Church Requel Blog - Writings of Mark Pierce

Christmas Eve Streaming Service at 5pm

Merry Christmas Eve everyone!

I’m very excited about our streaming Christmas Eve service tonight and want to make sure as many of you as possible will join us online on Facebook at 5pm,

We will NOT be meeting at church because of the Covid danger. According to all the numbers, Richland County is one of the most dangerous places to gather in groups right now.

However, we WILL enjoy a very special Christmas Eve service at 5pm Eastern Time Zone. Brandi and Eddie will join Mary Kay and me at our home. We will start broadcasting about 15 minutes early and hope to see many of you join us online. Starting at 5pm we will sing some Christmas carols together, Brandi playing our piano and I playing my ukulele. Eddie and Mary Kay will read the Christmas story out of Luke 2. I have some Christmas Eve thoughts to share with you.

We have brought the Christmas Advent wreath to our home and will light the Christmas candle together. We encourage you to find yourself a candle to light with us. Even though we will be dispersed across the Earth, we can still let our lights shine!

Do me a favor! Share this good news announcement about the Christmas Eve streaming service with your family and friends. I am sure many people will be looking for a Covid-safe, Christmas-appropriate way to worship tonight.

”A child has been born unto us!”

Christmas blessings to you! Pastor Mark

P.S. - We will be enjoying our normal Sunday morning worship service at Church Requel at 11am at the church. If you want to join us either in person or on Facebook, we look forward to our worship together.

Christmas Plans At Church Requel

Good Friday morning Church Requel!

I have some great plans to share with you today regarding Christmas events at Church Requel. Can you believe Christmas is just one week away? Wow!

Christmas Eve Facebook Stream at 5pm.

I am starting with our plans for Christmas Eve because I think this is the event that most of us look forward to the most. There is just nothing much better than the Christmas Eve candle lighting at Church Requel... (in my own humble opinion). Because of the risk of COVID-19 right now we will NOT be meeting together in person at the church. However...

We WILL stream our Christmas Eve Candle Lighting on Facebook at 5pm!!!

We don't want you to miss it. In fact we are hoping your families will gather together around your televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices and share an hour with Brandi and me. Brandi and Eddie will join Mary Kay and me at our home. We will bring the Advent Wreath Candles from church to our home and will light the Christmas candle together. We actually encourage you all to find candles in your own home that you will be able to light with us. Once again - even though we cannot be together in the same physical space doesn't mean we can't be together!

We plan to sing Christmas carols and read the Christmas story out of the Bible. I will also have a Christmas Eve message to share with you all. We plan for the Christmas Eve stream to last about an hour. So plan to tune in at 5pm on Christmas Eve. It will be a great way to kick off your family Christmas plans. While you're at it, why not invite your family and friends to also join you online!?

THIS Sunday - Christmas At Church AND Facebook Stream

We will meet this Sunday at Church Requel. Our praise band will be there and we will sing together - more on the songs below.  We will light the Advent candle of PEACE. We will share communion and pray together. AND...

Don and Vanessa Causely have prepared something really special for you on video. Don has some great insights to share with you about the angel's message to Joseph and Vanessa has prepared a wonderful song called, "Joseph's Lullaby" by Mercy Me.

We'll also start our service - right before 11am - with a special song by Susie Wiegand's granddaughter, Samantha. She will be singing "Silent Night," and will be remembering when she sang her late grandfather, Fred, a friend to all of us.

Our sermon this Sunday is titled, "Good News: Great Fear or Great Joy?" We will take a one-week break from our Proverbs Wisdom series for a more traditional Christmas message. But is it traditional? With the pandemic Christmas this year? We will focus on the fact that each angelic appearance included the message, "fear not." This advice to not be afraid is especially appropriate for us this year. I can't wait to share it with you.

Here are the songs we'll be singing together on Sunday morning: "Amazing Grace, My Chains Are Gone" by Chris Tomlin, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" by George Handel, "Reckless Love" by Cory Asbury, "The Reason" by Travis Cottrell, and "Your Name Is Power" by Rend Collective.

New Members On The Leadership Team at Church Requel.

Finally, I'm thrilled to inform you that we have some new folks joining our membership team at Church Requel starting January 1. Brandi Walker, Brian Betts and Chris Thoman will join Nancy Roop, Dave Repp, Sheri Nichols and me. We are looking forward to working together toward a post-Covid church!

Love you all much! Hope to "see" you either in person or on the stream this Sunday at 11am. Pastor Mark

Encouraging Words

Good Friday morning Church Requel!

How is your wisdom this morning? Bet you don’t get asked that question too often. I’m thinking we should be asking - at least we should be asking it of ourselves.

We are in a study from the book of Proverbs. So far we have considered:

• Choosing Wisdom
• Earning Respect
• Reducing Stress
• Cultivating Friendship
• Slowing Anger

We will continue this Sunday with the topic, “Encouraging Words.”

So how much thought goes into your words? Do you think before you speak? Do you consciously consider the power of your words upon other people? Not just the negative, angry words, but also the positive, encouraging words?

"A word of encouragement does wonders!"  Pr. 12:25 LB

One of my favorite heros of the Bible is Barnabus.  His nickname was "the Encourager".  I can't think of a better inscription for my tombstone that it to say "the Encourager -- he lifted people up." Everybody else discourages people.  So let’s you and I be encouragers!

This Sunday we will talk about 4 ways to guard our lips so that we can share encouraging words with other people. I am excited about the talk, because this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I have discovered that encouraging others - constantly looking for the good and then affirming the good in people - is so incredibly rewarding!

Proverbs Reading During December. We have given you the challenge to read one chapter of Proverbs each day in December. There are 31 days in December. There are 31 chapters in Proverbs. Pretty cool how that works out! So how are you doing with the challenge?

Each day on our Facebook page, we are including the chapter for the day. Check out the comments below. Participate in the comments! What verse grabbed your attention today? Why? We would love to see even more participation on our Facebook page.

Speaking of which, thank you Brian Betts for becoming one of our page editors. Each day he has been adding something to our page. Pretty cool. Make sure you smash that “like” button!

Sunday Morning Plans. We know many of you are staying home and watching online on our Facebook Page. That’s fine! We don’t like it, but we understand completely! How great that the vaccine appears right around the corner now. We just have to hang in there for a few more months! Anyway, back to the online stream, it appears that we got our sound problems worked out. Many of you commented online that it sounds so much better. Again, thank you Mike Perdue for helping us out!

We are working on some other improvements too - but I can’t yet tell you all the details. Hopefully next week I can let you in on the other big change coming in a few weeks. Stay tuned here for upcoming details!

We are thrilled that Jack and Cheryl Buckley from Virginia will be participating in our Facebook stream this Sunday. Cheryl will be reading our Scripture and Jack has agreed to sing a special song for us - so appropriate for this time of year - “Mary Did You Know?” You won’t want to miss it!

Here are the songs we’ll be singing together Sunday morning: “King of Love” by Jesus Culture; “Living Hope” by Phil Wickham; “King of Kings” by Hillsong; “Joy Unspeakable Joy” by Chris Tomlin; and “God So Loved” by We The Kingdom.

I so look forward to worshiping with each one of you this Sunday. Hope you’ll join us! Love, Pastor Mark 

Richland County Goes Purple

Good Friday morning Church Requel!

I’m keeping my attitude positive when I say “Good Friday,” but the state map at the right shows us just how dangerous it is for many of us to be out and about these days. As we have feared, our beloved Richland County is now considered to be in the highest state of public emergency with regards to the Coronavirus.

So what does this mean for our worship plans at Church Requel?

We will continue to worship Sunday mornings at the church just as we have been. Here’s why. Very few of you are actually attending in real physical presence. We probably average less that 20 at the church each Sunday morning. Most of you are watching the stream online. We would encourage you to continue this pattern of watching LIVE or watching later. But please do continue to worship. It is so vital to your spiritual health.

By the way - we know many of you DO WATCH later. Over the last month we have had between 172 and 311 views of our worship services throughout the week. Yet we usually only have a couple dozen watch LIVE. 

For those of you who do want to come and worship with us. That’s ok too. We welcome you. We do ask that you continue to wear your masks and socially distance from others when you come. Let’s show our love to one another by protecting each other during these Covid high risk days.

Christmas Eve. We have decided to NOT offer our traditional candle-lighting worship service this year at the church. We believe this worship service - by far the most popular service that Church Requel offers each year - would be just too tempting for too many people to come and participate.

Instead, we will offer another streaming opportunity for you at 5pm on December 24th. Brandi and Eddie will join Mary Kay and me at our home, where we will offer an intimate Christmas Eve worship time together. More details to come, but for now keep the 5 o’clock hour open for your families to participate with us on Facebook Live.

Many Thanks To Mike... Speaking of our weekly worship streams on Facebook... Many of you know that we have been struggling with our external microphone the last couple of weeks. It’s been so frustrating because we have used this mic so successfully for this past year. Suddenly two weeks ago it just turned off every time we turned Facebook on.

One of our newer online viewers, Mike and Leanna Perdue, contacted me last Sunday afternoon and told me that they might be able to help with our mic problems. They have a fantastic YouTube channel, The Dry Campers, and know more than just a little bit when it comes to the technical details of streaming live videos.

Sure enough, by the end of our conversation, Mike had correctly identified the source of the problem. I have now dubbed him a member of our tech team! Don’t you just love how more and more of our online audience is participating in a very tangible way in our church?

This Coming Sunday. We are looking forward to our worship time together - either in person or streaming. Most of the worship team will be back together Sunday morning. Here are the songs we are planning to sing together: “If We Ever Needed You” by Casting Crowns (a new one for us!); “Waymaker” by Leeland; “Angels We Have Heard On High” - an upbeat version arranged just for Church Requel; “Jesus” by Chris Tomlin; and “Sing Wherever I Go” by We The Kingdom.

ALSO!!! Amy Watson will be singing a special song for us titled, “Children Of The Heavenly Father.”

We will continue our Wisdom sermon series from Proverbs. This week the title of Sunday’s Sermon is “Controlling Anger.”

Hope to join you all in worship Sunday morning! Love you much!!! Pastor Mark