CWU Invites Community To Join Circles Of Love Program

World Community Day 2003 will be on Friday, November 7.

Church Women United/Bethel-Newtown invites all residents –– male and female –– to join a Bible study program to be held in the lower meeting room of C.H. Booth Library, 25 Main Street, in Newtown. The service will begin at 1 pm. Light refreshments will follow.

The Rev M. Sargent Desmond of Brookfield will be the guest speaker for the service.

There is no charge to attend, but participants should be aware that a freewill offering will be collected as part of the service. A canned food drive will also be held that afternoon and anything that is collected will be forwarded to local food banks.

The service will be led by members of CWU/Bethel-Newtown and will include Scripture readings, prayers, and hymns. “Circles of Love” is this year’s World Community Day theme. It draws on lyrical writings and songs by Sister Miriam Therese Winter, a professor of liturgy, worship, spirituality, and feminist studies at Hartford Seminary.

From two of Ms Winter’s ritual resources –– Woman Prayer-Woman Song and Woman World –– national Celebrations Committee members Jean Ivey from Macon, Ga., and the Rev Paula Payne from Contoocook, N.H., selected passages dealing with God’s spirit of love to develop the service and its Bible study around the theme of World Community Day.

“This celebration is especially relevant at the time when we need to be welcoming to newcomers in our land. Let God’s spirit lead us as we consider whom we bring into our ‘Circles of Love,’” said national CWU coordinators. “Come and join us in extending our own circle outward in peace for the sake of justice.”

Rev Desmond was first welcomed by CWU years ago by the late Margaret Winchester of Newtown, who was the founder of the CWU/Bethel-Newtown chapter. The Rev Desmond, who retired in 1997 after 21 years as pastor in the Congregational Church of Brookfield, UCC, will celebrate his 47th anniversary as an ordained minister in November. “Rev Des” as he was called when he attended Bangor Theological Seminary and worked with the 22 members of Newington Congregational Church in New Hampshire, came from Manchester, N.H. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School and went on to pastor in churches in Plymouth, Mass., Verona, N.J.; and four years (1956–60) in Danbury before arriving to Brookfield.

World Community Day was first celebrated in 1943 –– 60 years ago. Denominational organizations had been addressing peace issues and printing separate studies for their constituencies following the Second World War.

In 1942 a Study Conference of the Churches with the theme “A Just and Durable Peace” was held. After a report from that gathering was presented to the first biennial assembled of the United Council of Church Women –– a forerunner of Church Women United –– Mrs Albert Palmer of Chicago proposed “a day be set aside in the fall of 1943 for the study of peace.”

The national presidents and executive secretaries of denominational organizations met during the following June, concurred that a “peace day” be set for November 11, 1943, and requested that CWU prepare materials. They in turn promoted the day in their respective denominations and World Community Day was born.

Today World Community Day is an annual event that brings Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and other Christian men and women together in a common worship experience that focuses on issues of piece and justice. It is also an opportunity to share in projects for local communities.

For more information call a church’s key woman: Betty Williams, 270-9931 at Newtown Congregational Church; Pat Stroud, 426-5270, at St Rose of Lima; Shirley Roman, 426-0638 at Christ the King; Barbara Gates, 426-3446 at Newtown United Methodist; Doris Schoonmaker, 270-0311 at St John’s; and Barbara Gorham, 426-0638 at Walnut Hill Community Church in Bethel.