Sundays, 9:15 - 10:15 AM 

We kick off our Sunday School program year at the All Parish End-of-Summer Picnic.  Held the Sunday prior to Labor Day, the picnic features lots of family friendly games and activities.  Our program year follows very closely to the public school year, September to June.

Sunday School classes start the Sunday after Labor Day and continue until June. We begin at 9:15 AM, with an opening in the sanctuary where Barbara Verdile, Director of Music, leads children in singing. Then in the Sunday School wing, from 9:30-10:15 AM, our faithful Sunday School teachers instruct and inspire their energetic charges; using the award winning Cook Ministries Anglican Edition curriculum.

Sundays, 9:30 - 10:15 AM

We welcome you to begin your path towards your own Christian ministry here at St. Peter's. We offer a series of courses for newcomers titled "Path In."  These courses are offered on a continuous basis: St. Pete’s 101, an introduction to our parish; Living la Vida Fidei, an introduction to Christianity; and, Holy Places, Holy Things, a tour of the church, with links to spirituality.

Simple Ancient Disciplines of the Christian Life

We grow by participating in the simple ancient disciplines of the Christian life. Here’s how we define them at St Peter’s:

1. Learning Holy Scripture, participating attentively in the Liturgy of the Word on Sunday, as well as weekly small group and daily personal Bible Study.

2. Praying daily and worshipping weekly, developing habits of connecting with God and living a more God-centered life.

3. Living in Christian community, allowing oneself to be cared for and accountable and to grow through relational "friction" with others.

4. Offering our lives in stewardship, working toward or exceeding the tithe (10% of income) to build up the Church and advance God's healing reign for the good of the world. 

5. Working in ministry, taking responsibility to use our spiritual gifts to tangibly serve other people in our congregation and in mission outside of the church.

6. Sharing our faith, giving credible witness to Jesus Christ as we have each experienced him; attracting others to a deepening relationship with Jesus.

Purposeful participation in these disciplines changes your life, bringing healing and restoration and wholeness to you and your family. This is how Jesus disciples us and helps us reorder our lives around God’s will and promise for us so we can experience “the life that really is life”.

I suggest that it takes 8 hours a week in these disciplines for a Christian to grow steadily in spiritual maturity. Here’s an approximate breakdown:

• 2-3 hours on Sunday in liturgy, learning and fellowship,
• 2 hours divided into 20 minutes a day for personal prayer and Bible reading,
• 1.5 hours for small group fellowship, study and prayer,
• 1.5 hours serving others in ministry.

As an Anglican layman, with a considerable number of hours of university level religious courses, I found McGrath's “Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth” a highly informative source about a subject few people know or understand. During the last several decades many churches have been engaged in internal struggles over the heretical accommodation of changing secular norms. As the author, a historical theologian and a professor at King’s College, London writes, “Heresy has become fashionable,” describing the modern surge of interest in repressed and forbidden Christian ideas. He examines the classical heresies of the first five centuries of the church, known as the patristic age.

Sundays durning 10:30 AM service

St. Peter’s Children’s Chapel is a children’s-based Episcopal service in which children learn to worship in much the same way the adults do in their service. Children's Chapel is offered during the 10:30 AM service. 

With this program, the Children experience a church service set up to follow the regular service including:

• Opening Prayer
• Gospel reading
• Interactive discussion about the Gospel reading
• Music
• Children’s Nicene Creed, Prayers for Young People, and a children’s general confession
• If we have time, MORE MUSIC!

Children are led back into the sanctuary by an usher for the Peace and Eucharist. We’d love to have you come and visit, take a look, sit with your child, or even participate!  It’s a fun way to experience the liturgy.

Contact:  Traci Eddinger

Episcopal Lectionary - Here’s a handy place to find the scriptures and collect we read each Sunday. Note that at St. Peter's, we use the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL.)  Also covers feast days.

Daily Office - Prayers and scriptures readings for every day of the week.  Includes the order for morning and evening prayer for each day. Also information on saints for each day.

The Book of Common Prayer - The complete text in several formats. Also versions from other countries and other times in history. Even offers translations of several of these into various languages. 

My Utmost for His Highest - A classic daily devotional and great favorite for many people by the Scottish Author Oswald Chambers.

Oremus - A resource the offers daily prayer and a variety of prayer resources.

Christian Classics Ethereal Library - A large and growing library of Christian writings in the public domain. Some are also available for your PDA or as audio books.

Hymnals - This online collection of searchable hymnals contains texts and MIDI files of tunes used in much of the English-speaking world, with particular emphasis on the Anglican tradition.

Bible Gateway - Look up passages of scripture in many different translations.

C. S. Lewis Institute - The Institute endeavors to develop disciples who can articulate, defend, and live faith in Christ through personal and public living.

We offer our "Path In" to the life of St. Peter's on Sunday mornings. If you have recently come to St. Peter's you know that starting new is hard to do. Do you have questions about living as a Christian or the distinctive way we do it here at St. Peter's? For four weeks we will help you explore what we are about here at St. Peter's and how we live and work together as a congregation.

For developing the daily connection with God I recommend using Phyllis Tickle’s Divine Hours.  I use her prayers in the morning for 15-30 minutes.  They begin with a “call to prayer”, then respond with the “request for presence” and then “the greeting”.  I find that structure brings me right into God’s presence.  There then follows a brief scripture reading, typically from the Gospels, a Psalm, the Lord’s prayer and some collects. 

One can “say” these prayers in 5 minutes, or build in additional time for silence, meditation and other prayers and readings.  I find the structure very helpful to keep me focused and moving forward, but also very flexible and scalable for more time and additional needs.

Rite 13, Journey to Adulthood (J2A), Young Adults in the Church - Sundays, 9:30 - 10:15 AM

Youth Group - Sundays, 6:00 PM

The purpose of the Youth Ministry here at St. Peter’s is “Building Christian Teens for Life.”  We nurture teens to become fully devoted followers of Jesus and to take their place in the Body of Christ.

Our Youth Ministry provides a safe place for youth:

• To come and work through the tough questions they face about life, faith, and their place in the world.
• To be themselves, receive healing, be a part of the Body with their peers, and learn from their elders.
• To bring friends who are not a part of the faith but are curious, hurting and needing to feel the love of Christ, and looking for a place where they can learn and grow in the faith in Christ that is already alive within them.

Ideas have consequences. What you believe influences how you live. We dig into these ideas in Sunday School, every Sunday morning at 9:30 AM. Our curriculum - Journey to Adulthood - takes our teens through three different two-year classes, each one building on the one before.

Looking for an entry-level opportunity to deepen your faith? Look no longer. We are offering a course that was very popular last year called Living La Vida Fidei. That's English, Spanish and Latin for "living the life of faith" (a different twist on Ricki Martin's 1999 pop hit, "Living La Vida Loca).

For six weeks we will explore the practical basics of Living the Life of Faith as part of this congregation. We'll focus on a deepening relationship with Jesus, being more a part of the Christian community at St. Peter's.