We are excited to introduce the Canaan Congregational Church’s e-newsletter to the community which features a colorful logo depicting the beautiful window in our sanctuary. Our goal is to keep the community and surrounding towns informed through news items, feature articles, event announcements, notices of seasonal activities, profiles on our residents, and more. The frequency of our publication is transitioning to a weekly publication from a monthly one.
Already, we have connected our website as well as our Facebook page with the newsletter, and will expanding further into the social media world and adding Instagram.
Please feel free to share any announcements, missives, and tidbits with us at:
After all, the community is our collective eyes and ears!
Bask in the sounds and sensations provided by trios, duets and solos played by Anthony Bracewell, violin, Julian Müller, cello, and Gili Melamed-Lev, piano as they perform music by Piazzolla, Mendelssohn, Arvo Pärt, Bach, Saint-Saëns and more.
The mission of the Hudson-based Operation Unite, New York, is to produce well-rounded, progressive youth who will enter adulthood with a sense of direction, self-esteem, and social consciousness, and subsequently reinvest themselves into the community from whence they came.
General admission tickets are $30 and $10 for students, to purchase log onto: https://spencertownacademy.networkforgood.com/events/63156-benefit-concert-for-operation-unite
Saturday, April 20 at 7 P.M. at the First Congregational Church, 514 Main St., Dalton
The First Congregational Church in Dalton, MA is excited to welcome back Reverend Bert Marshall and introduce Poet Ketu Oladuwa for a magical night where music and poetry intertwine. Musicians Doug Rich, bass; Zoe Krohne, vocals and Willie Sordillo are also featured. A free donation will be collected and a reception follows the evening’s performance.
With severe weather events becoming more commonplace, you and your family can be prepared by registering for the NY Citizen Preparedness Training Program. The Canaan Protective Fire Company is hosting this course on:
Friday, April 26 at 4 P.M. at 2126 Route 295, Canaan
All participants must register in advance.
This course will provide an introduction on responding to a natural or man-made disaster. Learn how to develop a family emergency plan and what supplies are needed to stock up on.
Each family that attends will receive a Preparedness kit. This life saving course is sponsored by the NY State Governor, the Town of Canaan, the Town of Lebanon, and the Canaan Protective Fire Company.
Many Columbia County residents rely on local food pantries to ensure they are getting their basic nutritional needs met. However, as edible items are their focus, pantries are unable to offer staples such as toilet paper, toothpaste, diapers, laundry detergent, wet wipes etc. Furthermore, SNAP (the federal food program previously known as “Food Stamps”) does not cover non-food items. Understanding this need, Canaan Congregational has stepped up and created a drop off center for residents to make donations of such dry goods.
Both a large wicker basket, inside the entrance hall of the Church by the the office door, and a plastic bin outside the church on the porch, have been installed by the congregation to collect such items which are delivered to the Chatham Food Pantry weekly. Please join us and help our neighbors by contributing to this important initiative.
Since the rebuilding of the church, we decided to offer individuals and groups the opportunity to rent our space for weddings, retirement parties, birthday celebrations etc.
Most recently, we focused our energy in reaching out to not-for profit organizations seeking to connect with residents in this part of the county. The response has been enthusiastic!
As we have no pews, our space is configurable. We can accommodate groups up to sixty people depending upon your event’s configuration.
Should you work for, or are a member of group, charity, or foundation interested in reaching out to residents in Canaan or the surrounding towns and villages, as well as our neighbors in Massachusetts, contact us for information at:
Our Canaan Congregational Church participates in a variety of local and wider mission activities. The congregation typically responds generously throughout the year to the following wider mission offerings: The United Church of Christ’s One Great Hour of Sharing (March); Church World Service’s Blanket Sunday (June); and the United Church of Christ’s Neighbors in Need (November).
We also take special offerings and donate to groups in response to emergency situations such as natural disasters, refugee needs or political upheaval and mass shootings.
The congregation regularly supports multiple local missions. These include the Chatham Area Silent Pantry, which receives donations from the church throughout the year; and School Supplies Weekend, which we support during the months of September and October.
Each year in December we sponsor an Adopt-a-Family appeal—brightening the Christmas of a family in need in our community. Often, we coordinate this activity with another local support organization such as Canaan’s Neighbors Helping Neighbors.
Annually, we provide monetary support to organizations such as the Canaan Protective Fire Company, Canaan Neighbors Helping Neighbors, Columbia-Greene Domestic Violence, the Chatham Area Silent Pantry, Columbia Opportunities, Charlie’s Pantry, and the Lebanon Valley Protective Association, all valuable contributors to our community.
I’ve been thinking about journeying and what that means. Every summer, since I was small, I have spent time at my family’s lakeside cottage in Denmark, Maine. It’s so familiar to me – the sights, sounds, smells – that it’s like home away from home. There are things I love to do while I’m there – swim in the lake, go out for an early morning canoe ride, walk along the pine-scented roads, hear the loons calling at night, drive into town to visit the book store and get water at the town spring, stop for an ice cream at The Gazebo.
I also like to stretch out of my usual routine too – I often love to take different routes to get to the cottage, visit a town I haven’t been to before or a new shop. Talk to neighbors I haven’t met before. Stepping out of my comfort zone stretches me, and I often end up feeling that my little adventures feel God-inspired. When I’m open to it, I meet people and see places I might not have otherwise. And when my time in Maine comes to a close, I am always happy to come home again to Austerlitz and my family.
Some of you know that I have been a member of Al-anon for a number of years. This has very much been a part of my personal and spiritual journey. And one thing that I love about Al-anon is that no matter where I am in the world, the welcome that is read at the beginning of each meeting contains many of the same elements. It is this that makes me feel at home, no matter where I am, and no matter if I have never been to the meeting before or am among old friends.
As July approaches, I find I’m looking forward to our summer worship in a similar way. We’ll be journeying forth, to Richmond and West Stockbridge. being welcomed by these other church communities, meeting new people, and seeing good friends, being led in worship by pastors we know and some that are new to us, learning by worshipping with others. There will be familiar elements and perhaps different ones that we can appreciate. I hope you, too, will take part in and enjoy our summer worship journey.
Journeying, being welcomed, being in community, learning, and coming back home again.
Most days you can find me out back or along the perimeter of my property contending with invasive plants that are encroaching and overgrowing the rock garden behind my house. We know the multiflora roses, bittersweet, honeysuckle and garlic mustard. For the first time I just identified Japanese knotweed sending up its asparagus like spears. All of these species were not native to our region but cause harm to our existing forest and field scapes. It is a never-ending task to remove them and actually can be satisfying. As I am engrossed in the physical tasks, wielding my mattock, tugging out root systems, my mind engages in other imponderables.
I recently was reading part of Krista Tippett’s interview (Becoming Wise An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living) with her former Yale Divinity School professor of the Hebrew Bible, Ellen Davis. They were examining specific words and translations of words in the Bible. In particular, in the King James version the translation of God’s blessing on humankind in Genesis was embraced as the “rallying cry by Christian colonizers and industrialists and explorers: ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’“ Professor Davis offered that the actual Hebrew word used is a strong word but rather than understanding it as dominion she considers it as a challenge to humans to exercise skilled mastery amongst the creatures…of which we are one. Skilled mastery, not in the sense of dominion but in the sense of responsibility for creatures, for the land and the waters, for creation. We have much work to do in this interconnected realm.
As I continued in my further musings, I found myself considering our little church and the tasks before us. I believe that we do serve as caretakers of our church, our church family and its building and even beyond in the wider community.
One of the tasks we are embarking upon is our search for a new pastor. We started with an Ad Hoc Transition Team which has crafted a draft of our profile which we will tweak and then submit to the Conference to initiate our search. The Transition Team needs to reconfigure as a Search Team. We need a few dedicated folks to serve in the screening of profiles and the actual interviews. We will probably conduct much of this process via Zoom. We do not know how long the Search process might take. It is another stepping out in faith with no exact time closure.
We ask for five members to please step forward. If you have questions or are so inclined, please speak with Pat or Susan or myself. We hope to form this important team in June so we can proceed with our Search.
I spend the Winter months in warmer climates, as many of you know. Philip, my late husband, and I started doing that some years ago, when after his first bout of chemotherapy, he became extremely intolerant of cold temperatures, and it was necessary for him to get away from the cold. And after his death in 2020, I decided to keep going South in the winter because hey, it’s just pleasant to stick your toes in the warm sands of St. Augustine Beach in February.
One curious thing about Florida is that there are remarkable thrift shops. Think about it – nicknamed “God’s waiting room”, Florida has a disproportionate number of elderly. And when they pass away, often the family members do not wish to retrieve their belongings. So donated to a shop they go – perhaps to benefit a cause – animal shelters, etc. The thrift shops are chock full of wonderful items. I was perusing one of my favorite shops when I saw a worker lift a beautiful boat up on a sales shelf. It had a $6 price tag on it. It never made it to the shelf because I snagged it!
The upcoming Sunday, I was deacon at the St. Augustine UCC church, and the scripture readings were all about being tossed about on stormy seas. I took my little boat (pictured above) and set it on blue fabric (actually several scarves, also purchased at the thrift shop) made to look like waves on the altar table. Candles and a low bowl of water completed the table. I hope the table helped bring to life the scripture passages. Later I took it down to the beach, slid it into the surf and photographed it before leaving it with a friend for safekeeping.
The image of this little boat will now serve another purpose – it is to be our vessel on our journey as we set sail, searching for new pastoral leadership. What do we need to take with us in our boat? What are the essentials? What can we leave behind? How do we navigate? You’ll see this boat often as we wind our way through the process – as we ‘set sail’: which is our first step, just simply raising our sails as we prepare to launch a search. Soon, we hope, we will sail off in search of a new chapter.
