Your Custom Text Here
Find all Holy Week services here.
Easter is a time when we have enjoyed record participation in our Sunday service as well as our highest giving during the offering. Please consider giving cheerfully and generously this joyous season, whether in person, online, or by mail. Download the service bulletin here.
“Meeting people at their point of need, Inviting all into a dynamic relationship with Christ”
LET US KNOW YOU WORSHIPED WITH US TODAY - Please fill out a contact card to assist with COVID-19 contact tracing and to let us know you worshiped with us in person today even if you are a member. If you’re a visitor, online or in person, and would like more information please feel free to fill out a card or email Pastor Cress.
Second Presbyterian is a church community where you will be known and nurtured. Have a prayer request? Please let us know here. Interested in joining Second? Find more about becoming a member here.
And get connected! Join a small group here. While we may be practicing social distancing these days, there are still ways to be involved and to offer your time, talents, and resources in service to others. Please reach out to our Director of Community and Communications Jordyn Pritchard to get connected.
Find all Holy Week services here.
Dear Friends in Christ –
We have taken this Lenten season to accompany Jesus in his final days.
What have we learned?
That Jesus in his humanity is far more interesting, more competent, more radical, more intentional than we may have thought. Would the forces he opposed have killed him eventually? Probably, but we have seen Jesus leverage relationships and time to fulfill ancient prophecy, and to insure that this disruption in time would accomplish what needed to be done.
The longed-for Messiah arrives in the Holy City at Passover to liberate God’s people from navel gazing to radical inclusivity. We employ the Gospel of Matthew. The earth quakes. Roman guards are stunned. An angelic presence reminds us that Jesus has plans and we’ll find his resurrected self in Galilee, just as he said.
This Easter we’re open – to worship together, masked up and safely spaced. Invite your friends and let’s worship our God of righteousness, paradox and love.
Find all Holy Week services here.
“What Love Looks Like -Bellies Full & Feet Clean”
John 13:33-35
CLICK ON VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES BELOW TO FIND OUT MORE INFORMATION
This Lenten season, let us answer the call to slow down, dwell in stillness, breathe deeply in the silence so we might listen and hear what God is whispering into our hearts.
It is hard to believe that we have already made it to Holy Week. Easter is coming upon us quickly, and yet, there is still so much that must happen before we celebrate a tomb empty and our Lord risen. The seasons of the liturgical year teach us a rhythm in which we can live our lives. Most of the seasons, I have found, urge us to slow down, sit still, be patient and wait for the Lord. I believe Holy Week is a special invitation to sit and wait for the Lord.
There is something powerful about sitting in the discomfort of Holy Week. Throughout the Lenten season, Rev. Darwin’s sermon series has guided us through Jesus’ final days and we have been practicing sitting with and learning from that journey alongside our Savior. I often think about the disciples and how scary, jarring, and heartbreaking the last few days must have been. Especially when Jesus dies.
For the past few years, it has become an important practice for me, personally, to try and sit in that discomfort of grief and darkness of Good Friday and the uncomfortable unknown of Saturday. Because I have learned time and time again that when I sit in the grief, suffering, and darkness of my pain or others’ I can more truly and fully join in the celebration, the brightness, and the joy. Let us accept the invitation to be with Jesus on this journey this week so we might be able to truly celebrate when Easter Sunday arrives.
—Margaret Fleming
Margaret Fleming has been a member of Second Presbyterian Church since 2017. A native of Mt. Pleasant, she found herself back home after graduating from Columbia Theological Seminary in May 2020. She resides in Mt. Pleasant with her husband Will, a fourth-year medical student at MUSC. She is a candidate for ordination in the PCUSA and is currently serving as a Chaplain Resident at Roper Hospital.
Margaret's ordination service will be held on April 18, 2021 in the sanctuary.
Find all Holy Week services here.
Palm Sunday sermon: “The Beginning of the End”
“Meeting people at their point of need, Inviting all into a dynamic relationship with Christ”
LET US KNOW YOU WORSHIPED WITH US TODAY - Please fill out a contact card to assist with COVID-19 contact tracing and to let us know you worshiped with us in person today even if you are a member. If you’re a visitor, online or in person, and would like more information please feel free to fill out a card or email Pastor Cress.
Second Presbyterian is a church community where you will be known and nurtured. Have a prayer request? Please let us know here. Interested in joining Second? Find more about becoming a member here.
And get connected! Join a small group here. While we may be practicing social distancing these days, there are still ways to be involved and to offer your time, talents, and resources in service to others. Please reach out to our Director of Community and Communications Jordyn Pritchard to get connected.
Dear Friends in Christ —
Throughout the season of Lent we’ve engaged Jesus’ Final Week, discovering a more complex man, intentional leader, and shaper of the narrative. We’ve discovered someone who kept the mission in sight and provoked authorities and created situations as necessary to accomplish the goal of defeating those forces that divide and separate us.
This Sunday we start at the beginning of the week. The Messiah enters the Holy City from the Mount of Olives on the back of a colt in fulfillment of prophecy. We’ll see that each parable, each turn, each visit, meal and conversation moves the needle to and through humiliation, ridicule, and torture to love’s triumph.
Don’t miss this chance to accompany the Lord of life through human horror to God’s defining moment.
Let us abide together with God in love —
The Annual Meeting of the Congregation will be held this Sunday, April 11, 2021, following the 10:30 a.m. Worship Service to be followed by the Annual Meeting of the Church Corporation in compliance with the church’s by laws. The Nominating Committee will offer members to be elected for of the 2021 Nominating Committee and the 2021-2022 Corporation. The church budget will be presented having been approved by the Session and the Pastor’s Terms of Call will be offered for approval.
Slate of Nominees for the 2021 Nominating Team: Jessica Brock, Dominique German, Sarah Mitchell, Jordyn Pritchard, Nicole Schuerman, Debbie Smith, and Nathan Walker.
The 2021 Nominating Team is being put forward now by the 2020 Nominating Team based on the the officer recommendations forms submitted during the 2020 season. This election was postponed last spring by the Nominating Team considering the annual nature of these particular roles, unlike deacons and elders, in hopes that in-person meetings would be a safe option ahead of the 2021 nominating season. Officer recommendations for the Class of 2024 Deacons and Elders, and 2022 Nominating Team will open after the 2021 Nominating Team has been officially elected.
Our usual Holy Week services will be offered in the sanctuary masked and socially distanced and also livestreamed. Join us as we journey to the cross together for services on Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday.
This Lenten season, let us answer the call to slow down, dwell in stillness, breathe deeply in the silence so we might listen and hear what God is whispering into our hearts.
Becoming more human or allowing ourselves to get more fully in touch with our humanity has been a theme that has continuously been coming up for me in this season of Lent. Yesterday, I had the honor of preaching at Second and I preached on Mark 14:32-42, Jesus praying in Gethsemane, if it has been a while since you have read or heard this scripture, I urge you to give it another read.
In the text Jesus is wrestling with God and praying what I believe is an incredibly human prayer: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want” (Mark 14:36). I know I have prayed a similar prayer and I wonder, have you? I find that this text brings me comfort for many reasons, one being that Jesus is so human here as are his very sleepy disciples. I can’t help but see this text as an invitation; an invitation to allow God into our messes, even the ones we create ourselves. I have hope that when we pray raw and vulnerable prayers, like Jesus did in the garden, God honors them, hears them, and is present with us as we offer them—even if God doesn’t necessarily answer them in the ways we think God ought to or in the ways we might want.
May we be renewed and strengthened by the love of God this week and always. May we take heart in knowing our Lord never falls asleep and is always awake. May we try and stay awake, but be willing to accept God’s grace when we inevitably fall asleep.
—Margaret Fleming
Margaret Fleming has been a member of Second Presbyterian Church since 2017. A native of Mt. Pleasant, she found herself back home after graduating from Columbia Theological Seminary in May 2020. She resides in Mt. Pleasant with her husband Will, a fourth-year medical student at MUSC. She is a candidate for ordination in the PCUSA and is currently serving as a Chaplain Resident at Roper Hospital.
Margaret's ordination service will be held on April 18, 2021 in the sanctuary.
John Samuel Roper, flute, Tim O’Malley, viola da gamba, and our own Julia Harlow, harpsichord, will play a concert both in-person here at the church (masked, distanced) and live streamed here.
Composers include Michel Blavet (French, 18th c.), Anna Bon (a child prodigy of mid-18th c. Italy), Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach.
“Meeting people at their point of need, Inviting all into a dynamic relationship with Christ”
LET US KNOW YOU WORSHIPED WITH US TODAY - Please fill out a contact card to assist with COVID-19 contact tracing and to let us know you worshiped with us in person today even if you are a member. If you’re a visitor, online or in person, and would like more information please feel free to fill out a card or email Pastor Cress.
Second Presbyterian is a church community where you will be known and nurtured. Have a prayer request? Please let us know here. Interested in joining Second? Find more about becoming a member here.
And get connected! Join a small group here. While we may be practicing social distancing these days, there are still ways to be involved and to offer your time, talents, and resources in service to others. Please reach out to our Director of Community and Communications Jordyn Pritchard to get connected.
