind of church that gives overwhelmingly, we will be asking no more than two per family, and no more than one donation per person. There will also be a sign up sheet at the info table for any college or young adults looking to participate in the delivering of the sleeping bags. The distribution date will be on Friday, December 4th. We will be meeting in Penn Station at 9pm at the main terminal.
Hello, one more time, to my fantastic family at TNCC,
As you may or may not have realized, I have now reached the final week of my time in Thailand. We have finished our outreach and are back in Bangkok for our debriefing time before we all head our separate ways. Friday night is our school graduation, and Saturday morning I’m on a plane for home! Crazy!!
There are so many things going through my head as I prepare to come home. I know that things will be different, because time has moved on at home just as it has here; only I haven’t been with you all so it may be a little weird for me right away. For example, the last 5 months I have been focusing on using the smallest English words possible so that the Thai’s will be more likely to understand me. I’m probably going to be staring at cashiers like a doofus for the first few weeks, just because I’m not used to talking so fast!
This isn’t to say that you should all expect me to be weird, but I have become accustomed to a culture that is not my own, so I may be in shock for a little while. But I am so excited to be a physical part of the True North family again and to catch up on your lives!
To briefly summarize the past few weeks, firstly our team ran an English camp at a church in the Nakon Pathom province. It amazes me what a tool teaching English is for sharing the gospel; pretty much, if you say you’re teaching English, people will come flocking! It was an amazing week as we helped the church as well, and we saw a whole group of teenage guys come to know the Lord, and a smaller group of the young girls. In improving their skills in English, we were also enabling these kids to get better jobs and have hope for their futures.
The following week we helped run a kids worship camp at the church of one of my Thai roommates. It was a great week of getting to know these kids and breaking the barriers so many of them have against foreigners. They now know that not all white people are like the ones they see on TV, and you would have been amazed to see these kids worship God! I’ve never seen people so young be so serious about God. And no, it was not like “Jesus Camp.”
And this past week we spent in Ratchaburi, working with a group of kids who live in a Burmese refugee camp, whom you may be hearing more from me on in the future, because they really stole my heart! We also went out into the villages to have small-group churches and to pray for the sick and elderly who aren’t able to make it to church. There was one day that we went to a Thai university, and I was able to share with some Muslim students who asked me why I came to Thailand. They asked me to sing, so sang Hosanna and this other Thai song that I learned here. It was so cool!
There have been other times that we have been able to open doors to people through sharing testimonies, encouragements from scripture, and performing dances and dramas. It was tricky sleeping on dirty floors, sometimes with no running water, and constantly traveling from one place to the other, sometimes not knowing what our plans would be for the day! But through it all I have seen God really stretch me and teach me about how so many people live outside of America.
God has done so much while I’ve been here, and I don’t think I’ll really know exactly how much until I come home and see the person I was before. I have learned to love differently, to stand up even stronger for what I believe in, and to be the kind of Christian that will make the world want to know more about Christ. I hope and pray that the ministries I’ve been able to visit and help out with here in Thailand have been as blessed as I have been through the whole experience. And I can’t wait to be home and a part of your lives again.
Peace and love,
Anna
This weekend is Daylight Savings Time (Nov. 1), so our clocks “fall back” an hour (giving us an “extra” hour). Please be sure to remember to set your clocks. And while you’re at it, change the batteries in your smoke alarms. See you Sunday at 9:30, 11 AM or 7:30 PM for part 3 of Shipwrecks!
We hope you’ve been enjoying our current Shipwrecks series. If the whole idea of shipwrecks interests you, then you might want to check out the following:
Visit Long Island Shipwrecks where you can learn about Long Island shipwrecks, when they went down & where, as well as other facts.
Also, there’s an exhibit hosted by Discovery called Titanic: the Artifact Exhibition in NYC that runs through the end of December. Visit their website for more info. Aside from being an interesting exhibit, this might also be a great opportunity to invite a friend & listen to week one of the Shipwrecks series together for further discussion.
Just a note, we are not connected to either organization in any way. We just thought given our current series, these might be of interest.
The new www.truenorthchurch.net site is live! You’ll notice besides the new look & feel, we’ve made it a point to make things easier to access and more friendly to our newcomers. Here are just a few things you find: you can now access the latest message from the home page (streaming or downloading); we have a completely new online giving system that’s much simpler; we now have an E-invite that you can email to friends to invite them to True North; and many other cool new feature. Go exploring. We hope the new site serves you well!
Oh, and just so you know, our blog will still be the place to go for up to the moment information & news.
