Dear Church Family,  

The Christmas Season at TAC - Christmas Morning and New Year’s Morning. This year, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day both occur on Sundays.  This puts a bit of a twist on our Christmas and New Year’s celebrations.  With all the family celebrations occurring, we typically have less people join us for worship on the Sundays following Christmas Eve.  We really want to give so many of our tireless servants a bit of a break, so we’ve decided to host our Christmas Morning Service and our New Year’s Day services at the TAC building.  These will be simpler services in a much cozier setting.  We’d love it if you joined us as part of your Christmas celebrations at the TAC building at 10 AM on the 25th.  We’ll do the same on the 1st.   

Christmas Hampers As mentioned over the last couple of Sundays, we’ve been collecting items for the Christmas Cheerboard hampers.  We’ve signed up to do 6, but we’d like to add another family dear to us and would like to ask for your extra help to make this possible -  a total of 7.  Some of the families that we’ll be serving are through the Cheerboard - and we don’t know them - but they are in Transcona and they will definitely know that this gift came from TAC.  Some are from our own church family, and others are those who TAC has been connected to through caring folks in our TAC family.  Please check out the list on our website, here.  You can bring goods to the church office, or to the school on Sunday mornings.  You can also give financially to this with a donation marked “care fund” or “Christmas hampers”.   

Set up for Christmas Eve As we’ve been speaking about for the last number of weeks, we are so excited about our Christmas Eve service.  We’ve got such good involvement from people who will do small drama parts, worshipful solo’s, and decorating, and leading in carol singing, and sound/lights/video, and ushering, etc., etc., etc. We need your help to set up this winter wonderland.  Would you please join us on the 22nd at 6:30 PM at Murdoch Mackay to help set up Christmas trees, Christmas lights, chairs, etc. as we prepare to host our community to serve them with a Gospel-centred Christmas Eve celebration?  Come for as long as you can make it.  Even if you can only help for half an hour, we would be quite grateful.  

New Building I also want to say a big ‘thank you’ to the team who is heading up plans for our new building on the east side of Ravenhurst.  They are working with a great design team of architects and engineers to design a suitable building for us to gather together regularly.  We desire to use this building as another ministry tool to exalt Christ for His death, resurrection, and reign.  We still have no firm date yet, as much depends on the City, but their plans are still on schedule.  Our schedule, which is linked to theirs, remains unchanged; we are preparing ourselves for an occupancy, Lord willing, September 2018.  This looks reasonable and feasible at this point, but of course, this is all in the Lord’s hands.  Let us pray.  Let us work tirelessly to ensure that our vision and mission is the Gospel, not a building.  Let’s be about proclaiming the Gospel and discipling people with that Gospel - not about being bigger or having a better building.  Praise God that the lion’s share of the funds for the new building will likely be covered by the sale of the rest of the land.  Let us, in response to that, be a generous church toward other churches in places around Canada and the rest of the world.  

At Christmas, we celebrate that God gave His Son to gather the nations into His family.  The image of the Wise Men worshipping the young Jesus is God’s sign to us that He’ll do this.  He is doing this.

Your brother,  

Derek

#TransconaChristmas2016 #TransconaAllianceChurch #TAC