Glen Burnie Evangelical Presbyterian Church

Welcome

Welcome, and thank you for taking the time to visit our website. We know that you are busy and that there are many excellent churches and websites you could be checking out are honored to have you look us over. We know that we are not the church for everyone, but we are striving to be the kind of church where anyone can find a place to call home and a place to serve.  If you spend some time with us you will hear us talk a lot about grace. We do this because we need it—we’re not perfect, but we serve a God who is, and who gives grace to stumbling, bumbling, fumbling people like us. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to serve you, and please remember the following invitation we extend to you:

To all who are spiritually weary and seek rest;
to all who mourn and long for comfort;
to all who struggle and desire victory;
to all who sin and need a Savior;
to all who are strangers and want fellowship;
to all who hunger and thirst after righteousness;
and to whoever will come
This church opens wide her doors
and offers her welcome in the name of Jesus

For more information about us please click any of the buttons on the right or left.

This week at GBEPC Jan 14 to 20, 2007

Monday
Alcoholics Anonymous 7pm
Wednesday
Southgate/Old Mill Area Small Group, 7:00 pm, at the Jurick home.

Thursday
Women’s Bible Study, 10:00-11:30 am, Library
Narcotics Anonymous 7pm
Men’s Bible Study, 7:30 pm, Library

Friday
F.L.O.C.K. Band, 5:15-6:45 pm
Youth Groups Swim Party at Crain Highway Swim Center, 7:00-9:00 pm. Drop off and pick up at Swim Center. Cost is $2.50 plus spending money.

January 21
Orientation Meeting for ESL Helpers and Volunteers, immediately following the worship service, Room 102

February 9
“Date Night” Free Babysitting, 6:00-9:30 pm, at the church. A snack will be provided.

February 11
Annual Congregational Meeting. Pot-Luck Dinner at 5:00 pm. Meeting at 6:30 pm. Business will include election of officers and a nominating committee and presentation of ministry reports.

Campus Life Prayer Request

Hello Friends,
In this months letter I would like to ask you all to pray for a boy in my Pasadena Campus Life group who I will call “Cal”. Cal hasn’t been coming to our group for very long …perhaps a little short of a year. His parents are involved in his life very little, in fact, he has been raised by his grandmother for most of his life. Cal has been to many psychologist and other types of doctors to help him deal with severe anger issues, depression etc… He is also on so many different types of medication for his behavioral problems that I have lost count. Cal is obviously a young man who is lost and in a lot of pain.
On January 12-14 we will be taking a group of our students to a winter retreat called AVALANCHE. Most of the kids we are taking are non-Christian and they will hear the gospel in a very real and direct way.
I was very hesitant on taking Cal on this trip because of his behavior problems. He is often very disruptive during our weekly meetings. He has been practically begging me to let him go on this trip for sometime now. A few weeks ago, after he had misbehaved very badly during one of our meetings I told him that I was probably not going to allow him on this trip. The look that came on his face once I said this broke my heart. He literally looked like he was about to cry. I noticed some changes in his behavior after that. Although he is still disruptive at times, he goes out of his way to help me and the other adult staff step up the room before meetings and helps clean up afterward as well. I really felt the Lord leading my heart to take Cal on this trip. Just before Christmas I told Cal I was going to take him on this trip with us. His face lit up and he started jumping up and down in the middle of the room cheering. He looked like a young child excited on Christmas morning.
Please pray for Cal this coming weekend. Pray that God will do great things in his heart and change him in amazing ways. Also pray that he behaves and doesn’t cause much trouble on the trip. I am still a little nervous about taking him, but I am trusting the Lord is going to do awesome things. Pray also that this young man will come to trust Christ with his life.
Thank you all so much for partnering with me in this ministry through your faithful prayers!


In Christ,
Gregory Shade

Downloading Sermons

How to download sermons from the GBEPC web site.
On the upper right side of our home page(www.gbepc.org) you will see a list of sermons preached from GBEPC. When you see the sermon you want to listen to click on it. This will take you to another web site called www.sermoncloud.com. When in sermoncloud on the left side you have several options. You can download the sermon and play it later, you can listen to it online, or even make your own cd. The sermons are in MP3 format. If you need any help downloading the sermons please see Scott in the sound room after church and I will be happy to assist you in any way.

The sermons are in chronological order most recent at the top.

Answering Islam, 2

Here is another video from Jay Smith answering an issue posed by Islam.  In this video he is dealing with an issue that was raised in Britain regarding women's head coverings.  While the situation he is addressing may seem foreign to Americans, it provides an interesting insight into the views of Christians and Muslims on women.

Answering Islam, 1

As mentioned in my last post, we are going to begin posting videos about a Christian response to Islam, by apologist Jay Smith.  For an introduction to Jay Smith and his project see our last post here.  Today we are posting Jay's first video which is an introduction to the rest of the series.  Just click on the play button in the middle of the screen below to play the video.

Answering Islam Video Series

In my mind there are three great international issues that Christians need to be aware of, to address and to be prepared to respond to. 

The first is the rise of China as a superpower.  With its unprecedented economic growth China is poised to compete with the United States for economic supremacy, as well as supremacy in other areas.  When Richard Pratt was here at our missions conference he said that our grandchilden, and maybe even our children will need to know Mandarin Chinese.

The second is the issue of immigration, legal and illegal, from south of the border.  America is being reshaped in many ways because of this and Christians need to be able to respond, not only politically, but spiritually.

The third major international issue facing us is the rise of Islam.  Again, Christians need to know how to respond to Islam not only politically, but spiritually.

With that in mind, over the next several weeks we will be posting videos by Jay Smith, a British believer who works with AnsweringIslam.org and who regularly engages Muslims in public and private dialogue.  He has begun posting short 5 minute(ish) videos on YouTube dealing with issues raised by Islam, and we will begin posting these videos with the hope that they will help you to understand Islam better and be prepared to respond to it from a Christian perspective.

Here is Jay's explanation of the project he is engaged in:

A couple of Christian film-makers ('Quirky Motion' Films, http://www.quirkymotion.com/), after seeing me down at Speaker's Corner, approached me with the possibility of filming an entire series of public challenges to Islam, as well as rebuttals to their challenges of Christianity, and then housing them on 'YouTube', where they could be used to engage Muslims publicly, as well as employed by Christians who need answers to some of the more current challenges we are facing.

We decided to call these short videos 'Pfander Films', in memory of the great CMS debater of the 19th century, Dr. Carl Pfander.

I filmed my first 10 episodes (from 1 - 10 minutes each) on Thursday, and the first three have now been put on-line, at 'YouTube' for you to view at:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=PfanderFilms

These include my introduction, a five minute clip on 'Jack Straw and the problem of the Hijab', and a clip concerning 'Who is going to represent Islam in Britain now?'  We have purposely chosen these first ones to represent topics currently in the news, and have made them look amateurish, as they then tend to generate more hits.

Feel free to go up and look at them, respond to any of them, as YouTube permits you to freely post either a text or video response, or respond to the Muslims who are commenting on the clips.  It's a great way to get involved in evangelism from the comfort of your own home, a sort of 'arm-chair' missionary, and it won't cost you a cent.

 

Our next post will have Jay's first video and we will try to post his newer videos about once a week as long as they are available.

Good morning everyone from Gulfport,Mississippi

Good morning everyone from Gulfport,Mississippi:

It is Friday and some of the team will be leaving this evening and others
will be arriving over the weekend. Yesterday was a GREAT day in the Lord.
After a day of good work we went to an outreach ministry called "Katrina's
Kitchen" Started by one person from Illinois, just after the hurricane, ithas expanded to a ministry feeding and clothing over 1700 volunteers andvictims of each day. I was amazed at the number of college age people there.Volunteers who chose to spend their winter break here helping instead of laying on a beach on some island. Afterward, we met back at our dinner tent and shared with each other highlights of our first week. As a team we have sent the past week
helping 7 families get closer to returning to normalcy. It was a blessing to do so but
the real blessing was realized when one of the young women shared how
she was a little embarrassed because she had spent alot of each day with some
neighborhood kids playing instead of working on the house project her team
was doing.This same team had taken on an extra project sidiing the home
of a policeman off work because of an injury who is not a christian. Through
the sharing we came to the realization that our being here is not about the
banging of nails or hanging of drywall. If this police officer or just
one of those children, through our outreach, comes to a saving knowledge of
Jesus Christ than all of our hard work had more meaning than if we had
completed a hundred homes this week. Continue to pray for these people who have suffered so much. As the pastor of the church we are helping said, think of your own home and towns.
Think how it would feel to not have your house, your posessions, your job,
schools, movie theatres, resturants or any of the landmarks or historical
things that make your town what it is. That is what these people are
experiencing and will need our help for a long time.
We thank each of you who have supported us with your prayers and financial
assistance making it possible for us to experience a closeness to God we all
find hard to achieve when we are at home going through our normal
hectic lives. Pray for those traveling this weekend and for another great week
serving our Lord. I will send more pictures and look forward to seeing and sharing our
experiences when we return.

In Him,
Scott Herwig

Some Comments on the Origins of Christmas

Every year during the Christmas season there are those who debate whether or not we should be celebrating Christmas because some think it has pagan origins.  A typical example of this position is found on Steve Camp's blog where he quotes Retired Baptist Minister James MuCutchan as follows:

Should Christians celebrate 'Christmas' or the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you want to obey our Lord Jesus or pagan tradition via Romanism? The Scriptural answer is obvious: Christ Jesus is not the reason for the season!

On the other hand, Steve contrasts this position when he quotes Al Mohler quoting Gene Veith:

"According to conventional wisdom, Christmas had its origin in a pagan winter solstice festival, which the church co-opted to promote the new religion. In doing so, many of the old pagan customs crept into the Christian celebration. But this view is apparently a historical myth--like the stories of a church council debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or that medieval folks believed the earth is flat--often repeated, even in classrooms, but not true."

And further,

It is true that the first evidence of Christians celebrating December 25th as the date of the Lord's nativity comes from Rome some years after Aurelian, in A.D. 336, but there is evidence from both the Greek East and the Latin West that Christians attempted to figure out the date of Christ's birth long before they began to celebrate it liturgically, even in the second and third centuries. The evidence indicates, in fact, that the attribution of the date of December 25th was a by-product of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death and resurrection."

So, this is certainly a debatable issue, but I want to suggest that Christians can and should enjoy the Christmas seasson with no pangs of conscience.  Keep reading for my reasons.

Women’s Retreat

Glen Burnie Evangelical Presbyterian Church
Women’s Retreat
“GRACE”
March 31-April 2, 2006
The Dunes Manor Hotel
Ocean City, Maryland

God's grace is a wonderful gift to humankind. Grace is God's love freely offered to us. God places a little spark of divine grace within us which enables us to recognize and accept God's justifying grace. When we experience God's justifying grace, we come into that new life in Christ. We do not do anything to "earn" grace.

John Piper said ”Wouldn’t it be a beautiful world if everyone lived without being prideful and realized that we deserve nothing. What if every trouble was received without grumbling and every pleasure was received with amazing thankfulness for grace?”

Join us for the 2006 Glen Burnie Evangelical Presbyterian Church Women’s Retreat as motivational speaker Beth M. Boyd reveals that God’s Grace is indeed sufficient for us. You’ll be inspired and encouraged as you hear from Beth’s heart how God ultimately brings us closer to Him through His gift of grace. Breakout sessions will provide the opportunity to explore this topic. It’s a life-changing retreat you won’t want to miss.

About our Speaker: Beth M. Boyd was one of the founding members of Glen Burnie Evangelical Presbyterian Church. She will share how she has experienced God’s grace in her life.
About our location:
Built in the grand style of Ocean City's Victorian era, the Dunes Manor Hotel is truly one of a kind. With its unique design, each room is oceanfront with a direct oceanfront balcony. When you walk through the doors, you step back in time...to the gentle days of a bygone era. With a magnificent view of the Atlantic Ocean right from the lobby, you will be reminded of how close you are to the beach as soon as you enter.

• Microwave oven, a small refrigerator, coffee & coffee maker in each guestroom
• Wireless high speed Internet access in each guestroom
• Clock radio, hair dryer , iron & iron board
• 25 " color cable TV with remote
• Individually climate controlled
• Handicap Accessible Rooms available
• Complimentary morning coffee in the lobby
• Complimentary afternoon tea served daily
• Indoor/Outdoor pool, Jacuzzi & children's wading pool
• Large sundeck with lounge chairs for sun bathing
• Year-round oceanfront restaurant, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner
• Room Service
• Verandah with rocking chairs for your enjoyment
• Exercise Room
• Jewelry store
• Entertainment by Ms. Shirley on piano each weekend
• Complimentary on site parking, 1 car per room
• Just one block from the famous Ocean City Boardwalk!

How to register:
Register at the church after the worship service or call Peggy Abernethy (410-360-2564). The cost is approximately $150/ person for double occupancy and $240/person for single occupancy. A deposit ($35 for double and $55 for single) is due by January 1. Another payment of $35 / $55 is due February 5. The deposits are non-refundable. Scholarships are available.
If you are able to do so please consider a donation so others are able to attend.

PrayerLife Seminar

PrayerLife Seminar
Timonium Presbyterian Church is sponsoring a PrayerLife Seminar on Saturday, November 19, 9:00 am - 3:00 pm. Cost is $39 per person. The seminar leader is Paul Miller, son of Jack Miller, who together founded World Harvest Mission. For more information, go to www.seeJesus.net and click on Seminars.