Fountain Park Church

Today we worshiped at Fountain Park Church, 8533 Peters Road, Cranberry Twp., PA 16066, 724.779.2003, www.fountainpc.com, R. Mark Plumb, Pastor.


Bob’s thoughts:

We needed to worship at a church in our area where we knew our daughter and her family, visiting for the weekend, would feel welcome. It was an easy choice to go to Fountain Park, as we have always received a warm welcome there.

This is a smaller church that makes very good use of their space. I appreciate the heavy wooden cross set off to one side at the front of the Sanctuary. Today it was accented with seasonal decorations that wonderfully highlight the cross.

There are dual screens and one in back, so no matter how much you look around you can see to sing along. As always, I was pleased to see the offering taken in response to the Word. I was surprised when we prayed using the “new Lord’s Prayer;” don’t know why it was changed.

I sensed from some things said during the prayer time that the church was recovering from a schism, but the financial information in the bulletin didn’t indicate that. It is odd to see an income spike in July/August almost equal to the Easter spike.

I had the huge blessing of holding my newest granddaughter during the service. She was born the morning they took me to the Emergency Room, and I had only just met her earlier. She started to drown out the sermon and I ended up walking with her. Jan and I both had a sense that this was God’s way of letting our children hear this message. With three little ones, they seldom get to sit through a service.

The service was rather sparsely attended and mostly inanimate, but incredibly warm and welcoming.

I think the sermon was part of a series dissecting the Lord’s Prayer, a favorite sermon topic of mine.

Jan’s thoughts:

We chose Fountain Park today because we knew it was family-friendly for our three visiting grandchildren (4, 2, and 3 months of age). As always, it was good to see Mark and Lin Plumb, and after the service we had a chance to catch up.

We had no sooner sat down and heard the last half of the children’s message than I felt the urging of the Holy Spirit to take Luke (4) and Leah (2) to the nursery. The longer I sat there the louder they became and the more insistent was God’s urging that I be the one to take them. So I took them out and stayed with them. (We had fun playing in the nursery!) Consequently I did not participate in the worship service, and instead worshiped God through my obedience. It was only later that I learned God’s reason for His urging.

The sermon notes page in the bulletin indicated the message was on the topic of surrender (ironic, huh?). Our daughter, who possesses a B.A. in Christian Thought from Grove City College, explained to me later that this sermon was exactly what she and her husband needed to hear. (With three children under 4, they hardly ever get to worship together, but this day they heard the same sermon while sitting side by side.) They were encouraged in their belief that God has them living where He wants them to be living right now, that He has everything perfectly under control, and what he wants them to learn is to be content in His provision.

Also printed on the sermon notes page was The Serenity Prayer – in its entirety. I was unaware there was more to it, so in case you’d like to read it, here it is:

The Serenity Prayer
By Reinhold Niebuhr (also a surprise to me!)

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time,
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that You will make all things right
if I surrender to Your will
so that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen

I pray that my life would be that totally surrendered to Him.