First Presbyterian Church of Willmar, MN 

August 8th – Pastor Scott
VBS Celebration Sunday

August 15th – Karen Skaggs
“The Needs of Animals” Genesis 1: 29-30

August 22nd – Pastor Leanne
“Environmental Fairness” 1 Kings 21: 1-24

August 29th – Pastor Scott
“Our Children's Inheritance” Genesis 15: 13-16

September 5th – Pastor Leanne
“Living within Our Means” Micah 3:9 - 4:5

August 1st, 2021

Try This at Home:
Buy each family member a permanent water bottle to refill at taps and water fountain. Take inventory of your pantry and refrigerator and notice where your foods originated. Read ingredients labels. Can you pronounce the chemical names, and do you know what they are? Look them up on the Internet. (Michael Pollan wryly suggests avoiding what our great-grandmothers would not recognize and what third graders can’t pronounce.) Plan a local harvest meal. Visit the nearest farmers’ market and plan your meal around what you find. Ask farmers how to prepare the unusual squash. Give yourself extra credit for trash reduction. If you have children, research your local agricultural year together. What grows when? Make a date to visit a nearby U-Pick farm together, and produce a pie or meal from what you bring home. Try freezing or canning what you can’t use right away. Try growing something you haven’t grown before in your yard, on the balcony, or in a community garden. Experiment with something easy, like tomatoes or lettuce, and don’t worry about failures. Enjoy the process.

Scriptures for Deeper Reading:
Leviticus 25:1-28; 19:9-10, Exodus 23:10-11  

For Further Study:
To go deeper, and to follow along with the sermon series from week to week, pick up a copy of “Inhabiting Eden: Christians, the Bible, and the Ecological Crisis” by Patricia K. Tull, Westminster John Knox Press, 2013. For Aug 15, read chapter 6, “The Needs of Animals.”