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December 5, 2009
Inside the Courier 
: 
•
A Look at the BriteSide, page 2
• Transition Team report,
page 3
• Advent Conspiracy,
page 4
• Special Needs Chris
t-mas Pageant, page 4
• Board notes, page 5
 
On the Web 
fccminneapolis.orgAdvent Devotions Advent Conspiracyinformation FCC Flickr photos 
More Advent Celebrations:Cookie Baking... Special Pageant In-vitation... "Advent Conspiracy" Seepage 4 for details!
 
Advent Activities fill the Season at FCC
• Advent Conspiracy,
Advent begins this week at FirstChristian with the annual
Women’s
Ministries Brunch
on Saturday, Dec,
5, followed by the ―
Deck the Halls”
party
in the afternoon. Wednesdaynight
Advent vespers
also began onDec. 2, and will continue for theWednesdays leading up the Christ-mas. The brief service begins at 7 pmin the Fireside Lounge, and is an in-formal gathering time of prayer, me-ditation and communion.Three music programs will be pre-sented in our sanctuary during theAdvent Season.We are thrilled to be able to host forthe second time a production of GianCarlo Menotti
’
s opera
Amahl andthe Night Visitors
on Friday night,Dec. 18, at 7:30 pm. Laura Ander-son, our soprano soloist, is producingthis opera, and James Barnett, ourpianist, will conduct the orchestra.Both the orchestra and chorus willfeature student musicians from theUniversity of Minnesota. Membersof our choir will join student singersin the chorus. James Baumgartner,choir tenor, and Anna DeGraff, alto,will sing leading roles. The role of the boy will be sung by Luke Bilotta,who is a member of the MinnesotaBoychoir. Freewill donations willagain go to Feed My Starving Child-ren. Please invite family and friendsto this special Advent preformance.
Nicolas Carter
will present two con-certs during Advent. Saturday, Dec. 12,Nicolas will be joined by his ensemble
Nube
for a pro
gram called ―
The GoldenBird
.‖ Nube is a four 
-member group of harp, guitar, percussion and Andeanflutes. This event also begins at 7 pmwith tickets $15 in advance and $20 atthe door.The following Saturday, Dec. 19, Nico-las will perform a solo program of musicand reflections on the season. The pro-gram will begin at 7 pm, and tickets are$15 in advance and $20 at the door.Advent will culminate on
ChristmasEve, with a service at 8:00 pm
. Theservice will be preceded by a receptionat 7 pm, and a Prelude Concert at 7:30.
Christian Courier 
First Christian Church of Minneapolis (Disciples of Christ)
 
 
Page 2
Pastor Bob Brite
Bob offers Beard as gift and challenge
In Our Prayers 
We pray for
Ali Hesano’s friend
who sprained her wrist recently and allthose who have suffered accidents or injuries; for
Nancy Curry’s good
friend
in West Virginia who was recently hospitalized for cancer treat-ments and for all those live with chronic or critical illnesses; for all those inthe
armed services
at home and abroad, and for their families who waitand worry; for all who mourn the loss of a loved one; for all who sufferduring the season of holidays; with all legislators who are working onhealth care legislation; for all our homebound members, especially
Stanand Elaine Moe.
Amen.Following our current round of Unbinding the Gospel meet-ings, a week ago Sunday I putforth a challenge to the FCCworshipping community. Itwas a challenge that containedboth a gimmick and a gift. Thegimmick is that if all of youtogether invite enough peopleto have 250 in worship onChristmas Sunday, December20, I will shave off my beard of 31 years. That means thatevery person currently attend-ing will have to invite about 2.6people (how you work out in-viting .6 of a person is yourconcern). The purpose of thisproposal:
it’s
weird enough,perhaps, to be an encourage-ment for you to invite folks tochurch. The gift is that, aswell, if we have 250 in worshipon December 20, I will donate$300 to regional ministry.
“The first people a
church needs to evangelize
are those closest to us”
  Martha Grace Reese
Why am I doing this, you mayask? Martha Grace Reese, inher viewpoints on evangelism,says that the first people towhom a church needs to evan-gelize are those closest to us,family and friends. Tex Sam-ple, a leading Disciples scholar,in his book U.S. Lifestyles andMainline Churches found in hisdemographic studies that fun-damentalist churches grow be-cause they hold on to their fam-ily base; as the families growand add children, they tend tostay with their church commu-nity.He also found that with main-line churches, the opposite istrue: W
e don’t hold onto our 
families, and therefore, we areshrinking. If we can start byreclaiming our community base
 – 
the families and friendsaround us, then we have theopportunity to rebuild thecommunity by adding newfolks through a second worshipservice and other efforts.I like my beard. And if you get250 folks in church on Dec. 20,
I’ll shave it off that morning, but it probably won’t stay off. Nevertheless, it’s a sacrifice for 
me to offer up my beard for the
FCC cause. I’m encouraging
you to sacrifice, to risk your-selves a bit, to help grow the
 body of Christ, and I’ve tried to
give you an easy, somewhatwacky way to do so. Howabout it, folks?
I’d like to see YOU (and 2.6 or 
more of your family/friends) onany Sunday!Bob
 
A Look at the Brite Side 
Gracious God, welift up these personsin our prayers, ask-ing the blessing of  your Grace and out- pouring of your Loveupon them.
 
 December 5, 2009 Page 3
Transition Team Report 
Special Board Meeting set for Dec. 20
 There will be a special, brief Board meetingfollowing worship on Sunday, December 20,to deal with the matters of nominations andbudgets. The regularly scheduled Boardmeeting on December 22 has been cancelledper the decision at the November meeting.The Transition Team for FCC is responsible fordeveloping and forwarding to the Board and Con-gregation recommendations for the congrega
tion’s
future. The team, currently composed of Pat Dun-lop, Tom Curry, Skip Wolverton, Val Dunham,Bobbie Hall, and Martha Harris, along with BobBrite and Dennis Sanders, has met six times sincelate July. The issues the Team has discussed andare working through have been wide-ranging andcomplex, including, but not limited to the follow-ing:
 
whether to move or to close;
 
whether to move into ecumenical partner-ship with another congregation;
 
whether to stay in the Whittier neighbor-hood or relocate to the suburbs;
 
what sort of experiments to conduct in theministry of FCC to define its ministry andencourage its growth; and,
 
whether the energy of the congregation is of such a nature to invest itself in such expe-riments.To this point, the Team has come up with the fol-lowing understandings:1) The central question to be addressed by FCC is
―What is best thing that we can do to promote the
life of the Church, the body of Christ, through
FCC’s future?‖
 2) The question of moving is secondary to thequestion of viability
 – 
in other words, it is not agood idea, and in fact is poor
stewardship of God’s
resources, to buy or build another congregationalplant if the church is going to continue to decline,decline to the point of closure in not more thananother 10
 – 
15 years.3) The question of viability is directly related toage demographic
 – 
the congregation has a strong
group of people in their 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Thecongregation’s greatest need is to develop a mini
s-try that attracts more of the younger generations:
youth and children, 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s.
 In the light of these understandings, the TransitionTeam is trying to develop proposals for the con-gregation to chew over and consider concerningwhat the congregation may look like in five years.The Team also endorses, in the spirit of transfor-mation, a proposal by Pastors Brite and Sanders tobegin an alternative worshipping communitymovement in the life of FCC, but with the provi-sion that the current FCC community can see it asan appropriate ministry of the church and be will-ing to pour time, talent, resources, and ownershipinto the effort. The proposal for this has gonethrough the Worship Committee, been passed bythe Board, and $50,000 has been allocated byFinance Committee in the 2010 Budget for thatpurpose. That allocation, as well as the whole 2010Budget, will be dealt with by the Board at a specialboard meeting on December 20 following worship.The Team continues to meet on the average of about every 3 weeks, and in future meetings will beconsulting with other congregations going throughsimilar circumstances, developing further pro-grammatic experiments for transformation, andcontinuing to wrestle with that central question de-fined above. Team members welcome congrega-tional input as well.
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