From Our

Global Mission Partners

Subj: World Communion Sunday

Date: 9/22/1999 9:53:47 AM Central Daylight Time

From: holatyj@cpsarg.com (Tim Bobbitt)

To: ccarkarm@aol.com (Bill Rose-Heim)

Hola and greetings from Argentina!,

We hope this letter finds you all doing well. We are enjoying our work

here with the church in Saavedra and the children at the community center

in La Tablada. Our church recently elected a new church board and they

will have their first meeting this week. Tim is excited about the new

leaders who are willing to serve the church. The Board has a good mix of

both ages and experience.

We celebrated the elections with a fellowship dinner of guiso, a type of

stew. The week before we shared the guiso, everyone brought something to

add such as carrots, potatoes or noodles and brought it up during our time

for offering. It was a great illustration for stewardship and the abundant

grace of God. We are thankful to the members of First Christian Church in

Hampton, Virginia who sent us the idea and a stone. We used the basic

premise of the book "Stone Soup" which speaks of making soup when you

think you have nothing. In our version, however, it was the whole

community who made the soup. Our translated and modified version of the

story was used as the children's message on the day we shared the guiso.

We also used the beautiful chalice and plate that we received from FCC in

Hampton.

We are working hard to reach out to our community. Our basketball program

has become a great place to meet new people (especially teenagers). We

also have a new knitting group which enables us to come into contact with a

different group of people. We are preparing for our yearly congregational

retreat at a local park on November 6th. Our theme this year is unity. We

are also celebrating the 80th anniversary of the church and the 55th

anniversary of "Risitas", the church nursery school. Joshua is enjoying

his time in the nursery school and is learning and growing every day.

Jodi continues to work at La Tablada Community Center. The children are a

challenging group as many live in abusive families and all in situations of

poverty. One of the teachers had the children bring in empty food

containers which they then used to set up a play supermarket. Playing

supermarket with teacher guidance is helping them learn new math and

reading skills. It is really amazing what can be done with so little.

Jodi has been doing a series of nutrition workshops in which she and the

children have made pizza from scratch and a wonderful food pyramid collage.

She also shared a recipe for using baked eggshells which are finely

crushed and added to the flour before the other ingredients are added.

This is an excellent and inexpensive source of calcium. The children were

so excited to help and eat their own homemade pizza that they didn't even

notice the eggshells. They are a group very much in need of love and part

of Jodi's job everyday is trying to share the love of God with each of

them.

We received a message from the 'World Convention of Churches of Christ'

that reads as follows. It was the founder of 'World Convention', Jesse

Bader, who in the 1940s established World Communion Sunday as a way of

celebrating the essential & intentional unity (globally and in each place)

of the Church of Jesus Christ. This is a further opportunity to lift up the

global work your congregation is involved in and to do something together

at a local level (October 3)..

We thought we would share it with you as World Communion Sunday is fast

approaching. We celebrate communion each week and so do the majority of

Methodist churches in Argentina due to the strong Disciple influence and

relationship between the two denominations. The most distinctive part of

communion in our church is that we all form a circle around the table each

week as we celebrate the Lord's Supper. We are planning to share our new

chalice with another Disciple/Methodist congregation as Tim is preaching

there on October 3rd.

Que Dios les bendiga, Jodi Josh and Tim Bobbitt

To send a greeting to Tim and Jodi and their congregation click here ® holatyj@cpsarg.com