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Monthly Archives

September 2022

2022-10-02 Hybrid Worship

By Intersections, Newsletters, Sermons

You have found a place to encounter God and people who care about you – just as you are, right where you are, anytime. Our welcoming, energizing, community worship premiers at 10:30 AM every Sunday in the beautiful and historic Red Brick Church. We are fully accessible and street and lot parking is available. Stay for our Hospitality Table following worship. Get news and event information in your inbox every week by subscribing to our weekly Connections email newsletter. Sign up here!

Get Your Worship Guide (Click here)

A limited number of Worship Guides are available in the Narthex. Download your Worship Guide that includes a message and music preview, Scripture readings, prayers, community news, and much more! Click the link above.

Worship with us on YouTube (click here)

You can worship with us anytime on our YouTube Live channel. Enjoy the previous week’s messages and music, too, or share worship with a friend!


Read the Message and Music preview! This week, find out why you need a bicycle for your spirit!

Message Preview

There are bike trails like the Cold Spring Bike Path just north of us in Erma, the path along the old Cape May Seashore Line’s railroad bed, and the bike trail connecting Cape May City with Cape May Point and the state park. Last week hundreds of competitive bicycle athletes and enthusiasts rode through our area, some enjoying a side trip through our beautiful campus. While there are substantial health benefits to riding or exercising on a bike, we will discover even more about the bicycle. 

This week’s Gospel reading from Luke 17 starts with the disciples asking for more faith to meet a particularly thorny forgiveness problem. When you think about it, to forgive you really need to have faith! Surprisingly, Jesus explained to the disciples that to forgive big, all they needed to do was put what “little faith” they had into motion! Faith in motion results in forgiveness.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” -Albert Einstein

Faith is a bicycle for the spirit. And when faith is in motion, amazing things happen! There’s a vast difference in outcomes between riding a stationary bike and a moving bicycle. We’ll learn about a Scientific American study that evaluated which species on the planet was the most efficient in locomotion. While the mighty condor was above any other species, beating even a human in an automobile, it was a human riding a bike that blew the condor away from its top spot! In a message titled Faith: Bicycle For the Spirit (A Way to Forgiveness), we will learn how to get our faith in motion. Cold Spring Church is your neighborhood stop for a faith that moves you!

Music Preview

Following the message, we will be inspired by Jonathan Rundman’s Forgiveness Waltz. Jonathan is from Finland and was recently called as pastor of a Lutheran church in Minnesota. Jesus’ message of grace, of how loved we all are, as we are, is like a dance of forgiveness. 

Our sending hymn, Faith Begins By Letting Go, affirms that faith is not a state of being but a process of doing, becoming what we are called to be in relationship to God, other people, and the world. The movement from one stage of faith to another is suggested by gestures of the hand: letting go, holding on, reaching out.

Whatever your religious affiliation, or none at all, we all hear Jesus say, “Come to me all who are overburdened, and find rest for your soul!” Everyone is welcome at Cold Spring Church. Yes, everyone!

Enjoy sitting with others from greater Cape May as we worship together. We simplified our service and made it even easier to participate, with our Worship Guide and lyric videos displayed on a large screen.

Worship anytime on YouTube Live!
(click here)

Physical distancing and masks are recommended but are not required!

You have found a place to encounter God and people who care about you – just as you are, right where you are, anytime. Subscribe to our weekly Connections email newsletter. Sign up here!

Energize your life and discover the amazing love of Jesus! This week is the perfect time to join us in person for worship. Enjoy live music and solo, lyric videos, and a message of hope from God’s word.

We are excited to welcome you to worship in our historic Red Brick Church that premiers on Sundays at 10:30 AM.

2022-09-25 Hybrid Worship

By Intersections, Newsletters, Sermons

You have found a place to encounter God and people who care about you – just as you are, right where you are, anytime. Our welcoming, energizing, community worship premiers at 10:30 AM every Sunday in the beautiful and historic Red Brick Church. We are fully accessible and street and lot parking is available. Stay for our Hospitality Table following worship. Get news and event information in your inbox every week by subscribing to our weekly Connections email newsletter. Sign up here!

Get Your Worship Guide (Click here)

A limited number of Worship Guides are available in the Narthex. Download your Worship Guide that includes a message and music preview, Scripture readings, prayers, community news, and much more! Click the link above.

Worship with us on YouTube (click here)

You can worship with us anytime on our YouTube Live channel. Enjoy the previous week’s messages and music, too, or share worship with a friend!


Read the Message and Music preview! This week, find our where Charles Dickens’ inspiration for A Christmas Carol came from!

Message Preview

As a faith community, we transform lives as we fulfill our mission to make greater Cape May a better place in the name of Jesus Christ. We are delighted that more and more of us are returning to outdoor activities and in-person  worship. (Remember that a great way to support our mission is to invite someone to worship with you!)

As we improve our spiritual energy, we demonstrate God’s welcoming love to our entire community because nobody wants to be a Scrooge! We don’t even want to be around those who act like the protagonist from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. But we know that more than just individuals can ignore, disrespect, mistreat, and abuse others. Communities, organizations, groups, and nations can create or tolerate Scrooge-like behaviors and policies that adversely affect the least and the lost. Our mission is to work together to promote positive, trusting interpersonal relationships that improve hopefulness and reduce feelings of isolation. Healthy communities of every kind boost health, happiness, and longevity.

God sent Jesus to close gaps between our Creator and us, between individuals, to heal the divides of religion, gender, politics, and wealth. We can and must tangibly reveal our unity in Christ, here and now. The apostle Paul wrote, “When we have the opportunity to help anyone, we should do it” (Galatians 6:10a). In this week’s message from Luke 16, The Case of the Invisible Neighbors, we will hear Jesus’ story about a rich man who neglected his neighbor. More than a morality tale, we will consider how the radical nature of Jesus’ mission inspired Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Who will you be inspired to notice? Even Scrooge was inspired to change and treat others differently! All this and more this week at Cold Spring Church.

Music Preview

Our music video is Chris Tomlinson’s Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone). After a chance encounter on a plane, a producer asked Chris to write music for his upcoming Amazing Grace movie. The movie is about William Wilberforce’s work to abolish slavery in Europe. He wrote a chorus, My Chains Are Gone, to the well-loved traditional hymn. Chris says he never thought his version would be so popular in churches worldwide. (You can stream Amazing Grace (2006) starring Albert Finney, Benedict Cumberbach, and Toby Jones on Apple TV and Prime Video.)

We close today with a Carolyn Gillete hymn, Outside My Gate, Outside My Door, inspired by Jesus’ story of Lazarus on was dropped outside the rich man’s gate (Luke 16:19-31).

Whatever your religious affiliation, or none at all, we all hear Jesus say, “Come to me all who are overburdened, and find rest for your soul!” Everyone is welcome at Cold Spring Church. Yes, everyone!

Enjoy sitting with others from greater Cape May as we worship together. We simplified our service and made it even easier to participate, with our Worship Guide and lyric videos displayed on a large screen.

Worship anytime on YouTube Live!
(click here)

Physical distancing and masks are recommended but are not required!

You have found a place to encounter God and people who care about you – just as you are, right where you are, anytime. Subscribe to our weekly Connections email newsletter. Sign up here!

Energize your life and discover the amazing love of Jesus! This week is the perfect time to join us in person for worship. Enjoy live music and solo, lyric videos, and a message of hope from God’s word.

We are excited to welcome you to worship in our historic Red Brick Church that premiers on Sundays at 10:30 AM.

2022-09-18 Hybrid Worship

By Intersections, Newsletters, Sermons

You have found a place to encounter God and people who care about you – just as you are, right where you are, anytime. Our welcoming, energizing, community worship premiers at 10:30 AM every Sunday in the beautiful and historic Red Brick Church. We are fully accessible and street and lot parking is available. Stay for our Hospitality Table following worship. Get news and event information in your inbox every week by subscribing to our weekly Connections email newsletter. Sign up here!

Get Your Worship Guide (Click here)

A limited number of Worship Guides are available in the Narthex. Download your Worship Guide that includes a message and music preview, Scripture readings, prayers, community news, and much more! Click the link above.

Worship with us on YouTube (click here)

You can worship with us anytime on our YouTube Live channel. Enjoy the previous week’s messages and music, too, or share worship with a friend!


Read the Message and Music preview!

Message Preview

Taking care of ourselves is good advice. Cold Spring Presbyterian Church provides resources for you to experience abundant life through Christ. All of us invest a great deal of our time, energy, and attention in accomplishing our whole-life wellness, which we can call our standard of living. The Bible speaks a lot about our standard of living, the standards that show our love for God and others, and how we measure the standard of living we achieve. We also pay attention to all aspects of our life, mind, body, and spirit. Our time, energy, and talents are exchangeable for the resources we need to maintain or improve our standard of living.

This week, an overlooked and misunderstood parable of Jesus about a business manager will show us how his standard of living flows out of his standard of giving. (Fun Fact: Did you know that 38 parables deal directly with money? Yes! And in the Bible, more than 2,000 verses are about money and possessions!)

In our Gospel reading from Luke 16, we may discover a redeeming quality in a dishonest manager as we spend, save, and give, each according to our unique life experiences.

Music Preview

Rev. Larry Moyer will sing, Just a Little Talk with Jesus, written by Rev. Cleavant Derricks, pastor of a small African-American church in Alabama. He wrote the song during the Great Depression. Money was already tight during these difficult times, but his church was in terrible need of new hymnals. Rev. Derricks found a publisher, Stamps-Baxter, and contacted them. He stated he needed hymnals and did not have the money to purchase them while offering a bargain. Would the publisher accept his songs to provide hymnals for his church? The publisher bought just two of his songs. Rev. Derricks is said to have received fifty hymnals in exchange for the rights to his music. This song became one of the best-loved southern gospel songs within a few years.

Our lyric video hymn is God of the Poor (Beauty for Brokenness) by Graham Kendrick. It was commissioned by Tear Fund and originally recorded in 1993 for the Spark to a Flame album and re-recorded for 2011’s Very Best of Graham Kendrick. The theme reflects our reading from Amos about our responsibility to not only care for our neighbors, but to work for justice.

We will conclude worship singing God Whose Giving Knows No Ending. The musical setting grounds these inspiring words, an early American shape-note tune named for a Baptist church in Harris County, Georgia. The Hymn Society of America received more than 450 submissions searching for a new hymn about whole-life stewardship, and God Whose Giving Knows No Ending was their favorite.

Whatever your religious affiliation, or none at all, we all hear Jesus say, “Come to me all who are overburdened, and find rest for your soul!” Everyone is welcome at Cold Spring Church. Yes, everyone!

Enjoy sitting with others from greater Cape May as we worship together. We simplified our service and made it even easier to participate, with our Worship Guide and lyric videos displayed on a large screen.

Worship anytime on YouTube Live!
(click here)

Physical distancing and masks are recommended but are not required!

You have found a place to encounter God and people who care about you – just as you are, right where you are, anytime. Subscribe to our weekly Connections email newsletter. Sign up here!

Energize your life and discover the amazing love of Jesus! This week is the perfect time to join us in person for worship. Enjoy live music and solo, lyric videos, and a message of hope from God’s word.

We are excited to welcome you to worship in our historic Red Brick Church that premiers on Sundays at 10:30 AM.

2022-09-11 Hybrid Worship

By Intersections, Newsletters, Sermons

You have found a place to encounter God and people who care about you – just as you are, right where you are, anytime. Our welcoming, energizing, community worship premiers at 10:30 AM every Sunday in the Red Brick Church. We are fully accessible and lot parking is available. Stay for our Hospitality Table following worship. Get news and event information in your inbox every week by subscribing to our weekly Connections email newsletter. Sign up here!

Get Your Worship Guide (Click here)

A limited number of Worship Guides are available in the Narthex. Download your Worship Guide that includes a message and music preview, Scripture readings, prayers, community news, and much more! Click the link above.

Worship with us on YouTube (click here)

You can worship with us anytime on our YouTube Live channel. Enjoy the previous week’s messages and music, too, or share worship with a friend!


Read the Message and Music preview!

Message Preview

Happy birthday, football! Football is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Football League (NFL) today. Football is any game where you kick a ball with your foot on a linear field of play, including soccer and rugby. The goal is to get the ball to your opponent’s end zone for a touchdown. The NFL generated 15.26 billion dollars in revenue in 2019 and is the most profitable sports league in the United States. Total attendance at NFL games reached a record 18.29 million fans across the regular season in 2021. Increasingly football is beating out baseball as America’s favorite sport. This week football may also become your favorite metaphor for our spiritual life in Christ!

Living rooms and stadiums will erupt with shouts and cheers for a touchdown. But like watching the football move up and down the field, the forces of good and evil can be seen to compete. Sin can seem on the offense, putting the most points on the scoreboard. Too infrequently, though, spiritual goodness appears to be winning. The Apostle Paul spoke about the personal struggle of wanting to do good (Romans 7:18-19). Paul told Timothy about his spiritual progress as he learned to grow and mature, make better choices, living his best life in Christ (1 Timothy 1:12-17).

In our Gospel reading from Luke 15, we celebrate when God’s goodness wins. In the story about the lost sheep, Jesus wants us to realize that more important than a football crossing into the end zone is when even one person responds in faith to Jesus. With Jesus, a touchdown is an expression of repentance, and a pattern of repentance and faith, that elicits huge cheers in heaven! There is joy in the presence of the angels when one sinner repents, then for the ninth-nine righteous who need no repentance (Luke 15). The faith community can be a place of celebration as we discover The Gridiron Gospel and pick up the ball of faith this week at Cold Spring Church.

Music Preview

We begin with our countdown to worship video that sets the theme for our experience today. God welcomes all of us, right now, without exception! Barbara Cain will sing I Could Never Outlove the Lord, accompanied by Jayne McDonough. Following the message we will be moved by an energetic music lyric video, Chief of Sinners Though I Be, recalling our New Testament Reading where the Apostle Paul uses that phrase to describe himself and the astonishing good news that by God’s grace he celebrates all that Christ is doing for him. We will put our faith into action singing our sending hymn, O For a World. Everything longed for in the lyrics is a reminder of how far our present world is from what God wants. Yet this is not just wishful thinking; it is a call to action, a summons to participate in the fulfillment of God’s desire for all earth’s people to live in radical shalom because Christ lives in and through us.

Whatever your religious affiliation, or none at all, we all hear Jesus say, “Come to me all who are overburdened, and find rest for your soul!” Everyone is welcome at Cold Spring Church. Yes, everyone!

Enjoy sitting with others from greater Cape May as we worship together. We simplified our service and made it even easier to participate, with our Worship Guide and lyric videos displayed on a large screen.

Worship anytime on YouTube Live!
(click here)

Physical distancing and masks are recommended but are not required!

You have found a place to encounter God and people who care about you – just as you are, right where you are, anytime. Subscribe to our weekly Connections email newsletter. Sign up here!

Energize your life and discover the amazing love of Jesus! This week is the perfect time to join us in person for worship. Enjoy live music and solo, lyric videos, and a message of hope from God’s word.

We are excited to welcome you to worship in our historic Red Brick Church that premiers on Sundays at 10:30 AM.