Wednesday 11am: Bible Study

Wednesday 4:30pm: Children’s Choir Rehearsal

Wednesday 7pm: Bible Study

Wednesday 7pm: 11:15am Choir Rehearsal

Thursday 5:30pm: Contemplative Prayer 

Thursday 7:30pm: 9am Choir Rehearsal

Thrift Shop: Monday 10am-Noon, Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-1pm

Our word of the week from The Episcopal Church glossary is Adoptionism. Adoptionists deny that Jesus has always been God the Son and that he was born divine, and instead believe that he was purely human and became divine by being adopted by God the Father. They often say that this happened at Jesus’ baptism, the feast day we will celebrate this Sunday. The Church declared this to be a heresy, not to be believed by Trinitarians. It’s not the worst heresy, but it ain’t good. 

Sunday School classes for children and adults are held on Sundays at 10:30am. The adult class will be starting a long cycle of stories – Samuel, Eli, Saul, David, and Solomon, and many more characters; Father Todd is recovering from his nasty cold and is really looking forward to starting up the Sunday School class for adults this Sunday!

Tomorrow (Saturday, January 12th), youth from the parish are invited to attend a moving ceremony and to learn about a religious tradition different from our own. This past week, Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Gaden Shartse Monastery in India have been creating a giant mandala (a diagram of the cosmos) in Cameron Park out of sand. Other than its painstaking construction, the most important part of this ritual is when the sand mandala is dismantled in a ceremony meant to symbolize the transitory state of life and nature (If you are a fan of House of Cards, you may remember this particular plot device!

If your youth has any interest, please let Fr. Charlie know ASAP. We’ll leave from the church at about 6:20pm. The ceremony begins at 7pm and ends at about 7:45. The church will cover the cost of tickets, but youth might want to bring some money for dinner on the way home. We should be back in Folsom by 9:15/9:30. If you have any questions, please feel email or call Fr. Charlie. 

Mark your calendars for the Annual Parish Meeting: Sunday, January 20th, at 10:30am. You’ll hear a “state of the parish” style report from Fr. Todd, see the final 2019 budget, get an overview of our finances, hear a little bit about where we are on our master site plan to preserve, renovate, and expand our buildings and grounds, elect three new members of the vestry, and elect delegates to diocesan convention. If you generally avoid annual meetings because they take too long and you don’t like hearing dry reports read, we promise you our annual meeting is very different, and it has to be finished by 11:10 so that Fr. Todd can go do the next service. Sunday School classes for children and adults will be cancelled that day so that everyone can attend the meeting, but we will have activities for the children (K-5th grades in the Parish Hall Annex; 6th-12th grades in the Vestry Room in Trinity House).

Many thanks to those who volunteered to be delegates to the 2019 Diocesan Convention: Joanie Cahill, Gerry Cutler, Doris Gibson, Richard Hitchcock, Sue Mack, Lynn Steen, and Judy Utter; and Graham Breck, who will serve as alternate.      

At the Annual Parish Meeting on January 20th, we’ll be electing three new vestry members (Shannon Dillon, Deb Goldsmith, and Jared Kwek) to replace the three whose terms end at the meeting (Tovi Abello, Sue Mack, and John Wright). Read below for short bios for Deb and Jared; Shannon’s will appear in next week’s Tidings!    

Deb Goldsmith was raised a Methodist in the citrus groves of Arizona, but when she moved to Monterey in the 1980s, she became involved in the New Age spirituality groups ubiquitous in the area. Still, she says, she was always a Christian checking out new things, incorporating what was good and wise from other traditions into her own. Life took Deb to San Francisco, where she worked in the hospitality industry and for the SF Visitors and Convention Bureau, and where she met husband Brian, who was a resident at UCSF, and eventually to Folsom. Brian and Deb attended another church here for many years, but realized they were looking for something a bit different, and on Christmas Eve of 2014, decided to give the little Episcopal church in the historic district a try. They immediately loved it, and most importantly, son Jack, then sixteen, felt comfortable and was warmly welcomed. Jack, who has autism, would occasionally speak when everyone else was being silent, but the Goldsmiths didn’t feel criticized or judged, they felt understood and embraced. Jack especially appreciated the stability of the liturgy, and Deb says reading the words of the liturgy in the bulletin while the congregation says them aloud has developed his reading comprehension, too.  

Since Jack was born in 1998, Deb has been a constant advocate for him and other children with special needs. Deb is and has been a board and committee member for many organizations focused on children with special needs, the co-founder and a current member of the FCUSD Special Education Community Advisory Committee, a Surrogate Parent for Individualized Education Plans to advocate for children whose parents are unable to represent their child, and the recipient of the FCUSD “Excellence in Special Education” award for her work on behalf of Folsom-Cordova students with special needs. Deb is a longtime volunteer at the Twin Lakes Food Bank, and here at Trinity Folsom, she volunteers in the Thrift Shop, cooks dinners with our team at Powerhouse Ministries, and serves on the Altar Guild, Flower Guild, and the Outreach Committee. Jack, who graduated from Folsom High, is now in the ACTT (Active Community Transition Training) program (thanks to Fr. Charlie, Trinity Folsom is one of the work sites for FCUSD-ACTT!), and serves with Deb on our Altar Guild. Brian, a radiation oncologist, is the Chief Medical Officer at Marshall Hospital in Placerville and is also a Lieutenant Colonel in the California National Guard, serving as a flight surgeon; he often gets roped into helping Deb and Jack with Altar Guild after the 9am service. They live here in Folsom, and like to spend their vacations at their house in Hawaii, which they have often donated to parish and community fundraising events.

Deb loves that Trinity Folsom, like the broader Episcopal Church, is “a beautiful mix of tradition and embracing differences” and is thrilled to see this parish becoming a more diverse, multi-generational, and multi-ethnic congregation more representative of our community. Deb believes that diversity, and honing our ability to appreciate and learn from our differences, can be one of our greatest blessings. Deb has a particular interest in outreach ministry and is excited to see the parish continue to develop in this area. Having been active in women’s ministries, she’s interested in the potential for a similar ministry here, and, obviously, she would love to see us develop our ministry to and with families with special needs. She hopes that we will continue to grow while strengthening our sense of welcome and community, so that many more people can have the experience that she, Brian, and Jack had when they first visited us looking for a church to call home.

Jared Kwek’s spiritual journey covered a lot of denominational ground before he finally found The Episcopal Church. Born in Detroit to an Armenian Orthodox mother and a German Lutheran father, Jared was baptized Armenian Orthodox but then raised in a Missouri Synod Lutheran church when the family moved to California when he was three. Jared grew up in Bakersfield, and then moved to San Luis Obispo to attend Cal Poly, where he studied computer engineering and perhaps more importantly met a lovely Roman Catholic girl from Ukiah named Michelle, whom he married in 2005. They occasionally attended Roman Catholic churches, but Jared, excluded from Communion for being a Protestant, never felt welcomed or comfortable, and Michelle wanted to remain in a liturgical tradition. When they moved to Folsom in 2007, they struggled to find a church that was a good fit for both of them: liturgical, welcoming, and inclusive. Then Jared saw an editorial in the Sacramento News & Review, written by Brian Baker, then dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Midtown, supporting marriage equality in the debate over Prop. 8, and he was surprised that a church would be supportive and so he became interested in The Episcopal Church. He looked to see if there was a local Episcopal parish, but Trinity Folsom seemed pretty small, and he and Michelle wanted to anonymous at first and blend in with a crowd, so they tried the Cathedral first. But they really wanted to stay local, so they tried Trinity Folsom next and really connected with Mother Teri Gilmore, who made them feel very welcome.

At Trinity Folsom, Jared has served on the vestry, the rector search committee that hired Fr. Todd, the website task force that created our website not long after Fr. Todd’s arrival, and informal “dad squad” of guys who come and help out on random tasks around the parish buildings and grounds. Jared, who works in IT for SMUD, has also provided IT assistance for the office, and been involved in all sorts of other tasks, like producing our holiday yard signs and choosing our “new” logo several years ago. Jared and Michelle attend the 9am or the 11:15am with their daughters Ellery, Camille, and Amaya. All three girls attend Sunday School, and Camille and Amaya attend Children’s Chapel while Ellery serves as an acolyte; Ellery is also on the Altar Guild - our youngest member, she’ll be ten this year! Michelle, a florist, serves on the Altar Guild and on the Flower Guild, and has led flower-arranging workshops for the Flower Guild open to all of our parishioners. Jared, who has an interest in contemplative spirituality, frequently returns in the evening for the 7pm, and Ellery, who shares her father’s interest, often get a brief reprieve from bedtime and comes with him. 

Jared hopes to see us continue to prosper and to grow, and to manage that growth, “smart growth” he calls it, so that we maintain what we love and what is best about this parish and “embrace the new without losing what we stand for.” He’s eager to see us further develop our ministries of welcoming, hospitality, and fellowship – “that’s why I am here, because I was welcomed.” As the father of a young family, he is excited to see the growing number of young families joining the parish, and would like to find more ways to build relationships between them and all parishioners. Jared hopes, too, that we can create more opportunities for people, especially people new to the parish, to serve, whether it be in worship, outreach, children and youth programming, or parish leadership; he believes the blending of folks who have years of experience in this parish with folks who bring new ideas, wisdom, and their own experiences will keep this parish dynamic and strong, so that we can continue to love God and neighbor, and proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ, for generations to come.     

If you have a request to add to the parish prayer list, e-mail prayers@trinityfolsom.org. Prayer request will be kept confidential within the intercessory prayer group. If you’re interested in joining this prayer group, e-mail Fr. Charlie. 

Each Sunday, the flowers behind the altar are given to the glory of God, and in memory of the dead, or in thanksgiving for living loved ones, for answered prayers, or for life events like births, graduations, weddings, and anniversaries. The suggested donation is $50. If you’re wondering what happens to the flowers, they don’t go to waste! After the Sunday evening service, they are divided into smaller bouquets and taken to parishioners, and to non-parishioners in local nursing homes. You can donate altar flowers on the website.

Trinity Episcopal Church

 801 Figueroa Street

Folsom, CA 95630

(916) 985-2495 ~ www.trinityfolsom.org