CCC Gainesville | Blog
Welcome back to another Fall! We want to introduce you to each of the teachers that will be teaching your children this year.
Ashley and Adam Means
Ashley is the lead teacher in the Preschool class room. Adam is her primary assistant and they are going into their third year of teaching the 3 to 5 year olds at Christ Community Church.
Ashley and Adam have four children, Avery, Ally Claire, Alan and Ace.
Ashley has been teaching children for 15 years.
The Means’ have been a member at CCC for 7 years,
A few little details about Ashley when asked about herself:
I love to eat baked goods and drink iced coffee, spend time with my family, read, organize, play with our dog, and enjoy nature.
When asked why she teaches, and what she enjoys about teaching the Preschoolers at CCC:
I love to teach and communicate truths from the Bible. I love to see a child’s face as they begin to understand new concepts. And I like to develop meaningful relationships with the students.
***If your child is moving up from the Toddler room or enjoying another year in the Preschool room Ashley and Adam will be teaching during the 9am service. We are looking forward to another wonderful year in the Preschool room!
In today’s weekly email there was a quote that I submitted:
“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven…The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
This was an example of poor history and scholarship that is out there and was popularized by Dan Brown. It wasn’t earmarked as such in the weekly email and it should have been.
If you want to know a more biblical view, here’s one from JI Packer, writing of those who believe that a revelation delivered by sinful and ignorant human beings must itself be imperfect he states:
But this is to deny the biblical doctrine of providence, according to which God ‘worketh all things after the counsel of his own will’. The Bible excludes the idea of a frustrated Deity. ‘Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth’. He was well able to prepare, equip and overrule human writers so that they wrote nothing but what He intended; and the Scripture tells us that this is what in fact he did. We are to think of the Spirit’s inspiring activity, and, for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality, as (to use an old but valuable technical term) concursive; that is, as exercised in, through and by means of the writers’ own activity, in such a way that their thinking and writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elicited and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God’s work.
Its been so long since we have seen many of our families that I feel we need to say, “Welcome Back!”. I pray all of you had wonderful Summers, full of rest and family and friend time.
School for many of us starts on Monday the 20th. The beginning of school can be a hectic time for many, a time of first’s (our family will experience our first kindergartener), a time of approaching lasts, new things and a returning routine of old things. We hope in this time of flux that you may be experiencing that you find peace and joy among your fellow believers at CCC this Autumn.
We have a lot of changes going on so we hope this post will be helpful.
This coming Sunday, the 19th of August, will be our Back to School Kick-Off! This is the Sunday your children will move up into their next class level. This Fall we will offer:
Infants Class: 0-2 years
Toddlers Class: 2-rising three year olds
Preschool: Three-rising 5 year olds
Kindergarten-1st grade
2nd – 3rd grade
4th – 5th grade
These classes will be offered during both the 9am and the 10:30am hours.
All children are encouraged to bring their BACKPACKS to church on Sunday. During the 9am service the teachers will be welcoming the children to their new classes, this is a great time to meet your teachers and show your child around their new class rooms. During this hour the teachers will also spend a period of time talking about going back to school, praying for the children and encouraging them for the new school year. During the 10:30 am service the teachers will also be welcoming the children to their new classes, and during the morning prayer time, taking a special moment to pray a blessing on each child (while wearing their backpack–to acknowledge the child wearing his/her pack goes places we cannot be).
Finally this Sunday at the welcome station will be these wonderful little devotional boxes. They can go along with the curriculum being used during the first hour, or independently. This family devotional uses several methods that we are using more and more over time. They include; reading from the REAL bible, not a kids story bible (not that there is anything wrong with the kids bibles, we love our Jesus Storybook Bible) but this allows children to learn how listen to actual scriptures, prayer writing, wondering about the passage (“How do you think Mary and Martha felt when Jesus didn’t come in time to heal Lazarus?”), prayer and narration. If your family would like to use one of these devotionals this year please stop by the Welcome Station and ask to check them out.
***Please try to check the church blog regularly as this is our main source of information and communication.
We are so excited for the good things God has in store for this year!
Growing in Grace
Holli and Harmony
Girls and leaders sharing a meal. They (grades 8-12) are in Daytona for a retreat on r’ships and dating.
Habakkuk 2:4 is a classic place where we’re taught the idea that God mercifully works to make us His own. Here’s more:
1.) Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.
–From the Westminster Shorter Catechism
2.) We believe that Christ, by his obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those who are justified. By his sacrifice, he bore in our stead the punishment due us for our sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice on our behalf. By his perfect obedience he satisfied the just demands of God on our behalf, since by faith alone that perfect obedience is credited to all who trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God. Inasmuch as Christ was given by the Father for us, and his obedience and punishment were accepted in place of our own, freely and not for anything in us, this justification is solely of free grace, in order that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners. We believe that a zeal for personal and public obedience flows from this free justification.
–Point 8, The Justification of Sinners in the Gospel Coalition Confessional Statement
3.) The doctrine of justification, the storm center of the Reformation, was a major concern of the apostle Paul. For him it was the heart of the gospel (Rom. 1:17; 3:21-5:21; Gal. 2:15-5:1) shaping both his message (Acts 13:38-39) and his devotion and spiritual life (2 Cor. 5:13-21; Phil. 3:4-14). Though other New Testament writers affirm the same doctrine in substance, the terms in which Protestants have affirmed and defended it for almost five centuries are drawn primarily from Paul.
Justification is a judicial act of God pardoning sinners (wicked and ungodly persons, Rom. 4:5; 3:9-24), accepting them as just, and so putting permanently right their previously estranged relationship with himself. This justifying sentence is God’s gift of righteousness (Rom. 5:15-17), his bestowal of a status of acceptance for Jesus’ sake (2 Cor. 5:21). –JI Packer, article on justification
