Sunday School Reboot

In January Philip Decker helped to lead our teachers to kick-off our “Generations of Grace“ curriculum for our Sunday School and Children’s Church Classes. With this change, we've simplified our curriculum for our kids' program on Sundays. We were previously using two different sets of curriculum. Now, our Sunday School and Children's Church classes are spreading the teaching, projects, and activities over the span of the entire Sunday morning so that kids that go to both classes will receive a simplified,. unified, coherent teaching that they can apply to their lives throughout the week. 

Our Middle & High School students are continuing in their study of “Systematic Theology”. We are over 600 pages into our study. Only about 600 pages to go!

Advent Season and Christmas 2013

As a church this year we encouraged each other to work through John Piper's daily devotional "Good News of Great Joy"

You can download this free Advent daily devotional for Christmas 2013 written by John Piper and provided by the people at Desiring God from here:

http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/books/good-news-of-great-joy

The ladies of New Life celebrated a trip “Around the World” at their annual Women's Christmas Celebration. It happened Saturday December 7^thfrom 3-6pm at Brenda Bolenski’s home.

Our Community Groups held a combined Christmas Party on Wednesday December 18th from 6:30-8:30pm.

Our family and friends celebrated Christmas Eve at 7pm during our annual Christmas Eve Candlelight Service. 

Serving the Poor and Homeless in Rural Appalachia

We sent team to Athens, Ohio to help with Good Works Community of Hope the weekend of November 15-17th. Good Works is an organization that serves the poor and homeless in rural Appalachia.  It is the only homeless shelter in a 9 county radius in Southeast Ohio.

We had our annual Thanksgiving Dinner on Sunday November 24th. This is a great annual tradition of fellowship at New Life where everyone brings their favorite traditional dish to share. 

Operation Christmas Child 2013

A note from Samaritan's Purse: 
Thank you for all your partnership with Operation Christmas Child last year. We are very grateful for the opportunity to join with you to spread the love of Christ through the power of simple shoebox gifts.

Your service was critical in the collection of more than 7.5 million gift-filled shoeboxes in the United States that will create avenues for local churches to share the Gospel and begin Operation Christmas Child’s discipleship program called The Greatest Journey with millions of children. Together, we are seeing God work to impact the lives of children and families all over the world. We could not have done it without faithful partners like you!

Autumn upon us

October was filled with church bonfires, hosting the annual Summit Baptist Association meeting at New Life, preparing for Operation Christmas Child, and the My Hope with Billy Graham broadcast. We distributed invitations to people in out neighborhood on Halloween night for a viewing party of the My Hope broadcast on November 8th. This was when the program aired on ABC in the Cleveland market. It was a very powerful message that I wish more people could see. We have also been partnering with Love, Inc to help stock and serve at a local Personal Care Item Pantry with several other local churches. We have been collecting and distributing items that cannot be bought with food stamps/EBT. Last month we helped to serve nearly 100 families in our local area through this outreach.

We have been growing on Sunday mornings, so we have added more chairs to the sanctuary to provide more seating capacity. When we first came to Medina we had about 60 seats out. We expanded early on to make room for 100 seats. Now we can seat just about 140. The Lord continues to bless us and provide for us. Please pray that we would serve Christ well and represent Him well to the community and world around us.

Kingdom Kids Starts Tuesday October 8

We are starting a new weekly program for elementary school kids. We now have a weekly opportunity for learning and fun starting Tuesday October 8 from 6:30-8pm. The evening will include fun activities, Biblical teaching, scripture memorization, Bible drills, and more. This is a new ministry led by Jeff Smith. For more information go to http://newlifemedina.org/kingdom-kids/