Stewardship Updates

April is the month of renewal and hope. We begin it by pausing to honor the sacrifice and resurrection of our

Lord. As part of that Celebration, your Stewardship Committee wishes to report that 2018 pledges now total

$588,367.00. This meets our most ambitious expectations and we thank the 156 pledging parishioners for their historic commitment. The best news is that we have yet to hear from some of our 2017 pledgers. If they could simply renew at last year’s level, we would conclude this pledge season with over $620,000, which would advance our goal of strengthening Trinity Church’s financial position and set the stage for meeting the major financial obligations facing the congregation down the road.

In my last letter sent directly to many of our Genesis readers from whom we have not heard this year, we asked that you please complete a short survey so that, pledging aside, the Church and Father Banse can better understand whether you think the Church is doing all it can to help and serve you and the Lord. We ask again, please respond so that Trinity can remain your “home” during this year of change and uncertainty.

Many blessings of the Easter season,
Jim Hoecker
2018 Stewardship Chair

See Jesus Workshop

Vestry Updates

As always, Easter was a great day of celebration and worship at Trinity. In fact, the entire Holy Week was a moving period of reflection and meditation on Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Now we turn to the task of living as re- deemed people who serve God, one another and men and women in this community and beyond.

With that in mind, I would urge you to consider supporting one of Trinity’s most important events of the year. The Hunt Country Stable Tour is the pri- mary source of our outreach funding. It is what allows us to serve the people of Upperville, the surrounding area and men and women in crisis all around the world. The Tour can also attract those who are looking for a place to worship and have fellowship with other believers to Trinity. Stable Tour Chair Kat Gemmer and her committee have put together a wonderful itiner- ary. I would urge you to support the Stable Tour and the outreach work of Trinity.

Regards,
Matt Blunt

Stable Tour Update

The Stable Tour is well on its way to a successful 2018! The Farms and Events are set. Please check out our website for details about the fun filled Memorial Day Weekend and mark your calendars for May 26 and 27.

Our next task is to fill all of the farms with volunteers to oversee the grounds and activities. All head stewards have been selected and Jim Gemmer and Dorothy Gow will soon be contacting congregational members about farm slots. We are also taking advertisers for our booklet, so if you know of any businesses that might be interested contact Marylin Bigelow (marylinbigelow@gmail.com) or Kat Gemmer (gemmerkathryn@gmail.com). The church office is also able to answer any questions.

Donations continue to come in, but we still need your gifts. Please consider giving to this cause that uses all of the net proceeds to fund Outreach here at Trinity. I appreciate all of the support that each of you gives to the tour; it is such a blessing to be able to work for such an amazing tradition!

In Christ,
Kat

Easter Egg Hunt

Easter Sunday, April 1
12:00 Noon
For children up to 5th Grade
Bring your own basket! 

On Easter at Trinity it is our tradition that everyone would bring a dish to share for our coffee hour. Join us after church in Cox Hall for a wonderful spread of food, and for the Easter Egg Hunt at noon! 

Holy Week at Trinity

During Holy Week, the Holy Eucharist will be offered at noon on March 26, 27, and 28.

Palm Sunday March 25
8:00 AM Holy Eucharist Rite 1
10:30 AM Holy Eucharist Rite II
Both services will begin in the courtyard, weather permitting

Maundy Thursday March 29
Agape Dinner at 6:30 PM
Chili (A vegan chili will also be served) 
Worship at 7:30 PM
Holy Eucharist Includes Stripping of the Altar And a Service of Foot Washing 

Good Friday
Worship Service 12:00 Noon

Prayer Vigil
Thursday, March 29 at 10:00 PM - Friday, March 30 at 10:00 AM 

Easter Day Services

Sunrise Service
Sunday, April 1
6:20 AM
At the Outdoor Chapel of Trinity Episcopal Church

Sunday, April 1
Holy Eucharist & Celebration Worship
8:00 AM
10:30 AM 

Vestry Notes March 2018

The Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper was a nice way to commence Lent. Special thanks to Martha Williamson and the Parish Life Committee for the great decorations, and, of course, to the cooks who whipped up some great pancakes.

As we now continue through the Lenten season there are many opportunities to deepen our relationship with God – both individually and as a church body. I hope that each of you are experiencing a meaningful Lent and I also hope you will be able to participate in some of the discussions and studies that Trinity has between now and Easter. Our celebration of the Resurrection and what it means for us as individuals and for all of mankind will be here soon!I

Stewardship Chairman Jim Hoecker continues his excellent work on our stewardship pledge drive and we have enjoyed success. However, if we are going to meet identified needs on campus as well as enhance Christian education programs we still need more pledges. It is never too late to pledge and I am sure Jim will be follow- ing up with many of you to see if you can participate in 2018.

I am looking forward to a great March for Trinity and hope you and your family have a blessed season.

Upcoming Youth Group Activities

The Episcopal Youth Group has some exciting activities planned in the coming months. There are opportunities for fellowship, service and of course fun. Please join us and bring a friend to any of the events.

March 3- Ski Trip to Liberty Mountain. 8am at Trinity parking lot. There is a chance the mountain will not be open but we have a fun “plan B” if not, a trip to the water park in Massanutten. Contact Lisa White lwhite@longcompanies.com to sign up. Parent volunteers/ skiers also welcome. We will provide updates based on the weather late in the week.

March 11—Activity planning and SOME cookie bake - Following the 10:30 service we’ll meet to discuss your ideas and hopes for Youth Group and then bake cookies in the church kitchen for the church’s ministry to So Others Might Eat soup kitchen in Washington DC. A fun way to serve others less fortunate. Have a favorite recipe you want to make? Let us know so we can get all the ingredients you need. Contact Kevin Fox kfox@myviablevision.com (847) 971-4986.

Youth Sunday Service- Mother’s Day, May 13. We will discuss and help plan the service during Sunday youth meetings in April. Save the date.

Stable Tour Volunteering Memorial Day Weekend - Kat Gemmer and her team are hard at work for the Stable Tour planning and there is an important role for the Youth Group. This is your chance to shine and share your gifts with the community as we welcome people from across the region to Trinity.

Other events in the planning: Early Summer Canoe trip on the Shenandoah, Youth group fundraiser/ project, service project, bowling night, Shrinemont camp.

Parents please reach out to Kevin regarding your child’s availability/interest to participate in Youth activities. We are eager to set schedules and plan activities to make it as easy as possible for the most people to participate. Please encourage them to bring along a friend, being a church member is not required.

We are looking forward to a fun and thought-provoking spring and summer!

Flower Guild for Easter

All members of the Flower Guild are invited to help decorate the church for Easter.

We will meet at the church at 9 am on Saturday March 31.

Please bring flowering branches (forsythia, dogwood, etc.) as may be available. Thank you.

Stable Tour Update 2018

The Hunt Country Stable Tour of 2018 is well underway and we are excited to announce our farm list as well as kick off our donor campaign! For those of you wondering about the fabulous farms on tour this year they are (in alphabetical order): Atoka Farm, Belle Grey Farm, Foxmount Farm, Fox Chase Farm, Fox View farm, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Oak Spring farm, Middleburg Equestrian Center, the M.A.R.E. Center, Salamander Equestrian Center and Trappe Hill. The Sporting Library and Banbury Polo Club will also be free to ticket holders! What a wonderful line up, and even as March rolls in, we are busy planning events and organizing the tour!

Our donor campaign begins March 1st. We encourage everyone to contribute. Remember. All donations go directly to Outreach and all donations are 100% tax deductible. It is because of your generosity that our Stable Tour has been successful through this, the 59th year! Please look for your donation card in the mail, or go to https://trinityupperville.org/stable-tour-donate/ to donate directly online.

Finally. one of our goals this year is to continue to increase our online presence. We presently have over 2600 followers and our goal is 3000 to begin our season. We want everyone to go to Facebook and like our page! Encourage others, and don't forget to share our posts. That is Facebook page Hunt Country Stable Tour.

Our next Stable Tour meeting is Thursday, March 8 from 6-7pm in the Stable Tour Office. Please come and join our team! We would love to have you saddle up!

The Flowering of the Cross

The flowering of the cross has been traced back to the 6th century. It is an especially striking and beautiful way to symbolize the new life that emerges from Jesus’s death on Good Friday. Traditionally before the Easter Sunday service, the cross is covered with real flowers and the top draped in white. The entire cross is covered with flowers and is placed prominently at the front of the church to symbolize the new life in our risen Lord to all the worshippers present on Easter Sunday morning. The contrast between the starkly bare cross that worshippers have seen for 40 days and the living flower cross of Easter Sunday dramatically and visually represents the new life that we are celebrating after witnessing the very instrument of death and endings transformed by Christ's rising.

This year, as you come to Easter Sunday Service, pause by the cross and add some flowers to it. You can bring flowers from your garden, or you can place flowers from the bucket provided by the Flower Guild. The Sunday School children and Youth Group are encouraged to participate.

The Healing Ministry of Jesus Returns!

Trinity’s healing ministry is a group of people who feel called to participate in the healing ministry of Jesus. As part of this ministry, we meet weekly to pray for those on our parish prayer lists, the prayer request cards, and anyone we know of in need of prayer. We also offer prayer with laying on of hands after communion at the Sunday services and by request for those in need.

The Healing Ministry of Trinity Church will be offering a one-day course on the healing ministry of Jesus in an interactive Bible study. We will read and discuss Biblical accounts of Jesus’ healing ministry to understand how healing happened in Biblical times as well as it does today. We welcome anyone who would like to learn more about Jesus’ healing ministry and the healing ministry at Trinity. This course will be held on March 24th from 9am to 5 pm in the Peard House Living Room.

At the end of this study, any participants who are interested may continue in a one-day course on current Christian Healing Ministry Practices and Techniques. During this course we will study healing ministry training from prominent Christian Healers, including Agnes Sanford, Francis and Judith MacNutt and Leo Thomas to learn the “nuts and bolts” of healing prayer. This course will be held on April 28th from 9 am to 5 pm in the Peard House Living Room.

Anyone who is interested is invited to share in one or both of these healing studies. At the end of the training, you can decide whether you feel called to this ministry. If you are interested, please contact Ginny Fluet at vfluet@icloud.com or call at 540-869-0858 by March 15th.

Music News

For high school and college singers, Spring break often means going on a choir tour. I remember many years in my youth being jealous of my friends at the beach while I endured endless hours in a smelly bus, multitudes of meals of frozen lasagna in often smelly church basements, and restless nights on host family fold out sofas with, you guessed it, a smelly roommate. Mixed in there somewhere however, were many wonderful experiences. For a budding church musician, visiting a different church every evening for weeks on end was incredibly valuable, and getting to know host families was often extremely rewarding. Being on the other end of the choir tour spectrum gives me the privilege of providing this same opportunity for today’s students and hopefully making it smell a little better for them. 

On Monday, March 12 at 7:00 pm, the Schola Cantorum from Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ will give a concert here as part of their Spring tour. In addition to being my alma mater, Westminster is home to some of the finest choirs in the country so this should be a superb program. 

Hosting these student choirs is a wonderfully collaborative ministry for us to be involved in. We help provide an invaluable experience for the students and support them in their studies and in return they give us a beautiful musical experience which I hope you will all plan to attend. By getting further involved, we have the chance to get to know these students and share in their stories and they in ours. We are responsible for keeping the 70 Westminster students over Monday night so I hope many of you will consider signing up to give a group of students a comfortable bed for the night in your sweet smelling homes. I will be airing out the church basement and hope to provide this wonderful choir with a truly fragrant experience at Trinity Church. Sorry, I can’t do anything about the buses or roommates. 

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels, unaware.”

— Hebrews 13:2

Yes! I want to help host students from Westminster Choir College! 

How can I help? What are my next steps? We are so glad you asked those questions! 

Please contact Marguerite Sweeny 703-431-9962 / margueritesw@gmail.com, or Betsy Crenshaw 592-3343 / Betsy@TrinityUpperville.org 

Let us know a few things: 

• How many students would you be willing to host? 
• Would you prefer to house men or women? (Students are college sophomores). 
• Do you have dogs or cats? (A few students have allergies). 

The date: Monday, March 12, pick up after concert and return to church the next morning having been fed breakfast. 

Details will be provided closer to concert time. Thank you in advance! 

Pledge Campaign Update

February generally signals the conclusion, or a serious winding down, of Trinity’s annual “campaign” for pledge commitments that will see our Church through the year. Two observations. First, I am pleased to inform our parishioners that we have received 146 pledges, totaling $577,667. This includes 21 new pledges (families who did not pledge last year) and 33 others that increased their pledge from last year! We clearly have a solid core of Trinity members and disciples. For that I thank you most sincerely. Second, I regret that we have a number of families that pledged in 2017 but from whom we have not received a 2018 pledge. I am confident that, circumstances permitting, we will be hearing from you soon. To those parishioners and to the much larger number of members with connections to Trinity who have not contributed to our mission and activities in recent times, remember that a pledge in any amount, large or small, will signal to the Church that you are still part of our community and a disciple of the Lord. Because we want to know more about the perspectives and circumstances of those we lost touch with during the last pledge year, and to be of service to you any way we can, we will be in touch through the mails with a brief questionnaire. Father Banse and the Vestry are here for you if you wish to talk further about your relationship to Trinity Church. 

In sum, even as traditional pledge season is concluding, it is readily apparent that Trinity Church has financial needs that we must seek to meet in other ways. Last Sunday, the congregation heard an impressive presentation about our finances from our Treasurer Carol Miller. The news is very positive. However, like many churches and other institutions, Trinity Church must work and innovate to meet its obligations and the needs of its parishioners and missions. In that light, we cannot confine our offerings of support or discipleship to one part of the year or our planning efforts to any single year. Trinity depends on your faithful participation and support in all seasons. 

Worship or Concert?

What is it…worship or concert? 

What are its origins? 

The Anglican Office of Evensong, as established in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, resulted from the fusing together of elements from the Roman Offices of Vespers and Compline. Evensong, a liturgical pattern of psalms followed by lessons and canticles, always includes choral settings of the Magnificat, a hymn of praise expressing the joy and thanksgiving of The Virgin Mary following her Annunciation; and the Song of Simeon, a salutation of God’s promise of salvation as found in The New Testament. In addition to the singing of the established psalms and canticles, hymns and anthems are normally included in Evensong services today. 

“Evensong comes from a time when the arts were understood as a gift from God, meant to lead people into a deeper understanding and love of God. We moderns perceive a distinction between worship and performance that would not be audible to Evensong’s first hearers; for them, to listen to sacred music was itself an act of meditative devotion. Can you adjust your ears accordingly? 

Evensong was peace and solace. These people worked hard. From Water-Pic to John Deere, the machines that make our life easier were missing. Evensong at the end of the workday must have been a blessed rest to them. They didn’t have our expectation that the whole congregation should participate in the liturgy, sitting quietly for half an hour or so felt good. Can you put aside your labors and be at rest with Evensong? 

Evensong was delight. Sixteenth century Anglicans did not own CD players— understandably, since electricity had not yet been domesticated. They did not have the option of staying home and listening to sacred music in their own cottage, or even watching 60 Minutes. Evensong was an experience of special, extraordinary richness, a musical message about a beautiful, orderly transcendent reality that underlies the human experience of risk, pain, and need. Can you, through sacred rest, encounter this beauty and order? 

Finally, Evensong was an experience of unity. Modern Christians live out their faith in differing traditions of interpretation and practice, but in earlier times all the Christian people of a nation generally belonged to one church. The concept of “denomination” was unknown. Anybody and everybody in a community might show up at Evensong. They still do!” -- (copyright Pamela Grenfell Smith, 1998) 

S.O.M.E. News Jan 2018

January SOME Cooks
Kit Hemion, Ann MacLeod, Ellen Hall, Bob Eliot, Richard Taylor, Jolly deGive, Stephanie Knapp, Edie Smart, Nicky Perry 

January SOME Serves
Robin Keys, Lenny Schapiro, Jolly deGive, Gina Hammond, Ken Knapp, Margaret New 

An experienced crew of SOME cooks made the trip to Washington DC in January under mild weather conditions, successfully preparing lunch for about 350 guests at 71 O Street, NW. 

We entered a darkened facility fearing that the electricity was not operating only to learn that a new television system had just been installed in the din-ing room for viewing special programming. A movie was being previewed for some of the remaining breakfast patrons. The system will be put to the test on cold and hot days when venturing out on the street and into the elements poses a challenge, allowing diners to linger. 

Ken Knapp again manned the ovens and cooked eight cases of breaded Pol-lock to a delectable finish. Len Shapiro was at the bean stand. Ann MacLeod not only helped hand out plates but she assisted in preparing the rice casse-role for the ovens too. Jolly de Give, Gina Hammond and Margaret New worked along the serving line to place each sweet and savory item in a serv-ing cup. Robin Keys also assisted with the efforts. 

This was our first outreach effort of our 31st year of this ministry at SOME and as Ann commented, most of the long time staff and diners are well fa-miliar with our bountiful, well executed meal. They also recognize our faces if not our names and have gener-ally learned where Upperville, VA is located. Ann’s hat emblazoned with the words, “Upperville Mall” gener-ates much interest. 

Harriet Condon prepared a large tray of outstanding cornbread and many other parishioners contributed brownies, cookies, pastries and cakes. We are grateful for the generous support of our congrega-tion. 

Cooking in Cox Hall the previous day were: Ann MacLeod, Kit Hemi-on, Bob Eliot,, Ellen Hall, Richard Taylor, Jolly deGive, Stephanie Knapp, Edie Smart and Nicky Per-ry. We finished early thanks to Bob’s crack of dawn appearance. 

In March, we will be cooking in Cox Hall on Thursday, the 15th at 7:30am and serving on Friday, March 16, departing at 8:30am. Please consider joining us. Contact Ann MacLeod for more information at 592-3313 or use the sign-up sheet on the Cox Hall bulletin board to assure your spot. 

Lenten Study Series

Have you ever wished to deepen your relationship with God? To experience a warm friendship with God? Maybe even fall in love with God – again – or for the very first time? 

Starting on Wednesday, February 21, our rector, Rob Banse, will lead us in a five-week Lenten journey through prayer and reflection on The Gospel According to John. A light dinner of soup and salad will be served starting at 6:30 pm with the teaching session going from 7-8 pm. People may stay for the Service of Compline following the teaching session. 

Classes will be held February 21 and 28, and March 14, 21 and 28. Please note, there will be no session on March 7. 

This Lenten study is from the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE) and is spon-sored by Virginia Theological Seminary. 

Shrove Tuesday

Join us on: 
Tuesday, February 13
for our annual Shrove Tuesday celebration. 

The men of the church will be cooking us a pancake dinner. 

The dinner will run from: 
5:30-7:30 PM

This is a free dinner. All are welcome! 
(Decorations and set-up by the Parish Life Committee) 

Ash Wednesday 2018

February 13
Shrove Tuesday Pancake Feast
5:30pm

February 14
Ash Wednesday Worship
12 Noon & 7:00pm

“For dust you are, and to dust you shall return”

— Genesis 3:19 

Wednesday, February 14, 2018 marks the beginning of Lent, a season of reflection and introspection in preparation for Holy Week and Easter. 

Lent begins with the celebration of Ash Wednesday. On Ash Wednesday we will have 2 services, one at noon and one at 7:00 PM. We encourage everyone to participate. 

The services will include both the Holy Eucharist and the imposition of ashes. During the imposition of ashes, the rector will take ashes (from the burning of the previous year’s Palm Sunday palms) and will make the mark of the cross on each congregant’s forehead. The imposition of ashes is a reminder of our mortality, and our total reliance on God. 

Choral Evensong