Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Advent Meditations - 1990
[The following are Janet Tharpe's and Linda Mudd's introductory comments to the 1990 Advent Booklet. Since the writings selected were from those already uploaded they are not copied again here. -- JWA, 12/2000]
1990 Introduction (Janet Tharpe, Linda Mudd)
Dear Crescent Hill Family:
Welcome to the 15th Edition of Crescent Hill's Advent booklet it was fifteen years ago that Crescent Hill started an annual tradition of preparing an Advent booklet of daily devotionals, written by church members, as a way to provide a devotional focus for the congregation during Advent. Two years ago, the Advent booklet was extended by eight devotional meditations in order to include the time in the church year up to Epiphany which occurs each year on January 6th.
This year's book has been entitled, "And the WORD became FLESH, in friends who are family and family who are friends." The title joins together the memory of the first Incarnation of God in Jesus with God's on-going revelation and incarnation of God's self through other persons. The first part of the title is, of course, a portion of John 1:14 and the latter phase comes from Grady Nutt who coined it and used it often to describe the kind of family-friend-fellowship that he experienced and treasured at Crescent Hill Baptist Church. It is this incarnational family-friend-fellowship that this anniversary edition of the Advent booklet is designed to highlight as we prepare, once more, as a church for
the celebration of the Incarnation.
No new Advent meditations were solicited for this year's booklet. Instead, 36 meditations were selected from the past fourteen years' of Advent books because for us, your editors, the idea of a family-friend-fellowship and a 15th anniversary prompted us to think along the lines of a "family reunion" kind of theme as we selected the meditations and graphics for this year's book. So you will note in the pages ahead, that we have "reunited a number of writers: half of them are no longer local members of our congregation. We have included their addresses, as well as the addresses of the writers who are still local, at the end of each section to encourage you to perhaps make some "reunions" of your own through correspondence. In addition, many of the missionaries who are listed throughout this booklet also have Crescent Hill connections of some kind, and their addresses have been listed as well. As a special feature, we have even included some pages with the quilt pattern graphics along their border, at the back of this booklet, that you might choose to utilize as stationery. (Or you may choose to use them as journal pages for some of your own reflections or memories during this Season.)
We hope that you will enjoy the quilt pattern graphics and that they will convey to you the sense of heritage and history and home that they symbolized for us when we chose them to represent our theme of family-friend-fellowship. Perhaps you will even be inspired to pull out family quilts that you have in your home and tell their stories to your children or your friends.
Finally, editing this 15th Anniversary edition Advent booklet has been a very rich experience. Going through the past 14 years of booklets and reviewing the names of the writers has been like looking through a family picture album with all its names and memories. If you have kept your books from past years, we would like to encourage you to indulge yourself in a treat and set aside some quiet time this season to look through them again and remember and give thanks.
Christmas blessings to all of you!
-- Janet Tharpe and Linda Mudd, editors
Advent 1990 © 1990 by Crescent Hill Baptist Church, 2800 Frankfort Avenue, Louisville, KY 40206. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher.
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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