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Your AccountOur Church 1859 Danby Road - Map, Directions Ithaca, NY 14850 Phone: 607 272 1687 Email: · About Our Church · Statement of Beliefs  Mailing ListTell a FriendSearchRecent Forum PostsForum: Do you Beleive in Jesus?
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Christ's Successes @ DFCThese are the things that have come to us as successes this summer!
1. After great effort, we finally have a computer projector and both the Worship Team and Christian Discovery are using it! 2. We had a wonderful turnout for the Danby Fun Day! Thank you all!!!! 3. Last month the Southern Tier Food truck visited us and we served 76 families! Anyone can come. Please join us on Monday August 25th @ 1 PM. the food is great and the fellowship is even better!!! 4. Because of a partnership with St. Pauly Textiles we are now sending clothing around the world and back into our own neighborhood! Along with St. Pauly Textiles we interact with 19 agencies that supply clothing to places in the world where it is needed! Great work to all who have donated clothing. 5. Vaction Bible School was way too much fun this year! We made slim and learned new things about ourselves! See at our next Discovery event! 6. Our youth group went to Knigdom Bound again this year. They raised all of the money and planned the trip themsevles. Good job youth group. 7. The Men's Fellowship is growing once more and this weekend is a community wide garage sale and at the end of Sept. they are cooking steak! Stay tuned. 8. For those who are unaware, some members of Danby Federated Church started a Military Family Support Group and it too is collecting children's clothing to send to Afganistan with soldiers who are returning there. |
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Recent Forum Posts:  Jesus is in our community (Jun 13) Requesting prayer (Feb 29) Welcome to our website! (Feb 29) How should church fit into soc... (Jan 31) Welcome to the Prayer Requests... (Feb 12)
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Pastor's Message
Welcome to our website! I am Rev. Michael Grinnals. Danby Federated Church is just that, it is a federation between the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church. The federation was formed in the 1950's as a measure to facilitate the worship needs of the Danby community. It is my privilege to be in the company of so many Christian sisters and brothers.
We hope that you will enjoy your time on our website. We also hope that you will be a part of making it a better place for all! We pride ourselves on the concept of being "A Place For All" so we encourage you to join us in that endeavor. Please feel free to contact the website with your joys and concerns. As our administrators oversee the site they will notify me if you would like me to get in touch with you. I look forward to talking with you and if you are in Danby please stop by, it would be my privlege to worship with you at either 8:30 or 11:00 AM on Sunday mornings. Sincerely, Rev. Michael Grinnals
Pastor Mike's Weekly Sermon
NEW TESTAMENT: Romans 13:8-14
GOSPEL: Matthew 18: 15-20
God’s purpose today is FELLOWSHIP: Enjoying the Word of God through each other
The Debt Of Love For Others
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Paul begins by explaining that we must pay all of our debts expect the debt of loving others. He also gives another reason to love others, he explains that time is running out. Jesus is explaining that we must be our brother’s keeper. In both cases we have to be careful not to intrude on others personal space. This is a very tricky and an explosive issue. Even here today there are some who feel that others are intruding on their work in the church. The only way that we can overcome these feelings of intrusion is to first understand what it means to care for and love others and then We Must Talk about these ideas! If we fail to sit down and discuss the issues that make us feel controlled and imposed upon they will explode into a degradation that will become irreversible!
We must never completely relieve our debt of loving others. We can never resign from loving God. Our church or our neighbors! If we constantly act in suspect of others we will never fulfill God’s will for us. That is to say we have to learn to trust one another. We have to begin by sitting together, being in fellowship together and discovering our mutual mission together, rather than accusing each other of controlling or trying to control our mission. Those who avoid the discussion about mutual mission are as guilty on the subject as those who are being accused of be controlling in our mutual mission.
When I was going through my divorce, the pastor of the church, in partnership with my ex-wife, ambushed me in my own home with six other members of the congregation, sighting this passage from Mathew, making the accusation that I was a sinner and that my ex-wife was in the right. Neither was true! We certainly had grown apart but the accusation that one or the other of us was a sinner and the other was free of fault was and remains ridiculous! Here again the control issue rears its ugly head! Each of us wants to be in control of her/his own life and at the same time we must give up our personal control to reach out and take care of each other. When we exceed caring and broached intrusion we have over stepped our boundaries.
Boundaries are very important. They denote the places one can go and where one cannot go. When we talk about ministries of the church there are boundaries and limits and they must be clearly delineated and highly respected. When they are not delineated, respected or ignored catastrophe occurs!
Recently, I ran into one of those “visitors of that night” who came into my home to intrude on my already strained and difficult marriage and now years later she too has been divorced and re-married. She found herself in an awkward situation of having to face me under completely different circumstances and discovering that we, humans, are never in the position to judge others; she put her eyes down and could not look at me. In fact we are only responsible to love each other not to control each other! We are to care for one another but we must never dominate one another. This requires that we first respect each other and then cooperate with one another.
According to our definition of fellowship, our job really is to enjoy the Word of God through each other. We are not responsible to interpret the Word for others; simply enjoy each other! This is a difficult concept because often we experience the wonderful love of God and we just want everyone else to experience too! By intruding on others we can never expedite those positive experiences we always cause negative experiences! That is why church FELLOWSHIP is so important. We must never allow church to become hurtful to another person! Sadly, I overheard someone say that they felt that church was becoming a painful place to be. This is an urgent message for us! Church must never be painful!
The operative word in our purpose today is enjoying! When we enjoy each other then we will trust each other and then we can talk together. When we talk to together we discover wonderful things about God and each other. Fellowship, as we define it, is the enjoyment of each other’s behaviors when we act according to The Word of God! Remembering that our greatest Commandment is to love, it is truly easy to enjoy! Everyone who loves; enjoys!
The downside of love is that because we love we have a tendency to hurt along the way. We hurt because we want to do well and sometimes we just fail to do satisfactorily. I was listening to a child psychologist recently who described child rearing as the ability to allow your child to fail successfully. We too have to learn to allow our fellow Christians to occasionally fail successfully. What the therapist was describing was that we must allow our children to fail but teach them how to manage their failure and turn those failures into successes. We too must be helpful in turning failures into successes, specifically by teaching rather than by criticism. Most people like to learn and no one likes to be criticized.
In their book “Getting To Yes” the Harvard Negotiating Project observes that; in conflict management one has to resist the temptation of taking a position. The more often we take positions the less often we can get to “YES” and the less likely we will be able to manage the conflict! Look at labor and management. They have been in unmanaged conflict since the turn of the twentieth century! If we take a position we are highly unlikely to change our position, therefore, less likely to be able to reach a compromise! That is how we end up with labor strikes.
When we leave the judgment of right and wrong to God we are free to “enjoy each other through the Word of God”. Even if we disagree we can do it in an agreeable way so as to still enjoy each other’s company. As an issue escalates into a conflict we must turn to Paul’s instructions; “Pay all your debts, except the debt of love for others.” In labor both sides must consider the value each brings to the table. As we will discover in a couple of weeks in Matthew 20, as we enter the Kingdom of Heaven we will all be treated exactly the same even if we start our work in the vineyard at five o’clock in the evening. With different gifts there are different rewards. We have to learn to respect that natural principle.
So we have to come to agree on the WONDERS OF GOD, not the laws of man! Remember, Jesus told us to beware of the LAW. Sin is not breaking the rules; it is an aggression towards God. So to take the literal position that someone has sinned because the rules were broken and then ambush them in their own home is by far a more egregious sin than any original infraction! The WONDERS OF GOD are just that WONDERS! They make us wonder and they remain wonders. When we are not sure of what to think we must put it in the hands of God. Alisa explains it simply as; “A Mystery of God”.
God is far bigger than our capacity to comprehend. This leads us to understand that there are far more “Mysteries of God” than far gone conclusions! We have to realign our thinking to recall God’s WONDERS rather that to pass down edicts!
We are our sister and brother’s keeper, but we are not their jailer! We have to allow people the chance to succeed or fail on their own terms. When we do that we are answering God’s call to enjoy our fellowship!
Jesus concludes this passage with these words; “I also tell you this: If two of you agree down here on earth concerning anything you ask, my Father in heaven will do it for you. For where two or three gather together because they are mine, I am there among them.” Jesus is explaining that we get to choose God; God has already chosen us and has promised to “do for us”! It is when we agree that God will “do for us” that we succeed. It is when we come together in Christ’s name that Christ will be among us! Imagine having Christ at the table every time we decide on anything! Decisions would be far easier than sometimes they seem to be.
We have to call on God through Jesus Christ in order to change our failures into successes. Jesus invites us to come to the table and we too have to invite him to our table. We must refresh the habit of calling on Christ to be present in everything we do! It is the purest form of FELLOWSHIP I can think of.
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Strength Training - Sep 08 @ 9:00 am Admin Council - Sep 08 @ 6:30 pm Community Bible Study Picnic - Sep 09 @ 6:00 pm (Sue Walkers) Choir - Sep 10 @ 7:00 pm Praise Team - Sep 10 @ 8:00 pm Christian Education - Sep 11 @ 7:00 pm Wedding rehersal - Sep 12 @ 6:00 pm Pioneer Club - Sep 12 @ 6:00 pm
Counterhits Verse of the DayAnd God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.
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From Reverend Michael Grinnals
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