Issuu

The First Baptist Church of Redlands

T A PE S T R Y

May 2022

Wo v e n To g e t h e r I n L o v e : C o l o s s i a n s 2 : 2

Issue No.5

May Flowers

A Message from Pastor Shawn April showers bring May flowers. Popular adage The groundwork doesn’t show, until one day. Corita Kent I’m sure about this: the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus. Philippian 1:6 CEB Living in California, we do not experience the truth of this adage as much as when one lives in a place with more overt seasons. April in Indiana is the season of mud. Even in a place where there is rain much of the year, April can be frustrating. It is a month where you can go from sunny 70-degree days to snow…all in the same week. It is a month when you feel like you are getting your hopes up that winter is finally over and then you walk outside to find a cold wind that slaps in you in the face. The early bulbs will come up, like daffodils and tulips, and then they freeze and die. But then comes May! In May the weather is perfect. The temperatures are more often in the upper 70s and there are fewer rainy days—and snow is very rare! And the flowers really start to bloom. My favorites, Irises, are everywhere and maybe you start to feel like April was worth it, if it brings about May flowers. As we enter May, the last full month before summer break, we can look back on a year that has been full of ups and downs, hard work, change, loss, meaningful experiences, and more. We continue to experience staff transitions, but we are blessed by those who have come on board during this time. Rhonda Bauer is blessing us with her gifts as she is leading the choir. The cantata was a wonderful addition to our Easter Celebration this year! Our own Abby Kishimoto has been mentored by Pastor Cheryl and has stepped into the job directing our children’s ministry with near

seamless ease. Joining Stephen Stark, who joined our staff in January, is our new assistant custodian, Brang Ying. And what would we do without those staff who have continued through all of these transitions, Nathan, Angel, Sally, and Isa! We are also blessed that it won’t be long until our search committees will be presenting candidates to fill our two associate pastor positions. May flowers! After months of analyzing information from the congregation, acquired through focus groups and surveys, we are now having fruitful discussions that will lead to some creative ministries in the near future. As we deal with the ups and downs of Covid, we are encouraged that there seem to be more ups than downs. In all of this, we have discovered new ways of doing things, new ways to reach people, and we have learned to adapt to changes quickly. We have discovered the gifts of people in our congregation that we didn’t know about before. We have also gained several new families into our congregation. May flowers! May 1 is my sixth anniversary with The First Baptist Church of Redlands. In some respects, I can’t believe it has already been 6 years. On the other hand, I feel like I have been here for a long time. This is really my church family! Who could have guessed that more than a year of that time would be spent ministering from our homes. No one could have imagined being a church family through a pandemic, seeing each other only on our screens and hearing each other’s voices only on the phone. But we did it—and are doing it. I am truly looking forward to what God has in store for us as we look to our Lord for direction into a long future. No matter what it looks like around us, God is going to do what God is going to do, with or without us. May it be WITH us! We have seen April showers. It won’t be the last time. But let us celebrate the May flowers in Jesus name! Grace and peace in Christ, Pastor Shawn

COVER

FELLOWSHIP

A Message from Pastor Shawn: “May Flowers”

Ann Smith: “Interview with Bryan Tapia”

Staff and Contents

Event Photos

MINISTRY

NEWS

Abby Kishimoto: “Children’s Ministry Updates”

10 Church News

Nathan Jones: “Youth Ministry Updates”

11 May Calendar

MISSION 6

Worldwide Prayer Concerns: Ukraine, Sri Lanka, Iran

Submitted by Gregg Sneller: “Update from Corenne and Phil Smith”

STAFF Rev. Dr. Shawn Zambrows Senior Pastor

Angel Florence Office Administrator

Abby Kishimot Interim Director of Children’s Ministries

Isa Terrell Communications Specialist

Rhonda Bauer Interim Choir Director

Stephen Stark Senior Maintenance Custodian

Sally Rehfeldt Organist Nathan Jones Youth Director

The Tapestry is published monthly by The First Baptist Church of Redlands, 51 West Olive Avenue, Redlands, CA 92373. All material for the Tapestry should be typed and emailed no later than the 15th of each month to tapestry@fbcredlands.org. If you would like to be added or removed from the Tapestry mailing list, please email tapestry@fbcredlands.org. Current and previous Tapestry issues are available in digital format at issuu.com/fbcr.

Contact us: admin@fbcredlands.org 909-793-3289 www.fbcredlands.org Our office will be semi-open during regular office hours. However, we are still receiving mail and phone messages. Staff can be reached by email (see above). Office Hours Monday - Thursday: 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. Friday: 9 a.m. - 12 p.m.

MI NI S T RY

Children’s Ministry Updates by Abby Kishimoto

There is something very special about being able to join together and worship together again this year, especially during this Lenten season. Throughout the past month, our children have been busy learning about Lent and the Creation story. Sunday mornings the God’s Kids and Junior Disciples have been participating in singing with Jonathan Peske and Doris Baker. They also get to practice playing with some instruments like tambourines and maracas. We’ve been lucky to see some of our Junior Disciples even participating in Drum Circle during worship. Sunday School has been a time of learning about the season of Lent with the help of all of our volunteers. So, a special thank you goes to all of them for all of their dedication to our children! On Wednesday nights, the children are learning about the events in the creation story. The main way that they did this was by decorating boxes with each side representing one event of creation. To represent God’s time of rest when all of the work was finished, we had a movie night where they could “rest” inside their finished boxes and enjoy the work that they had done. For the next couple of weeks, we will continue with “Creation Care of the Earth” on Wednesday nights and really place an emphasis on making sure that we protect and care for God’s Creation. Lastly, we were able to have Easter egg hunts for all of the kids this year! There were three separate egg hunts for our children. The youth planned and held the Junior Disciples’ egg hunt. Then, after the service, we had Easter egg hunts for our God’s Kids and Toddlers. Again, thank you to all of the volunteers who helped to make everything fun for all ages!

Youth Ministry Updates by Nathan Jones

Sunflowers for Ukraine

JD Easter Egg Hunt

Our youth have been wondering about what they could do in response to the images and news they’ve heard about Ukraine. We started with praying about it every week during our Pastry and Prayer Sunday School time. After brainstorming with Carol Ray about how our youth might get involved and getting more information from the online forum on Ukraine hosted by ABCOFLASH, I approached Pastor Shawn with the idea of the youth crafting something to distribute on the patio to raise awareness and funds for One Great Hour of Sharing (OGHS) for Ukraine. Soon thereafter you may have seen a table on the patio appear covered in beautifully-crafted felt sunflower pins and magnets adorned with Ukraine-inspired blue and yellow ribbons, created by our youth. Our elementary-aged children and their teachers also got excited about the idea and crafted some sunflowers as well. Pastor Shawn and the Executive Council got so excited about the idea that they even decided to designate half of this year’s Easter Offering to OGHS for Ukraine. It is truly amazing to see what can grow and blossom from the seeds planted in our youth by the work of the Holy Spirit! We send out a big thank you to Diana Kanady for her crafting expertise in helping me to plan and prepare our craft supplies and to Carol Ray for both helping the idea take form and for providing the pins and ribbons!

On Easter morning, FBC Redlands’ Youth have traditionally (at least for the last six years) had the responsibility and privilege of hiding Easter eggs for the JDs, for reasons lost to time, in the basement. Because our JDs missed out on two years of egg hunts at FBC Redlands, we thought an out-of-sight basement egg hunt just wasn’t egg-citing enough and that we needed to make this year’s hunt a little eggs-tra special. Why not take advantage of the tradition-bending habits we developed over the COVID era to make a positive change in how we renew our egg hunt tradition?!

If you haven’t yet taken advantage of the opportunity to give to the Easter Offering and Ukraine, you still can both online or in person!

First, we took the JD Egg Hunt out of the basement and invited JDs’ families to come out to watch in the bright, spring sunshine of our beautiful courtyard with cinnamon rolls (baked and frosted by the youth!), fresh fruit, and orange juice provided. In addition to filling and hiding many colorful plastic eggs, our youth lovingly—though inexpertly—also crafted a large paper mache egg for each JD to find. Then the youth accompanied the JDs on their hunt to ensure they found the right egg and avoided opening someone else’s in all the egg-citement! For the youth, JDs, parents, and other FBC members watching, the JD Egg Hunt was cracking with all the joy, laughter, and chaos you’d expect from a candyfinding free-for-all culminating with the piñata-like destruction of not one, but many colorful, paper mache eggs, but our youth experienced a different kind joy, too. They had the opportunity to create something special for an individual JD over the course of multiple weeks, and then they got to help make the event happen on Easter from baking and frosting to the final egg cracking to reveal the gifts they’d placed inside. Our youth experienced an important part of what intergenerational church life is all about, not just benefiting from niche programming curated for their own small group, but rather they developed a sense of responsibility and investment within our church community for making sure the JDs’ egg hunt was a success, and in doing so they experienced the joy of serving others and of seeing the joy they made possible for others.

MI S S ION

While we were making the paper mache eggs, joy wasn’t the first word that would have come to mind. The youth were either grossed out by the feeling of the icky-sticky paper mache, or frustrated with the process of covering a balloon with small strips of paper, one at a time (though that didn’t prevent them detouring from their egg-making to paper mache over Hilary Craw’s drink cup). In the decorating process, they were either frustrated with the delicacy of the eggs, or inexplicably covered with paint. But after the egg hunt Easter Sunday, after seeing the joy their efforts brought to others and how much the JDs enjoyed the eggs specially made for each one of them, the youth were already making plans for how they might better construct or decorate eggs next year, or scheming about where they could hide the eggs to make them even more difficult and fun to find.

Youth enjoying our traditional Palm Sunday Breakfast Burritos

M I S S ION

Worldwide Prayer Concerns “But recall those earlier days when, after you had been enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated.” Hebrews 10:32-33

UKRAINE The ongoing war in Ukraine weighs heavily on all our hearts. Pray for all involved: leaders, soldiers, civilians, refugees, aid workers…. Pray that food and aid can be delivered to those who are in need. Pray that civilians who are trying to flee can safely escape. Pray for all those who have experienced severe loss, suffering, and trauma in the past month to have strength to press on each day and ultimately find healing. Since Ukraine is a major grower of wheat and other crops, please also pray that the disruption to the world food supply will be balanced in other ways so that everyone, even poorer citizens, has access to affordable food over the next year.

SRI LANKA www.internationalministries.org Rohan Mendis, the Director of the Asia Pacific Baptist Aid requests prayer for Sri Lanka, which is suffering fuel and food shortages which are leading to mass protests. Gas stations have lines that are hours long. Overall inflation is 17.5%, but food prices are up over 25%. Rolling blackouts of 10 hours or longer are common. The government has not been responsive but has instead arrested dozens of the protesters. Pray for improvements in the economic and political situation and for the church to shine with Christ’s light of hope in the midst of turbulent times.

IRAN www.persecution.org Even in the midst of the darkness in our world, the Holy Spirit is still working to change people’s lives. One example comes from Iran, where a man named Manouchehr had turned to alcohol after his mother’s death plunged him into depression. In his desperation, he reached out to a Christian media ministry asking for prayer and for more information about Christ. After a month, he shared, “I have found the peace of Christ. I have been freed from my addiction. I only wish I had known Jesus sooner.” He shared with his family members and they too found new hope in Christ. Praise God for this miraculous work!

- Jonathan Peske If you have information to share about the persecuted church or news from the mission field, please share it with Jonathan Peske.

Global Servants

Update from Corenne and Phil Smith presented by Gregg Sneller

Prayer Requests

Greetings First Baptist Church of Redlands! Wish you were all here with us in Brazil. We just finished “Carnival” or better known as Mardi Gras in the United States. Carnival is kind of like Labor Day. Summer is over, and everyone is back to work, back to school, back to business. So things are just now in full swing. Our residential students. (200 in 11 different houses) are back in school. The day students (500) are back in session attending the 15 different certification courses we are offering this semester. They change each semester as the demands in the marketplace change. We are so happy to be out of quarantine, even though the entire country is still masked—COVID numbers are significantly down. Everyone you talk to has been vaccinated at least twice and are awaiting the third. There is rarely a discussion as to the pros and cons of the vaccination. I am not entering into the discussion. Just reporting on the culture here.

It may seem like “old news” that we lost two boys to murder during quarantine, and our lead house parent was killed in a car accident. The staff as well as our kids are still traumatized from all the loss. We have actually even seen a turnover in staff indirectly related to the stress. Please pray for us to effectively deal with the trauma in a healthy, Christ-centered way. And please pray for us as we prayerfully struggle to find new house parents who are willing to give a 10 year commitment to serve with our children. Anything less is a monitor, not a parent. Smith Family After an almost three year “chaos of COVID and quarantine,” all four Smith’s are under the same roof in Brazil and we are loving it. Marc just finished high school and is taking a gap year to be with us after spending a year in a boarding school in the States. Bella is completing 7th grade online with the help of her mom. Phil is, of course, in Brazil spending some of his time in Vitoria and some of his time in Campinas. Pray for all of our boys, who want to do the right things, but sometimes don’t really know what that right thing is. Pray for our girls who are abused and shattered. Pray for us to have wisdom, and patience with each of our kids and with each other. Thank you for being our partners in this important ministry. As always, our doors are open to receive you any time you want to come and visit.

Praises We will (finally) be opening our second church. The space has been rented, the pastor has been hired, the cell group has been trained and praying. We are proud that our first church plant in Campinas has now sent two missionary couples out to serve. One nationally in Brazil and one to serve in Indonesia. Our new church building will also be the site for our first thrift store in Vitoria as well as our graduate half/way home (where our graduates will live for six months as they launch into their new life) and a small drug detox program where heavily addicted adolescents can receive treatment before they enter into our residential program.

F E L L O W S H IP

Interview with Bryan Tapia

by Ann Smith

in-person date at the Macaroni Grill. They dated for a year before he decided to propose to her in Temecula in the vineyards of a winery they liked going to. They were married nine months later on October 22, 2011 in the Tea Garden at Edwards Mansion in Redlands. They have now been married for ten and a half years and are blessed with two daughters Nora Rose, who is 9 months and Noelle Grace, who is 7 years old. Bryan was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness. He remembers going to church every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. His parents instilled in him strong Christian morals that he is forever grateful for. He recalls going to conventions with his family and learning about the Bible and the love of Christ. By the time he was 18, he had come to feel that he did not fit in the church he was attending. He could not be himself and still fit the mold of who he had been taught God wanted him to be. He began to attend church with his future wife in December of 2019. He found that he had finally found a church where he fit in and made friends with people with whom he could identify. He says that he had finally found peace within the church in that setting.

Bryan Tapia was born on October 9, 1984 at the Kaiser Hospital in Fontana, California. He grew up in Chino when it was the dairy center of Southern California. He graduated from Don Antonio Lugo High School in Chino in 2003. He attended San Bernardino Valley College and graduated in 2020 with an A.S. in Electronic Engineering, Computer Engineering and Communication Engineering. He is now attending Arizona State University Online majoring in Electrical Engineering. His father, who passed away in June of 2020, was a heavy equipment operator for the Chino Valley Unified School District for 43 years. His mother still works for the Chino Valley Unified School District. She is a security officer at Chino High School. She has been with the district for 36 years. Bryan is the youngest of 4 children. He has an older sister, Rachel, who lives in Oklahoma. She is a stayat-home mom. Another older sister, Amanda, lives in Washington state and is also a stay-at-home mom. He has an older brother, Jason, who lives in San Gabriel, California and is a barber. He is an uncle to 5 nieces and 6 nephews. He met his wife, Anna, online on the site OK Cupid. He was living in Fontana and she was living in Redlands. After talking for a couple of weeks, they had their first

Bryan began coming to First Baptist Church of Redlands with his wife, Anna, for Christmas and Easter. She had grown up in this church; so, they felt comfortable coming here to be with family and friends. They started attending First Baptist Church of Redlands regularly in June of 2016 and have been coming here ever since. His favorite Bible verse is Jeremiah 29:11 which says “For I know the plans I have for you” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster to give you a future and a hope.” Brian said, “In my deepest, darkest times when I was stressed, depressed, or just lost, this verse has always reminded me to never give up on my goals and dreams; that God is always by my side and that he always has a plan for me– even when I can’t see it.” Bryan’s favorite Christian song is by Zach Williams and is called Less Like Me. You can find it online at zachwilliamsVEVO. He says it reminds him to always try his best each day to be a little more like Jesus. The chorus says to be a little like mercy, grace, kindness, goodness, love and faith. He feels like these are things that we could all use some help with – especially, mercy, grace and patience. Having a long commute every day gives Bryan a chance to meditate. He says he feels closest to God while he is able to listen to worship music and talk to God while he drives. This enables him to clear his head and speak to God about all of his worries and concerns.

Wednesday’s Creation Box Movie Night

Pastor Cheryl’s Birthday

News HAPPY May BIRTHDAYS TO... 1

Lacey Marie Wardschenk

Katelyn Zabaleta

Jacqueline Williams-Reade

Liam Fisher

Martha Hone-Warren

Virginia Chapman

Claudia Brown

Shellie Skinner

Henry McLaren

Neera Daniels

Bobby Warren

Mike Aguirre

Jessica Terracciano

Abigail Kishimoto

Miletta Updegraff

Doris Stephens

Deborah Crowley

Garrett Zambrows

Bruce Laycook

Barbi Carpenter

Moumita Baidya

Glenda DelRosario

Jason Lowe

Jim Hollenberg

Stela Salia

Janet Roberts

WEDNESDAY Dinner MENU May 4 – Cinco de Mayo dinner of Chicken and cheese enchiladas, refried beans and Spanish rice; Hot Fudge Cake for dessert May 11 – Oven Baked Chicken, macaroni and cheese, grilled vegetables; Banana Cream pie for dessert May 18 - Meat and veggie lasagna, grilled vegetables, garlic bread; Cookies for dessert May 25 - Chicken and gravy, mashed potatoes, grilled vegetables; Carrot cake for dessert

For Your calendar

Submissions for the Tapestry should be sent to tapestry@fbcredlands.org by the 15th of each month.

Special Thanks We would like to thank Romberg Tree Service for their donation of palms for our Palm Sunday Service.

Summer BBQ May 29, 2022 Mark your calendars! The Diaconate Commission invites you to kick off your summer with a BBQ after church on May 29. The meal will be prepared by the commission and monetary donations will be collected. Enter the pie-baking contest or the Balloon Toss! Enjoy food, fun, and fellowship as we resume this longstanding tradition!

Quarterly Business Meeting of the Congregation Sunday, May 15, 2022, 11:30 AM (in-person)

Pray for Youth

11:30 a.m. BYF

BBQ after Worship Service