Congregational Meeting, coming soon!

The First Church annual budget approval meeting will be held THIS SUNDAY, January 29, immediately following worship.

It is crucial that we have a quorum in attendance, so we can thoughtfully discuss and then approve a budget for 2023.

Your attendance and participation is enthusiastically encouraged!

Everybody's Birthday Luncheon is Back!! 

Please join us on Sunday, February 5th after church for a potluck and birthday celebration. If your last name begins with A-M, please bring a main dish for the potluck. If your last name begins with N-Z, please bring a salad or side dish. We also need people to "adopt a month" for the birthday celebration. Please sign up outside the church office to provide a dessert (cake or other) and table decorations for one of the months. If you have any questions, please direct them to the church office or to Sarah Colson at 440/774-2538.

Book Group

The First Church Book group meets via Zoom every Tuesday at 4 pm and ends at around 5:30 pm. To join, you just need to let the First Church Office know that you’d like to be on the list and you’ll receive an email invitation to the Zoom meeting every week. 

Have questions? Contact anyone in the Book Group Task Force which (roughly) organizes the meetings: Laurel Price Jones, Anne Elder, Heather Laughman, Lindsay Graves, or Linda Gates. 

Look ahead to see what books are being discussed. One book mentioned by Jeanne McKibben in her reflection on Sunday, October 30 - Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing - will be read and discussed in January. See the attached schedule.

There Are NEW Requirements for Making Submissions to our First Things First eNews!

In an effort to make our eNews more readable and shorten the length, we have created new guidelines for submitting posts! The guidelines are as follows.

1. As usual, the deadline for submissions for the upcoming First Things First is Wednesday prior to 10 AM.
2. We will not be putting in any non-First Church job postings.
3. We will not be putting in any full flyers as the submission (however, we will put in a button that links to a PDF of the flyer).
4. There is a word limit of 100 words for the text of a submission.
5. You may insert links into the text post for more information, either by button or hyperlink in the text.
6. You may insert PDFs (accessible by buttons) for more information, a flyer, or anything else that would be helpful for the post, but the document must be in PDF format. Any other document format will not be included in your submission.
7. You may send one picture that you have the rights to use (i.e. a picture that is not subject to copyright, we suggest using the site pexels.com).
8. The submission will run for a maximum of 2 weeks in the eNews. These 2 weeks do not have to be consecutive.

When sending in your submission, you must have

• The title of the post
• The text of the post (maximum of 100 words)
• Which 2 weeks you'd like for your submission to run

When sending in your submission, you could have

• If you'd like, one picture
• If you'd like, PDFs (and what you'd want the title of the button that links to it to be)
• If you'd like, the links for spots in the text post (and which word(s) you'd like to be the hyperlink or what you'd want the title of the button to be)

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we try to make our eNews experience more manageable for our readers!

Open and Affirming Committee Openings

June is Pride Month and a perfect opportunity for growth. (https://openandaffirming.org/ona/why/grow/). The Open and Affirming Committee (ONA) has openings. What is the ONA Committee you ask? It is a committee without meetings. It is a team of committed people supporting the ONA Statement of The First Church in Oberlin adopted in 1995 and amended in 2013. If you want to help make sure our congregation is living up to the welcoming and affirming spirit of the following statement, please contact Marty Buck @mbuck@oberlin.net or 440-225-7160 or a member of the Outreach and Service Committee @ outreach@firstchurchoberlin.org. Let us make the ONA Committee an ONA Team!

We know that as the Church we are many members but are one body in Christ. Each bringing individual pieces and gifts, only together do we find completion. With Christ we affirm that we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, and that we are called to act as agents of reconciliation and wholeness within the world and within the church itself. Recognizing the presence of ignorance, fear, and hatred in the wider church and in our culture toward specific members of Christ’s body:

We pledge to welcome people of all races, ages, genders, gender identities, gender expressions, abilities, socioeconomic levels, and sexual orientations into the full life and ministry of the church.

We seek actively to include and support those who because of fear and prejudice find themselves in exile from a spiritual community.

We commit ourselves to caring and concern for all.