You are invited to the Worship Service on July 21st at 10 am. The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.

You can worship live on ZOOM by clicking the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9658816441      Meeting ID: 965 881 6441

You can also watch Sunday services at your convenience by going to our website “watsonville1stumc.org” and click YouTube or Facebook. Each Sunday worship will be uploaded on Sunday afternoon for your viewing.

Ordinary Time
Sunday, July 21, 2024, 10 am

Children’s Time: “How to Make Good Choices” by Pastor John

Special Music                     Kaulana Kawaihae                            John Song
Sung by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole

This is an old Hawaiian song called “Restful Kawaihae” that in the whispering sea tells of old Hawaii where time slows to eternity.

Message      “How to Make the Right Decision Every Time”       Rev. John Song

As we go through life we constantly make decisions, big and small. Some decisions, we are glad we made those choices. And some, we wish we could do them over. How can we make the right decision every time without regret? This message will be consequential for we only go around once.

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost, 1915

[“The Road Not Taken” is a narrative poem by Robert Frost, first published in the August 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and later published as the first poem in the 1916 poetry collection.]

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

You are invited to the Worship Serviceon July 14th at 10 am. The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.

You can worship live on ZOOM by clicking the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9658816441         Meeting ID: 965 881 6441

You can also watch Sunday services at your convenience by going to our website “watsonville1stumc.org” and click YouTube or Facebook. Each Sunday worship will be uploaded on Sunday afternoon for your viewing.

Ordinary Time
Sunday, July 14, 2024, 10 am

Message                                       “Climate Change”                                      Bob Culbertson

Bob Culbertson will deliver a message on Loving Our Neighbor and Loving Our Planet. Listed below are agencies who are striving to make a difference for humankind and our planet:

3CE: 3CE is dedicated to investing in the communities it serves through energy program rebates and incentives that assist 3CE customers with switching their homes, workplaces, and transportation from fossil fuel power to clean energy solutions. Visit 3Cenergy.org/energy-programs to learn more.

UMCOR: Your gifts ensure UMCOR can respond swiftly to disasters around the world and as a source of hope and healing for those left most vulnerable.

UNHCR: Right now, the UN Refugee Agency is on the ground delivering jackets, gloves, blankets, heating stoves, fuel and more. Your donation ensures refugees around the world receive the critical assistance they need to keep warm and safe this winter and year-round.

SC County Health & Human Services Department: The Human Services Department strengthens our community by protecting the vulnerable, promoting self-sufficiency, alleviating poverty and improving the quality of life of all county residents. Visit their website to learn more on how you can help! 

Watsonville Wetlands Watch Adopt A Shade Tree Program: You can help make Watsonville a cooler place to live by adopting a shade tree and planting it within 10 feet of the sidewalk or street. Call  831-728-1156 extension 3 or email [email protected] for more information. 

I thank You God for most this amazing day
For the leaping greenly spirits of trees
And a blue true dream of sky
And for everything which is natural,
which is infinite, which is yes
~ ee cummings

“The earth is not broken, but our relationship to the earth and
one another is broken. Restoring the earth without restoring
our relationship with the earth is an empty exercise.” 
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass

“Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank.”
~ Morning Star

You are invited to the Celebration of the Independence Day with Holy Communion on July 7th at 10 am. The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.

You can worship live on ZOOM by clicking the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9658816441         Meeting ID: 965 881 6441

You can also watch Sunday services at your convenience by going to our website “watsonville1stumc.org” and click YouTube or Facebook. Each Sunday worship will be uploaded on Sunday afternoon for your viewing.

Celebration of the Independence Day with Holy Communion
Sunday, July 7, 2024, 10 am

Children’s Time                        “American Revolution Quiz”                           Pastor John

Message                     “Othering: Us against Them in America”                  Rev. John Song

As we celebrate our Independence Day, we’ll take this opportunity to examine our divided nation where we find ourselves as Americans. In this critical moment in our young democracy, we are sorely tested and called upon to rise to the ideals of our founders.

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
~ Mark Twain

“Convince your government, as Abraham Lincoln understood that
the real threat always and still comes from within this favored land.”
~ Ken Burns

“The most important political office is that of the private citizen.
Vote.
You indelibly underscore your citizenship,
and most important, our kinship with each other when you do.”
~ Louis Brandeis, the early 20^th century U.S. Supreme Court Justice

“Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity, discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness, sacrifice over self-indulgence. Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology the word enthusiasm means simply, ‘god in us’. Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Denounce oppression everywhere.”
~ Ken Burns, the Key Note Speech to the Brandeis University’s 2024 Graduates

Abraham Lincoln and his mobile log cabin

You are invited to the Sunday Service on June 23 at 10 am. The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.

You can worship live on ZOOM by clicking the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9658816441         Meeting ID: 965 881 6441

You can also watch Sunday services at your convenience by going to our website “watsonville1stumc.org” and click YouTube or Facebook. Each Sunday worship will be uploaded on Sunday afternoon for your viewing.

Ordinary Time
Sunday, June 23, 2024, 10 am

Choir Anthem: “Abiding Love”
Words & Music by Gloria Roe

“Abiding love to me the Saviour’s given. Abiding love for now and evermore;
this love is free because a life was given, Abiding love for He our hatred bore.
Abiding love, the greatest story ever, can fill each heart if opened to his call.
So love Him now. This love He’ll never sever, Abiding love from Him, Who’s over all.
Abiding love has ever been commanded than love from Him Who died to save His friends;
so now should we, because this love is granted, Abide in Him, on Him we can depend.”

Message  “The Things We Carry” Haley Feuerbacher, Ph.D.

One of the powerful invitations of Juneteenth is to attend to what we’re carrying and what we’re passing on to our future generations. Each one of us is carrying stories, habits, and tendencies passed down to us by those who came before that were created out of trauma and pain – and we might not even realize that these are affecting our lives. In this message, we will be discovering how the stories of two enslaved persons four generations apart – a single mother named Hagar and a traumatized Hebrew man named Joseph – become transitional characters whose experiences of a God who sees their pain, hears their cries, and helps them dream a different reality help end a cycle of generational harm. These two resilient people, bound together across generations and differences, are our spiritual ancestors two, inviting us to consider that what we carry and what we pass on is crucial to how we participate in creating God’s kin-dom on earth as it is in heaven. Each of us is called to take brave, bold steps to become a transitional character in the story of our lineage – one who ends cycles of generational trauma and begins the cycles of generational healing.

“What’s past is prologue.”
~ a quotation of William Shakespeare from his play The Tempest

“Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank.”
~ Morning Star

You are invited to the Sunday Service on June 30 at 10 am. The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.

You can worship live on ZOOM by clicking the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9658816441         Meeting ID: 965 881 6441

You can also watch Sunday services at your convenience by going to our website “watsonville1stumc.org” and click YouTube or Facebook. Each Sunday worship will be uploaded on Sunday afternoon for your viewing.

Ordinary Time
Sunday, June 30, 2024, 10 am

Sunday School with Joan! 
First, children will be in worship. Following the Special Music,
the teacher, Joan Culbertson, will lead our children to the Nursery Room.

Choir Anthem:  “He Hideth My Soul”
Words by Fanny J. Crosby 
Music by William Kirkpatrick, Arranged by John Carter

Message                                              “Creative Rejoicing”                                       AR Pointer

Radical joy is more than just a feeling.  It’s an anthem to those who thrive against all odds.  An ode to beauty and a reminder that joy is both universal and individual.  We should unite in spreading it everywhere.  

Whenever you have the chance to help someone, be thankful for the opportunity.  It means you could be the answer to someone else’s prayer.

You are a spirit in a body, not a body with a spirit, so making the body beautiful is fun, but making the spirit beautiful is the main goal of life!

Choosing Joy
“Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. “Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us.” ~ Henri Nouwen

John 15:11
“I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you
and that your joy may be complete.”

“Lord, save us from somber saints.”
~ St. Teresa of Avila

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
~ John Milton, from Paradise Lost

“Unhappy souls always see happy souls as irritating.”
~ John Song

“You can’t spit at a smiling face.”
~ Korean Proverb

“In every genuine person, there is a child hidden who wants to play.”
~ Nietzsche