404-633-4505 | Join Us On Sundays at 11AM!
404-633-4505 | Join Us On Sundays at 11AM!
Read the latest news for our church.
May 10th – June 15th
Central is participating in the TCHA “Hunger Doesn’t Take a Vacation” campaign, and has volunteered to collect 700 cans of BLACK BEANS by June 15th. Please join us in this worthy campaign! Look for this flyer in the Commons and the office area, and you’ll find the receptacles to put your cans. Thank you for your donations!
May 09, 2025
June 22, 2.30 pm @ Theatrical Outfit (84 Luckie Street NW Atlanta, GA, 30303)
ASL interpreted performance
After last Friday’s great turnout to see Will’s show, we decided to go ahead and plan the next outing: Young John Lewis, a “Made in Atlanta” World Premiere Hip Hop Musical. We chose the Sunday matinee at Theatrical Outfit, on June 22nd, so we can caravan from church.
Tickets are selling quickly, so check out more details here and let Julie McBride ([email protected], 404-226-4547) know if you want to go by Monday, May 19th. We can get 20% off tickets if we have a group of at least 10. Looking forward to our next outing!
Dear Siblings,
This weekend, I invite you to think about your faith journeys. In particular, who are the key figures in your journey of faith? Why might you consider them as key to your engagement with the Divine today?
Our worship focus will be the opening lines of a letter from Paul to Timothy, in which he acknowledges Timothy’s faith development as the product of his mother and grandmother.
Yes, I chose this text for Mother’s Day! Although our service will not focus on Mother’s Day, it will acknowledge the idea of “Mother God.” In our unceasing and unfailing efforts to fully know and understand the Mystery of God, we apply human language as best we can in the hopes that we’ll find our way. For the vast majority of the history of our faith, God has always been “Father.” It’s still somewhat new to view God as “Mother.” That distinction is slight, but it matters. And, I think it opens up a whole new way of imagining, engaging, and understanding God.
So, come! Our Story for All Ages will talk about the Lord’s Prayer and our sermon will dive into the “grammar of the Spirit.”
As we approach Mother’s Day, it’s important to acknowledge all of the joy, celebration, and “best mom in the world” feelings! I pray that we will also keep in mind folks who don’t have the best relationship with their mothers, folks who wanted to be mothers but were unable due to circumstances and situations that they couldn’t control, and for those who are grieving the loss of their mothers too.
See you Sunday,
Thomas.
Dear Ones,
Happy Easter! I know, you’ve put away your Easter bonnets and eaten all the chocolate bunnies that were hiding in the “grass” in your Easter basket. And, yes, everything Easter is marked down to 70% off. But we have eight Sundays in the Season of Easter, including Resurrection Sunday, before we get to the Day of Pentecost. So, I insist:
Blessings on you in this season of New Life and Possibility!
In worship on last Sunday—”the Second Sunday of Easter”—Rev. Thomas took us back to the earliest congregations we would call “Christian” today to remind us that they had very different practices when they met for Communion. He reminded me that we have not always done it this way, even though it may seem like it. Because there was no tradition, they were free to use their imaginations and find their way into what honored the experiences they’d had and their intentions to embody The Way of Jesus. Underline free.
To my surprise and as though summoned forth, a little book by Diana Butler Bass jumped off my bookshelf and opened before my eyes to this page. In The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), Bass urges mainline congregations to develop “the emerging congregational style” that she outlines, and to cultivate the
imaginative power of congregations to move beyond normative patterns and programmatic fixes into a place of doing and being church that embodies the enchantment of the Christian story in the practices of faith.
What? Embody the enchantment of the Christian story? So, that’s what the first followers were doing! I’m in. What Bass says next, I take as an invitation:
The lack of imaginative and fluid retraditioning in a new cultural world “caused” mainline decline. After all, imaginatively fiddling around with tradition is one of the things congregations do.
OK. Let’s do it. Come to worship on Sunday, the Third Sunday Easter, for a slightly “fiddled” Service of Word and Table in a way that opens us to what we do and why. You will notice that the order of worship is shifted a bit for Communion Sunday.
Attention Streamers—all of you will be with us online—please prepare the “bread and wine” of your choice to be consecrated so you can share in the meal. If there are other “elements” needed, we’ll be sure to give you time to be prepared.
Love and hugs, and grace upon grace.
Rev. Liz
(This feels risky. Do you suppose it felt that way for those first followers? We didn’t get the liturgies most Protestants use until the Reformation. What did they do before that?)
Sunday, May 4, @ 12 pm, The Commons
Featured ONE-WOMAN EXHIBIT artist this spring and summer 2025 is Elizabeth Samoluk. Her artworks include oil, acrylic, watercolor, and drawing, with most works created “En Plein Air” throughout Atlanta, from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, Sandy Springs, Roswell, and Savannah, Georgia. Elizabeth also included some pieces from her western journeys to capture the beauty of our U.S. National Parks and UNESCO World Heritage Sites! Elizabeth is happy to donate a portion of her sales to the church.
You can find out more about her and her story this Sunday, after worship. Steve Siminski, Central’s art exhibit coordinator, is organizing a Welcome reception for Elizabeth in the Commons, during the Coffee Hour.
Dear Siblings,
Alleluia! What a wonderful Holy Week and Easter we shared together. Of course, none of this happened on its own.
A little more than two dozen folks joined us on Maundy Thursday, and shared the story of the Last Supper before serving communion to one another. The same number joined us for a dramatic recounting of the story of Good Friday. In those spaces, we sang old and familiar hymns, while introducing a few new ones too.
On Easter Sunday, almost 20 kids hunted for eggs on the playground and in the memorial garden, 80 people were in the Fellowship Hall for the Easter Breakfast, and 180 people joined us for Easter worship.
Again, none of this happened on its own. It took people baking and bringing food for breakfast, folks who stepped out of breakfast to help the Easter Bunny hide eggs, people to buy and cut the bread for communion, an AV tech, singers, banner hangers, greeters, Zoom worship hosts, someone who smiled and said “peace” to a new face in the room, dedicated folks to hang back in Kids Space, an invitation to combine the Story for All Ages and the sermon, a stirring in the heart and mind to simply show up, and whole lot more!
My heart is glad that we are a church of a whole lot more.
Someone with us on Sunday didn’t believe that a church like ours could exist… and now they do. Thanks be to God!
Historically, folks take a short break from church on the Sunday after Easter, but I hope you’ll join us. We’ll talk about the first supper after the Resurrection.
Be well,
Rev. Thomas
It will be such a joy on Sunday to see our Sanctuary overflow with the lilies you offered in honor of, or in memory of someone. Here is this year’s Lilies and Easter Mission Project Donor List .
And remember you have a few more days to offer a gift to our Easter Mission Project, which benefits El Refugio. El Refugio envisions a world without immigration detention. To maximize our support, we will accept donations to this fund by the end of April. You can use the online form or the printed form that you can find at the entrance to the Sanctuary.
Apr 18, 2025
Dear Members, Friends, Siblings, All,
“We welcome glad Easter when Jesus arose!” And we look forward to welcoming you for worship on Resurrection Sunday in the sanctuary or online. It’s always like a family reunion in the best possible way.
This Holy Week has been wonderful at Central, beginning on Palm Sunday. We know these stories, of course, but they reveal newness each time we hear and tell them. You’d think by now there is no more to say. Somehow, there is. The mystery of this season–everything I cannot explain or understand fully–is what I like best about the space between Ash Wednesday and the Season of Easter.
The Maundy Thursday service inspired us to look deeper within. Our Good Friday service should make the journey to the Cross come alive, and we will take time to honor the grief that surrounds us. For Holy Saturday, you may find the two poems here to be helpful in your devotions between today and Sunday. I have.
Easter Sunday will be a day of rejoicing as we greet the resurrected Christ and each other. We’ll look for you in worship online or somewhere around this place. Until then, grace to you and peace. Also, love and hugs.
Rev. Liz
Apr 01, 2025
Mar 28, 2025
Thursday, April 10, 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm, Room 102
An educator from the Dekalb County Fire Department will provide in-person CPR/AED training (without cost) for our church community at Central. All are welcome. Please note, this training will not lead to formal CPR certification.
To sign up for this training, or to obtain additional information, please contact Mary White at [email protected].
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