Hineni (pronounced hee-nay-nee) is the Hebrew word for:
Here I am.

I can’t believe that I have officially been with all of you for one year. It has been a wonderful year with our ups and downs, with learning curves that have taken us in new directions and, above all, a sense of God’s divine providence at All Saints’. I am so very fortunate that you have embraced me. You have given me a new set of eyes and ears. During this past year, I have learned many things about parish life. With both new ears and eyes, I have learned about parish health and dysfunction. With new ears, I have learned about unconditional love. I have shared with many of you the sorrow and grieving as loved ones have left us. With new eyes, I have tackled budgets and the importance of fiscal records. Management has also been a great awakening. During this past year, the highlight for me has been embracing, loving, and crying with you as you have embraced, loved, and cried with me.

Upon reflection, I find that the kingdom of Christ is like the shuttle tram in the air terminals. I’ve done a lot of traveling lately, and I have found that people who travel do not sit still for very long. As I put this in a theological perspective, I find that the realm of God is also on the move. To be part of this kingdom, we are called to keep moving. The kingdom of God is always moving forward.

I can’t help to think of the years of my past ministry. The prison was comfortable. I remember, with guilt, my chaplaincy within the prison system. The guilt comes from not being there any longer. It is truly a special ministry and not many people are called or qualified to do it. I worried that the servants, whom God has called, would not do the same job I did. And they haven’t. They are not doing things the same way I did, but they are using their new eyes and ears and doing different things as well as allowing the fire of God to move and change their dynamics. God called me to that ministry, and I was ordained for that ministry. I never in a million years ever thought that I would be a parish priest. After seventeen years of prison chaplaincy, it seems that God has called me to utilize a new set of eyes and ears of a different chaplaincy, that as a parish priest. I did not want to move or change. In fact I fought it for quite some time. We all hate change; even though it is unhealthy, keeping things the way we have always done it before is usually the safest and easiest choice. We all want to stay in our comfort zones. However, God has different plans for us…

I thank God that I am able to use my eyes to see new challenges and my ears to listen to God’s calling. I have always felt slighted that I had no Damascus Road experience. In my call to the prison and to you, God did not strike me blind, or make me deaf, or unable to speak. It is in this that I heed the call to be your servant. So, here I am. “And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, whom shall I send, who will go for us? Then I said: Here am I. Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8)

Here I am… Just me… Amen!

With peace and love,

Margie

By: Kent Whitaker

Howard Books, 2008

By: Phyllis Tickle
Baker Books, 2008

Phyllis Tickle is a lay Eucharistic minister in the Episcopal Church. She is married to a physician, has seven children, and is a prolific author.

Reviewed by Margie

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We had a very good turn out for the Oct. meeting, and the meal was very good. Thank you so much David. We also had a very good time. Our meeting will come early this month, the day after the election: Nov. 5^th. I hope to see many of you there. Remember to please call Sadie Carol (537-4406) by Monday morning if you cannot come and have signed up for the meals. The Board will meet at 10:15 in the Mullen room and then at 11:30 Communion and the General meeting in the church followed by lunch in the Parish House. We are still saving the bar-codes on the Campbell soup labels, the BOXTOP$ on certain items, aluminum cans for CPC and pill bottles.

Our fall UTO Ingathering is November 2^nd. You can put your blue envelope in the blue cushion plates on that day or bring the envelope to the office or Frances Jones.

Our new yearbooks have been at the back of the church. Please check to see if there is a book that has not been picked up for someone to whom you might bring it. We are now using the new telephone chain.

The Bishop will be with us the following Sunday, so bring one or two of your favorite dishes for lunch on the 9^th.

I hope everybody has started working on our Food and Craft Fair items. Please take and give orders for the BBQ to Vickie. Remember the Fair is the 22^nd of this month. Let’s all prepare items, come for the sale and have a most enjoyable morning.

On the last day of the month, Sunday Nov.30th we will have the advent wreath making with supper in the Parish House. We will not meet in Dec. We will have the wreath making in place of our December meeting.

Deedie Moncure will be glad to take pledges or lunch money in case you have not done that.

Angela Allen, Peggy Barber, Pat Barnes, Agnes Carter, Ruthie Gregory, Sally Hardison, Betty Harris, Rev. Margie Holm, Frances Hursey, Renate Ingram, Frances Jones, Shirley Karpus, June Long, Deedie Moncure, Margie Musgrove, Betty Pearce, Sally Pierce, Sadie Carol Ward and June Whitaker are the names I originally had for lunches. If you want to take your name off this list or add it to the list please let Sadie Carol and Deedie know. You are welcomed to bring guest however do let Sadie Carol know by Monday morning before the luncheon and be in touch with Deedie.

Sisters in Christ,
Ruthie G

Calling all families of All Saints’ to attend our
Annual Advent Wreath Creations
Sunday, November 30, 2008
All items needed will be available
except clippers.
A hot meal will be served
Cost is $10 per family,

You don’t want to miss this….. a holiday concert on Friday, December 5 at 8 p.m. at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, featuring musicians Judith Harris and Danita Barnes at the organ and piano and the All Saint’s Handbell Quartet. A program of traditional and contemporary holiday music will be presented.

A spaghetti dinner will be served at the Parish House prior to the concert, beginning at 6:30 p.m. Reservations are recommended. To reserve a seat or a table for your family, please call Vickie at the Parish Office at 537-3610. Please let Vickie know if you need transportation and we will arrange a ride for you.

Church members, family, and friends are welcome! We’ll see you there!

If you look at the Table of Contents of the Hymnal, you will find that it has a logical order and arrangement of the music. First comes the Service Music (those entries with an “S” before the number) arranged to correspond to the services in the Book of Common Prayer. Then come the hymns arranged by how and when they are used. Half of the hymns come in the same order as the seasons of the church year (Christmas carols go from 77 to 115 and Easter carols—carols are songs that tell stories—go from 174 to 213, for example) and move on to the different services and rituals of the Church (communion hymns are numbered 300 to 347). The other half of the hymns are general use hymns, but they, too, are subdivided into themes such as “Praise to God” and “The Christian Life.”

The two halves of our Hymnal reflect the constant tension in our Church between the Liturgical traditions that link us to our Catholic roots and the Evangelical traditions that link us to our Protestant branches. In fact, sometimes I think that the committee that put together this Hymnal was not unlike the wise men in the Asian parable in which the sages were put into a dark room with an elephant and each was asked to describe what the elephant was like. Of course, since each man touched only one part of the elephant, the men’s opinions were widely divergent. Given the diverse sources of our Hymnal, it is no wonder that sometimes we don’t see what a beautiful elephant it really is.

The music available for worship at the birth of the Anglican Church in the early 1500’s was very limited. Remember that with the Protestant Reformation, plainsong (or chant) was considered too “Catholic.” Therefore hymns of praise and worship in metrical settings—with three or four beats in a measure—for the singing of the psalms were composed and collected, and usually each city had its own psaltery for use in its area. Since the printing press was coming into wide use, these books began to travel, and these collections were published throughout the 1500’s.

Great composers of liturgical music—both Catholic and Protestant—arose in the 1600’s and early 1700’s. This is partly attributable to the installation of the first great Baroque organs. J. S. Bach, a Lutheran, wrote masses in German (and Latin) for his churches and in Latin for his sovereign, the Duke of Saxony, a Catholic. His cantatas are the successors to the sequence hymns of the early church and forerunners of the modern “anthem” as they addressed the liturgical theme for a particular service, and the chorales they included became the first great congregational hymns (“Sleepers Wake!”, for example). Thomas Tallis was the first great English composer of church music in the late 1500’s and in the 1600’s William Byrd and Henry Purcell were composing music for Anglican services.

With the rise and fall of the Puritans in the middle part of the 1600’s, the Evangelical movement, a Great Awakening, took root in the Anglican church. Hymns were sung to tunes both sacred and secular (which demonstrates how the tune we call Greensleeves can at once be a bawdy soldier’s song and the tune to the Christmas carol “What Child Is This?”). John Wesley’s Hymnal of 1737 was the first hymnal in the modern sense, as religious poetry of the age was adapted for singing. John Newton and William Cowper (Methodists in Anglican cloth) produced the Olney Hymnal in England in 1779, a high water mark for Evangelical music in England, giving us the text of “Amazing Grace” and other favorites. These hymnals did not have printed music but only suggested a familiar tune; as a result, congregation members with different preferences often sang the selected hymn to more than one tune at a time!

In America, songs of simple harmony and plain meaning that once were called “Sunday School songs” became known as “gospel hymns” and formed the backbone of the general use hymns in mainline Protestant churches, coinciding with the Second Great Awakening of Evangelicals in the first half of the 19^th Century. Lowell Mason (“Joy to the World”) became the first great composer of American church music with the publication of over 1600 gospel hymn tunes from 1822 to 1860. Meanwhile, a competing line of less sophisticated tunes took root in the Deep South during this time, giving us the shape note hymnals “The Sacred Harp” and “The Southern Harmony.” These passionate settings, with the melody in the tenor voice, were eschewed by mainline Protestant churches as too rough and unmusical until they produced the preferred tunes for many texts including “Wondrous Love” and “Amazing Grace.” As a result of the influence of these primarily Evangelical English and American sources, church music in mainline American Protestant churches had become standardized by the middle of the 1800’s. But a new wind with ancient roots was beginning to blow in the Anglican church.

Next: Part Two—From the Oxford Movement to Today

Val and Tony Short are coordinating these trips in the church van. Please register so we will know to expect you. To register, call Vickie in the church office at 537-3610. Cost per trip will be $10 to cover the cost of gas. Meals, drinks, admission fees, and other personal purchases will cost extra. Parents must accompany their children. Please sign up for one or all of the following trips….

(take 43 to Rocky Mount—stay on it until you pass The Theater Complex and go under Hwy 64) A very short distance and before you cross over the Tar River. The road on the right side has a sign to Stonewall on the Left side of the road is a large monument honoring Confederate Soldiers.)

Some of you might have noticed that the prayer bench has been removed from the church. There is one major reason for this: it is dangerous. We do not have a large altar space and the prayer bench located behind the lectern creates a hardship for all of you who come to the lectern to read our Sunday Lectionary readings. The Prayer Bench has been moved to my office. I am not aware of anyone who comes in during the week to pray at the Prayer Bench.

If any of you would like for the Prayer Bench to remain in the church, or if you would like it moved to another location, please let us know. For one thing, since the Prayer Bench has been moved to the office area, I use it every day that I am in the office. The Prayer Bench provides a wonderful discipline for my spiritual life. However, it is not just for me. It is for all of us. It does not matter if it is in the church or not.

It seems that when it was left in the church, no one used it, not even during Sunday worship services. Should you wish to use the Prayer Bench, or would like it moved to another location, please let me know.

Prayer is very important in our spiritual lives. Whether it be private or corporate, prayers are very significant in the life that we live out in Christ.

Margie

Lord, we give thanks that you are the God who brings mercy and wholeness. Comfort and heal, we pray, all who are in sorrow, need, sickness, or any other trouble. Give to those who care for them wisdom, patience and gentleness and, to us all, your peace. Amen.

Dear Lord, we give thanks for the safe return of Josh Noxon, nephew of Bonnie and Will Mahone, and his unit from Afghanistan. Thank you Lord: for protecting all the soldiers who are fighting for our country. For those who are still serving in dangerous places, support them during battle and in the time of peace keep them safe from all evil; give them courage and strength and bring them home safely; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Members Present: Joann Parrott, Ralph Ingram, Scott Barber, Henry Moncure, Bill Pierce, Bill Hodge, Tony Short, Bob Burke, Billy Green, Fletcher Carter, Mary Wellman, Cary Whitaker

Approval of Minutes

David Young and other Saints’ will be preparing Thanksgiving lunch at All Saints' Parish House for all people that don't have family, or don't have a place to go for Thanksgiving! Members of All Saints' Church & members from 1st Presbyterian Church are invited. Lunch will be served Thanksgiving Day, Thursday November 27, at approximately 12 noon, with Turkey & Dressing, sweet potato souffle, desserts, and all the trimmings. If you wish to contribute a 'covered dish', feel free to do so.