Sunday, March 14 – (Daylight Savings Time)

10 a.m. Worship Service

Sunday School & Nursery Care

Sunday, March 21 -

10 a.m. Worship Service – Randall Shea, guest

Sunday School & Nursery Care

Sunday, March 28 – Palm Sunday

10 a.m. Worship Service led by Youth

Sunday, April 4 – Easter Sunday

10 a.m. Service of Communion and Worship

Sunday, April 11 –

10 a.m. Worship Service

Sunday School & Nursery Care

Sunday, April 18 –

10 a.m. Worship Service

Sunday School & Nursery Care

Sunday, April 25 –

10 a.m. Worship Service

Sunday School & Nursery Care

Youth Group meets Sunday, March 7th & 21st, April 11th & 25th at 5 p.m. for Kindergarten –

5th Grade

Youth Group meets Sunday, March 14th & 28th, April 18th at 5 p.m. for Jr/Sr High

Women’s Share Group meetings Thursdays at 7 p.m.

March 11th & 25th , April 8th & 22nd

Session & Deacon Meeting Sunday, March 21st & April 18th after Worship

Choir Practice on Wednesdays at 6 p.m.

Bell Choir Practice on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. If you are interested in joining, contact Marion

Davy, 823-3109.

Hope House volunteers needed for Saturday, April 17th. Contact Bob Paddock if you

can help cook or serve.

The Little Falls Presbyterian Church is first and foremost a mission church. All our

friends and members are encouraged, supported and challenged to be “followers in the way

of Jesus” in the world. For Jesus, compassion was the central quality of God and the central

quality of a life centered in God.

As followers in the way of Jesus our worship, education, fellowship and outreach

programs represent our faith community’s response to his call: “To be compassionate as God

is compassionate.” Our image of the church life, then, is to be shaped by an ever deepening

and life transforming relationship to the Spirit of this compassionate God revealed in the life,

teachings, and self-sacrifices of Jesus. Indeed, growth in compassion is a sign of our growth

in the Spirit. It is this life in the Spirit that provides direction for our everyday life in the

church and the world.

Practically speaking our mission church provides the training ground for schooling in

compassion where together we learn the ways of Jesus in the world. Taking our lead from his

teachings and open “table fellowship” our church is an inclusive fellowship uniting love and

learning that strengthens and enables us to be and share the “good news” of God’s

unconditional love. To paraphrase a quote from the Epistle of the Hebrews: “Let us consider

how to stir up one another to love and good works…not neglecting to meet together…but

encouraging one another.”

Please remember with your calls,

cards and visits those of our church

family who are not able to worship

with us.

Betty Buehler –Acacia Village Rm. #120,

Masonic Home, 2150 Bleecker St., Utica,

NY 13501

Naomi Dawson – Alpine Rehab &

Nursing Home, E. Monroe St., Little Falls

Wing Fisher – 676 E. Main St., Little

Falls

Ellen Gerdin –562 Garden St., Little Falls

Auline Martin– Alpine Rehab & Nursing

Home, E. Monroe St., Little Falls

Sherry McLaughlin – Masonic Home,

2150 Bleecker St., Utica NY 13501

Edna Skandera – Alpine Rehab &

Nursing Home, E. Monroe St., Little Falls

Evelyn Viskup – Pillsbury Manor, 20

Harbor View Dr., S Burlington, VT 05403

*****************

Pastor Noble conducts weekly services at

Alpine Rehab & Nursing Home (formerly

VanAllen’s) on Wednesday mornings at

11 a.m. Rev. Noble will also be

conducting a service at the Adult Day Care

program at Little Falls Hospital the third

Wednesday of each month at 1:30 p.m.

If you cannot serve on your scheduled

Sunday, please find a replacement and

contact the Church Office.

March 7 -

Usher: Judy McDowell

Communion Server: Carol Paddock

Elder Greeter: Keith Davy

Coffee Hour: Grace Family

March 14 –

Usher: Beth Regan

Elder Greeter: Stephany Daley

Coffee Hour: Beth & Kali Regan

March 21 –

Usher: Gayle Noble

Elder Greeter: Scot Nolan

Coffee Hour: Nolan Family

March 28 –

Usher: Deb Ackerman

Elder Greeter: William Walker

Coffee Hour: Roach Family

April 4 –

Usher: Laurie Unser

Communion Server: Suzanne Paddock

Elder Greeter: Steve Keyser

April 11 –

Usher: Judy McDowell

Elder Greeter: Keith Roach

April 18 –

Usher: Beth Regan

Elder Greeter: Anita Smith

April 25 –

Usher: Gayle Noble

Elder Greeter: Carol Paddock

The Church’s website has been updated.

The address is: www.presbylf.org

We also have a page on Facebook and

encourage everyone to take a look at the

videos that have been taken during our

Worship Services. The link is

Little Falls Food Pantry is in

desperate need of canned goods, cereals,

and other food items to replenish their

dwindling stock of supplies.

MARCH

3 Betty Buehler

6 Scot Nolan

17 Lois Miklich

26 Carol Paddock

APRIL

11 Sierra Ackerman

18 Olivia Nolan

20 Anna Smith

Auline Martin

An Affirmation of Faith

As Printed In Our

February 21, 2010 Bulletin

We believe that where people are

gathered together in Love God is

present and good things happen

and life is full.

We believe that we are immersed in

mystery that our lives are more than

they seem that we belong to each

other and to a universe of great

creative energies whose source and

destiny is God.

We believe that God is after us

that God is calling to us from the

depth of human life.

We believe that the nature and

character of God has been revealed

in Jesus of Nazareth.

In and with Jesus we believe that each

of us is situated in the love of God

and the pattern of our life will be the

pattern of Jesus – through self

sacrifice and an even deepening and

transforming experience of the Risen

Spirit of Christ.

We believe that this Spirit of

Compassion is present with us, the

Church, as we gather to celebrate

our common existence, and the

fidelity of God.

And most deeply we believe that in our

struggle to love we experience God’s

compassion in the world.

And so aware of mystery and wonder,

caught in friendship and laughter we

become speechless before the joy in

our hearts and celebrate the

sacredness of life lived by the power of

God’s Spirit revealed in Jesus.

Quotes to Ponder

“Why do people hate you? They’re

supposed to love you. And God is love.” –

A fourth grader’s question for President Obama at

a town hall meeting in New Orleans [ABC News,

October 15]

“We cannot continue transferring the

nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the

economic pyramid – which is what we

have been doing for the past three decades

or so – while hoping that someday, maybe,

the benefits of that transfer will trickle

down in the form of steady employment

and improved living standards for the

many millions of families struggling to

make it from day to day.” – Columnist Bob

Herbert, lamenting the large bonuses going to Wall

Street executives while the combined

unemployment and underemployment rates

approach 20 percent [New York Times, October

20]

“We doctors have many new ways to

prevent deaths from hypertension,

diabetes, and heart disease – but only if

patients can get into our offices and afford

their medications.” – Dr. Andrew Wilper, lead

author of a Harvard study that found that nearly

45,000 deaths each year are attributable to lack of

health insurance and that uninsured working-age

Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death

than their insured counterparts [American Journal

of Public Health, September 17].

SEEDS OF HOPE

Another outcome of the shattering of hope

is the “hardening of the heart”.

We see many peoplefrom

juvenile delinquents to hard-boiled

but effective adults –

Who at one point of their lives,

maybe at twelve, maybe at twenty,

cannot stand to be hurt any more.

Some of them, as in a sudden vision or

conversion,

decide that they have had enough;

that they will not feel anything anymore;

that nobody will ever be able to hurt them,

but they will be able to hurt others.

Having lost compassion and empathy,

they do not touch anybody –

nor can they be touched.

Their triumph in life is not to need

anybody.

Not so rarely, a miracle happens

and a thaw begins.

It may simply be that they meet a person

in whose concern or interest they believe,

and new dimensions of feeling open.

If they are lucky, they unfreeze completely

and the seeds of hope which seem to have

been destroyed altogether come to life.

A CARE FOR UNITY

Fill up my cup of happiness

by thinking and feeling alike,

with the same love for one another,

the same turn of mind,

and a common care for unity.

Rivalry and personal vanity

should have no place among you,

but you should humbly reckon others

better than yourselves.

You must look to each other’s interest

and not merely to your own.

BEFORE I BEGIN

Before I begin my day’s work, Lord,

I say a prayer to you.

All the strength I need comes from you.

You help me to be kind and patient,

sympathetic and understanding.

You understand my life, Lord.

It is the same as that of thousands of

others.

Yet it is still different, it is something you

give especially to me.

And since it comes from you,

I shall strive to believe in what is beautiful

and to strive for what is good.

Adapted from Women Before God

SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN

ANGRY GOD

“There is laid in the very nature of carnal man

the foundation for torments in hell. Your

wickedness makes you, as it were, heavy as

lead and to tend downwards with great weight

and pressure towards hell…The God that

holds you over the pit of hell, much as one

holds a spider, or some loathsome insect,

abhors you and is dreadfully provoked; His

wrath towards you burns like fire; He looks

upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be

cast into the fire. –Jonathan Edwards,

Northampton revival, 1750

WHAT WE HOPED

Most of us had hoped to be loved –

not just to be coddled and to be fed,

but to be understood,

to be cared for, to be respected.

Most of us hoped to be able to trust.

A VIEW OF THE WORLD

Some of the ablest,

most sensitive young people

in contemporary America

are engaged in varying forms of rebellion

because, to oversimplify matters,

they view the world

as an asylum in which the sick

have stolen the keys

and periodically lock up

those who cry out for reason.

(If you want to read any of the books listed

below, check with Cathy during the week or

Pastor Noble on Sundays.)

Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the

Neighborhood Church is Transforming

the Faith –Diana Butler Bass

Dr. Bass provides the reader to two

types of churches in America today. The

first is when Christian congregations are

gatherings of saints, then hellfire is the

sure result. Such communities must

maintain clear boundaries of who is “in”

(the saved) and who is “out” (the

unsaved). Saints believe specific things

bout God and morality, allowing for no

ambiguity or questions, and demonstrate

their faith by resisting everything they

deem idolatrous or evil. By its very nature,

this version of Christianity must extend its

reach in a quest to eradicate all forms of

sin that threaten the purity of the church.

In American history, the church as the

gathering of saints has been a persistent

form of Christian community.

The other form, the church as a hospital

for sinners, has been sometimes less

obvious in our national life. This vision

does not emphasize personal salvation in

terms of heaven or hell. Rather, this kind

of church recognizes that all human beings

are sickened by sin and need healing.

Faith is a matter of trust in God; morality

is enacting God’s justice; salvation is

God’s wholeness or shalom. This kind as

church comprises a variety of folks – some

with a variety of ills and some at different

levels of spiritual wholeness – all pilgrims

together on a Christian way. The

comprehensive church is a fundamentally

modest body, and it makes a few grand

claims about eternity and salvation.

Rather, these communities emphasize life

in this world. They offer ways of being

Christian, also called practice, that enable

people to live better and more faithfully in

God.

Crazy for God – Frank Schaeffer

By the time he was nineteen, Frank

Schaeffer’s parents, Francis and Edith

Schaeffer, had achieved global fame as

best-selling evangelical authors and

speakers, and Frank had joined his father

on the evangelical circuit. He would go on

to speak before thousands in arenas across

America, publish his own evangelical

bestseller, and work with such figures as

Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Dr.

James Dobson.

But while coming or age as a rising

evangelical star, Shaeffer felt increasingly

alienated, and as a result he experienced a

crisis of faith that would ultimately lead to

his journey out of the fold – even if it

meant losing everything.

An American Gospel: On Family,

History, and the Kingdom of God - Erik

Reece

Reece facing up to the legacy of a

shocking family tragedy. Finding

unexpected solace in the work of two

Thomases – the Jefferson Bible and the

Gospel of Thomas – Reece embarks on a

spiritual and literary quest to make peace

with his troubled American soul, an

attempt to join the strength of the faith he

grew up with to a conviction that this life

and this earth represent all that is holy.

The result is an intimate, inspiring book

about personal, political, and historical

demons – and the geniuses we must call

on to combat them.

“As the grandson of a fundamentalist

Baptist preacher in rural Virginia and the

son of a preacher, Erik Reece spent the

first eighteen years of his life as a

compulsory churchgoer. That was

followed by eighteen more years of trying

to extract himself from the church. After

doing that he wanted to create an

American gospel that was both religious

and democratic- a collection of readings

by American philosophers, poets,

utopians, and political and religious

leaders whose vision is relevant to our

country in the twenty-first century, people

like Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Walt Whitman, William James,

and John Dewey.” [Terry Gross, NPR’s

Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street,

Main Street, and Your Street – A Moral

Compass for the New Economy - Jim

Wallis

Getting back to “the ways things were”

is not an option. It is time we take our

economic uncertainty and use it to find

some moral clarity. Too often we have

been ruled by the maxims that greed is

good, it’s all about me, and I want it now.

Those can be challenged only with some

of our oldest and best values – enough is

enough, we are in it together, and thinking

not just for tomorrow but for future

generations.

Jim Wallis shows that the solution to our

problems will be found only as

individuals, families, friends, churches,

mosques, synagogues, and entire

communities wrestle with the question of

values together.

He argues persuasively that the financial

crisis is also a moral crisis. A vivid

storyteller and prophetic voice, he shows

how the worship of markets has led us

astray – and how repairing the economy

requires a moral awakening and a new

commitment to the common good. This

wise and helpful book points us toward a

new economy and a more spiritually

satisfying public life.

OUR COMMON LOT: Ethicist Daniel

Callahan asks why it is that the U.S. is the

only developed country that doesn’t

provide universal health-care insurance.

One reason is that Americans don’t have a

strong tradition of thinking about the

common good. Conservatives endorse

choice, freedom and competition – but

liberals don’t have a consensus on a

countervailing set of values. “Suffering,

disease, and death are our common lot,”

argues Callahan. “They ought to be dealt

with as our common problem…in the

recognition that we all have bodies that go

awry and fail.” (Commonweal, October

9).

*********

ATHEISM SCHISM: A rift is growing

in the atheist community. On the one side

are the militant “new atheists” like

Christopher Hitchens, who claim that

religion should be treated “with ridicule,

hatred and contempt.” On the other side

are old school atheists like Paul Kurtz,

who founded the Center for Inquiry 30

years ago to provide an alternative to

religion. Kurtz builds alliances with

religious groups on issues like addressing

climate change and opposing the teaching

of creationism in public schools. Kurtz

says he was ousted as director of the

center in a “palace coup” a year ago. “I

consider them atheist fundamentalist,”

Kurtz says of his atheist opponents

(“Morning Edition,” October 19, npr.org).

*********

LISTENING TO ILLNESS: Physicians

are apt to spend more time studying their

patients’ records on a computer than

listening to the patients themselves. The

economic pressure on medical

professionals is also crowding out time for

patients. And yet a patient’s own narrative

of his or her illness is as important as any

DNA analysis or MRI investigation, says

Dr. Jerome E. Groopman. “The most

seasoned clinicians teach that the patient

tells you his diagnosis if only you know

how to listen.” What is being lost is the

“compassionate, altruistic core of medical

practice,” Groopman says (New York

Review of Books, November 5).

*********

GAY MARRIAGE

Favor Oppose

White evangelicals 17% 77

White mainline 39 50

Black Protestant 25 66

Catholic 45 43

Unaffiliated 60 34

“To correct the serious evil of unexcused

absenteeism in Congress, the old rule has

been revived of practically fining members

by deducting from their pay the amount

for each day in which they fail to be

present except when sick or when detained

by some other legitimate reason.” –April

25, 1894

*********

SPIRITUALLY, THE STRONGER

SEX: In time for Women’s History Month

in March, the Pew Research Center’s

Forum on Religion & Public Life offered

new insight on sex and religiosity based on

a previous survey and finds that women

are more religious than men in a variety of

measures, including being more likely to

profess belief in a God, pray and attend

religious services than men.

Among the results, 86 percent of women

are affiliated with a religion, 77 percent

have absolutely certain belief in a God or a

universal spirit, 63 percent say religion is

very important in their lives and 44

percent attend worship services at least

weekly.

The results indicated that only 79

percent of men are affiliated with a

religion, 65 percent have absolutely

certain belief in a God or a universal spirit,

49 percent say religion is very important in

their lives and 34 percent attend worship

services at least weekly. – United Methodist

News Service

*********

SEBELIUS GOOD CHOICE

Evangelical Christian leaders dedicated to

common ground solutions on abortion

welcomed President Obama’s nomination

of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as

Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Pointing to her record of reducing

abortions in Kansas and commitment to

working with both parties to get results,

they issued a statement that read, in part:

“Under Governor Sebelius’ leadership,

abortions have decreased in Kansas by 10

percent, adoption funding and incentives

have increased, healthcare access for

women and families has expanded,

prenatal care has become more widely

available, and legislation protecting the

unborn from crime has become law. Such

a record demonstrates a commitment to

results rather than rhetoric on life issues.”

Her own Catholic bishop, who called on

her to stop receiving Holy Communion

until she alters her stance to oppose

abortion under all circumstances, has

criticized Sebelius’ abortion stance. –

Faith in Public Life

Subject: Acts2:38

A woman had just returned to her home from an evening of church services,

when she was startled by an intruder.. She caught the man in the act of robbing her

home of its valuables and yelled: 'Stop! Acts 2:38!' (Repent and be Baptized, in the

name of Jesus Christ , so that your sins may be forgiven.)

The burglar stopped in his tracks. The woman calmly called the police and

explained what she had done.

As the officer cuffed the man to take him in, he asked the burglar: 'Why did you

just stand there? All the old lady did was yell a scripture at you.'

'Scripture?' replied the burglar. 'She said she had an Ax and Two 38s!'

We are providing members and friends of the congregation the opportunity to purchase lilies

as a memorial for our Easter Service this year. The lilies will cost $15 per plant. (Checks

payable to the First Presbyterian Church)

Please complete the form below and return it to the church office by Sunday, March 28.

First Presbyterian Church

PO Box 613

Little Falls, NY 13365

**********************************

Your Name ______________________________________________________

I would like to order _____________ lilies.

I have enclosed a total of $ _______________.

I would like to present the lilies in honor/or in memory of: (wording for bulletin)

Please check one:

_________ My lily may be presented to a shut-in after church.

_________ I will pick up my lily after church.

Rev. Jon A. Noble, Pastor

Scot Nolan, Clerk of Session

Cathy Carpineti, Administrative Assistant

Joy Mayton, Organist/Choir Director

Marion Davy, Bell Choir Director

Beth Regan, Sunday School Superintendent

Scot Nolan, Clerk of Session

Melissa Brewer Stephany Daley J. Keith Davy

Stephen Keyser Keith Roach Suzanne Paddock

Carol Paddock Anita Smith William Walker