April 25, 2025
Dear Peachtree Road Family,
I hope you are well. Let me begin this week’s note by thanking so many of you for joining us for an incredible Easter service last Sunday. Almost 4500 worshipers filled our sanctuary, and over 1,400 more participated online. An incredible amount of work took place behind the scenes to make Sunday a glorious day of celebration:
- Flower Guild members working most of Saturday to decorate the sanctuary and the cross in front of the church
- Altar Guild and Pew Duty volunteers preparing the sanctuary for worshipers
- Musicians rehearsing their anthems and leading us in great hymns of the church
- Ushers, Greeters, and Ambassadors welcoming folks onto our campus
- Childcare workers caring for our preschoolers while parents worshiped
- Acolytes bringing the light of Christ into the sanctuary at the beginning of worship
I am grateful to our audio-visual team for their efforts to make the pageantry of our services available online. Week in and week out, they do a phenomenal job behind the scenes, helping folks who cannot physically be on our campus on Sunday morning find their place spiritually in our sanctuary for worship. I am grateful for all of our behind-the-scenes folks.
Thank you for your contributions to our Lenten Offering. This offering goes to support several of our partner agencies in the community as we work together to build a better Atlanta. I do not have a final number to share with you, but if you have not had an opportunity to give, it certainly is not too late! You may contribute by sending your check made payable to Peachtree Road UMC and marked for “Lenten Offering” or through the church website at www.prumc.org. Please help us give the new life we celebrate at Easter to others who desperately need it.
As wonderful as last week’s services were, I was saddened by the news of the deaths of two great leaders in the church on Easter Sunday – Pope Francis and Bishop Richard Wilke. Pope Francis took his cue from the one from whom he took his name, St. Francis, and modeled for us a faith rooted in love for God and compassion for others. He made our world a better place. Bishop Wilke was elected to the episcopacy in the United Methodist Church in 1984 and wrote his seminal book And Are We Yet Alive? in 1986. Through its pages, he offered a prescription to address the decline our denomination was experiencing at that time. His prescription included a return to a clear focus upon Bible study as Wesley had emphasized two centuries earlier. After the book came out, Cokesbury approached Bishop Wilke and his wife, Julia, about collaborating to write new curriculum for the denomination, and Disciple Bible Study was born. I do not have the words to describe the impact this study has had on Peachtree Road UMC and so many other churches in our denomination. Bishop Wilke has left us an incredible resource for study, growth, and transformation. King David could have been speaking about one of these great men when he said to his servants of Abner: “Do you not know that a prince and great man has fallen this day in Israel?” (II Samuel 3:38)
I really am looking forward to worship this Sunday as we continue our celebration of Easter. Last week’s message focused upon the relationship between fear and faith, and I made much of the way Matthew’s account of the Easter story emphasizes moving through our fears to sight. In the 10 verses Matthew uses to describe the events at the empty tomb, he mentions sight and seeing four times. I want to continue on that theme this week as we consider the healing of a blind man named Bartimaeus. I encourage you to prepare for worship by reading Mark 10:46-52 and reflecting upon the blind man’s prayer:
“My teacher, let me see again.”
The hymns will continue our resurrection theme (“The Day of Resurrection” and “Christ is Risen,” which are both sung to very familiar tunes), and the Chancel Choir will sing Richard Shephard’s arrangement of Tom S. Long’s Easter anthem “The Easter Son of Praise.” At the close of the 11:15 am service, we will be honoring our high school graduating seniors. All in all, Sunday promises to be a great day, and we look forward to worshiping with you in person at 8:45 am, 10:00 am, or 11:15 am or by livestream through the church website.
Finally, on Sunday, I will introduce the next phase of our Centennial Celebration. I hope you will join us as we announce an initiative to set a solid foundation for Peachtree Road UMC to launch into a second century of ministry.
Thank you for your support in so many ways. I look forward to growing with you in our resurrection faith in the coming days through the ministry of this great church!
Grace and peace,
Bill