Exciting Video from heART and SOUL week

Dear Westport Presbies, family and friends!

Here is a link to a 10 minute video/slide show of our heART and SOUL week. Well worth watching!
https://www.facebook.com/westportpresbyterian/videos/338250363731492/?v=338250363731492

Thanks to Deanna Capps for making this visual sermon. Thanks to Emily Davidson and Deanna for many photos, and all the other people who made it happen: Stan Morgan, Debbie Anderson, Jeanne Reiss Myers, Bobbie Testa, Nancy Gay, Marian Thomas.

We’re less than $100 from our goal in the Back To School project. Thanks to all generous givers.

Bruce Anderson is going to have another brain surgery soon. Keep him in your prayers.

We pray for courage and wisdom to change the culture and politics of gun violence and white supremacy that is tearing our country apart and bringing death and grief to so many of our fellows. Here are the gun related policy recommendations from the Presbyterian Church, USA:

1. 1Limit legal personal gun acquisition to one handgun a month.
2. Require licensing, registration, and waiting periods to allow comprehensive background checks, and cooling-off periods, for all guns sold.
3. Close the “gun show loophole” by requiring background checks for all gun buyers.
4. Ban semiautomatic assault weapons, armor piercing handgun ammunition, and .50 caliber sniper rifles
5. Advocate for new technologies to aid law-enforcement agencies to trace crime guns and promote public safety; f. raise the age for handgun ownership to the age of twenty-one.
6. Eliminate the Tiahrt Amendment to annual appropriations for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that impedes local law enforcement agencies in their use of gun traces and requires the Justice Department to destroy within two hours the record of a buyer whose NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) check was approved.
7. Following the recommendations of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, to support laws to “require judges and law enforcement to remove guns from situations of domestic violence, as well as from people whose adjudicated mental illness, drug use, or previous criminal record suggests the possibility of violence, ” and to increase police training in nonviolent proactive intervention.

This is a part of the social witness of our church going back to the 1960’s when political assassinations of many beloved leaders in our country brought about the first measures to solve the problem of gun violence.

Attached are some other photos from heARt and SOUL week and also amazing Kids Team Up for Art programs in several city community centers (a major mission support effort of our congregation, through the Westport Center for the Arts)

1. Youth on arts and spirituality scavenger hunt in sanctuary (counting organ pipes….smile)
2. Creating Mother Earth under Stan Morgan’s guidance
3. Kids Team Up for Art collaborative art
4. & 5. Kids Team Up for Art at Tony Aguirre Community Center and Westport Roanoke Community Center

Keep the faith…..Rev Scott