West Village Courier
may

 
Church Activities
2—Mother Child Brunch
   3—-Dig ‘N Roll Trip
  10—Mother’s Day
  16—EC Graduations
  17—Graduate Recognition  
     Looking Ahead
 June 1-5-VBS
    June 7-Church Picnic
  June 28-July 2-Shiloh trip
May  Anniversaries
4—-Dustin & Meaghan Fryman
 8—-Jim & Sandy Hortin
 15—Roger & Sherrie Turpin
 16—Jayare & Tara Buerster
        Caleb & Ashley Porter
 17—Kent & Diane Mason
       Doug & Stephanie Spencer
 23—Jason & Kelley Biggs
         Chris & Lenora Meyer
 24—Chris & Audra Spray
 27—Ed & Sarah Smiley
 28—Daniel & Lesa York
May Greeters
3—Sherry & Alex
  10—Tanea & Eric
  17—Tyler & Mackenzie
  24—Ben & Ashley
  31—TBD
May  Sound System 
Randy Longbons
Nursery
3-Whitney & Niki
10-Sandy & Debbie
17-Tonya & Rhonda
24-Emily & Joyce
31-Mackenzie & Michelle
Children's Church
3-Emily
10-Ashley
17-Darla
24-Tara
31-No Children's Church
Junior Church
3-Parker/Katie
10-Erin
17-Sherry
24-Tanea
31-No Junior Church
Call to Worship
3-Mike Dean
10-Steve Thomson
17-David Lane
24-Jayare Buerster
31-John Spray
 Servers
Neil Fearn
Steve Thomson
Tylor Etheridge
Eric St. Ledger

Church Picnic

The annual West Village picnic will be held on June 7th, directly after morning worship.  It will be a great day for fellowship and delicious food, as the serving tables fill with everyone’s favorite dishes!  Keep watch in the bulletin for more details.    

Mother-Child Event

On Saturday, May 2nd, a Mother-Child Event will be held at the church from 9-11am. It will feature a breakfast brunch. If you plan to attend, please sign up on the bulletin board and note the number that will be in your party.

Elementary Youth Trip

The end of the year Elementary Youth (3 yrs. old through 5th grade) trip will be on May 3.   We will provide lunch after church before heading to Dig N Roll in Evansville.  We anticipate being back at the church between 4:00-4:30.

Oil Belt Registration

Oil Belt is set to open registration for the summer of 2026 on March 2 at 10am! Select the week of camp based on the grade campers will be entering in the fall.  For payment you will need the code 100westvillagecc. (Please note the code is slightly different this year.) After registration is complete, fill out the church payment authorization form and bring it to Nolan to sign!  After that all that is left is to pack and have a great week at camp! Schedules are available on the welcome center.

Vacation Bible School

VBS is right around the corner!!  It will be June 1st-5th for ages 3-entering 6th grade.  The theme is  Snowball Mountain Challenge: Find Your Strength in God.  Registration is available online.  Lots of volunteers will be needed and a sign up sheet is on the bulletin board.  If anyone has any questions please contact Shayla Potts, Michelle Smith, or Mackenzie Longbons.



Missions Moment

Pioneer Bible Translators
     From the April 2026 MacSaveny Messenger:
It’s rainy season back in our old home in Tanzania, which is always a mixed blessing for Tanzanians and expats alike.  Refreshment on one hand, floods and power outages on the other.  The rescheduled Matumbi New Testament dedication is currently awaiting the end of the rains that make the Matumbi heartland potentially inaccessible.
And here in the U.S. our Kinymulenge translation team is enduring a season of challenges as well.  One of our translators is in Africa now, dealing with the aftermath of his 94-year-old father’s murder.  Our translators constantly live with the fear and tension of having loved ones still in harm’s way.  Trauma care is a growing part of PBT’s ministry in this and other people groups. 
We also learned that our rent-free office space is being repurposed, and the team is in need of a new place to work by the end of June, so Tim is juggling the quest for a new ministry home with full-time PhD work and his regular translation ministry.
News Highlights:
-Tim’s studies are progressing well, and he is learning a lot about the unique features of oral cultures, paving the way for ministries like ours to communicate more effectively with traditional people groups.
-Tim will travel to Dallas in late May to help recruit and train prospective Bible translators, and then our project will host a new group of interns for the summer.  We will also be serving as a family again at Oil Belt Christian Service Camp.
-While in Africa our colleagues distributed Scripture, ran a literacy workshop, and trained people in Farming God’s Way.

Nolan's Corner

      Its that time of year. My wife is beginning talk of the dreaded garden. It’s not that I don’t like the product, the produce as it were, but my goodness, those prefilled aluminum cans of vegetables seem way easier. But who am I to argue? It does help that at the start we get to do the one job in the garden that I actually like. Every year I get to pull out my blow torch and burn everything.
In order for something new to come up the old needs to be cleared away. We burn off the ground for new life to emerge. This can be a traumatic event that reveals what we are working with. And what is true in the garden is true in our lives as well. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 3:13 that “each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.” The fire reveals the truth of our lives, our weaknesses, our work, our faith, our everything. That doesn’t make the fire any easier.
I have two questions rolling around in my head this afternoon. When the refining fires come what will remain? And honestly, what in my life needs to be burned away for true growth to occur? The hard truth is that there will be times when life is difficult, when it is painful. And it would be easy to turn to God and ask why. But I would challenge all of us to see the trials of this life as the fires that will bring us closer to God, if we will let them. If we will let them burn away the sins that we have been holding on to, the distractions that keep pulling us away from the focused life of worship. The believer should welcome the life that can only grow when some things have been burned away.