This upcoming , we are hosting and we would love for you to join us! On at , we will be. This past , we have completed which had an excellent turnout. Over came out to with us! Thank you for all of your continued prayer and support. A letter of invitation includes an explicit invitation to join the church as an official member.
The letter should also include a membership card to fill out and mail back, as well as any instructions for informational meetings to learn more. To us, membership means. We are a church that believes. Check out our website at to read more about what we believe— and what it means to be a member. Missionary letters include key updates about the communities in which missionaries are serving.
Many of you know , our missionaries currently stationed in. The team currently consists of who have been overseas for. A letter to an inactive member should include empathy for the person whose church attendance has recently declined, and a sincere request for them to return.
You should let a reasonable amount of time pass before reaching out. Long time, no see! Please join us for a worship service on at , or take part in one of our community events!
Check out our website at to get involved again. Take the lead from the recommended party, and make sure you adhere to whatever deadlines they specify. Nothing is worse than a late letter of recommendation! Through our time working together at and , I know is a , individual that anyone would be lucky to have. This certifies that is a member in good standing at since. At their own request, would like their membership to be transferred. We affectionately recommend to join your fellowship, and wish you all the best of luck.
For further information, please do not hesitate to contact us at or. This should include a brief explanation, an expression of gratitude, and a tentative plan going forward. Send this letter as soon as they feel comfortable enough to make the announcement to the entire congregation. I regret to inform you that I, of , will be within. I will miss all of you at , but ultimately feel that God is calling me to. Due to , I have decided this is the best choice for myself and my family.
I appreciate every single one of you for the environment and experiences at , and it is an opportunity I will forever cherish. Feel free to reach out to me at or for any further questions or concerns. Check out our website at for any updates and to stay in-the-know. Church donation letters include information about the current state of the church and how continued donations would help further those goals. Projects like these are able to be completed thanks to generous contributions from churchgoers like you.
Would you prayerfully consider giving to our church and joining in the mission to? Check out our website at to make a donation in seconds. Special event or special project letters should include specific details about the time, place, and date of the event, as well as information detailing your specific monetary needs. Event letters should be sent out at least six weeks before the event, and special project letters should also be sent out fairly early as well.
Our goal is to raise by so that this event can be an exciting and successful time. Check out our website at to give or learn more about. Sponsorship requests should include specific information about the event or project that needs sponsoring and include any benefits that sponsorship can offer an individual or business—such as advertising and good publicity.
We are currently fundraising for and are looking for some dedicated, generous sponsors like you. Statistics say that most people who usually don't attend church would attend a service if they were ONLY invited.
It is encouraging to see that you not only extended an invitation but went out of your way to make their experience here at First Christian Church an enjoyable one. Recently, it came to my attention that you will be moving away from the area, and will no longer be able to attend First Christian Church.
It has been a joy having you and your family as part of our congregation here at First Christian Church. Let me be one of the first to say that you and your family will be missed here.
However, I trust that God will go before you and will bless you indeed as you embark upon this new chapter in your lives. We just do not sit down and write letters like we used to. Most of our correspondence nowadays is in the form of emails or texts. Or maybe you are writing some kind of post on social media.
We tend to type rather than write, and we can see it in our children. Many of them do not learn cursive anymore because that has gone out, with the typewriter coming in. The typewriter and the keyboard is more useful these days than actually being able to write in cursive. But we are quickly losing all the good that can come from a well written letter. I am sure that even some of our kids do not even know how to write a letter or even how to address an envelope.
It is just not something they are taught anymore because we hardly do it. Letter writing was once considered an art, and if not an art, it was the mark of a cultured, educated individual. And throughout our history there have sometimes been some very rigid rules about the wording of certain parts of a letter, particularly the salutation and the closing.
The address, the date, the salutation, the body, the closing all had to be in a certain form. It had to look set up properly, and other matters like post scripts and attachments, had to be dealt with in a proper way or the recipient of the letter might very well look down a very long and straight nose at the sender because he was not or she was not keeping up with the proper etiquette of letter writing.
Like I said, it was an art. It was a mark of a cultured person to be able to write a good letter and to present it in a proper way. Even the weight or the quality and even the color of the stationary that one sent it in and the envelope were evaluated one way or another—that this was a quality individual, or this was a person who would send you the very least. These days standards in this area have fallen dramatically.
They are still used in business. There is a certain amount of this kind of letter writing going on, but it is not as important as it used to be. Nowadays, it is the resume and the cover letter that have to be perfect and normal business correspondence tends to be just kind of mediocre. In II Samuel is the Bible's first mention of a letter being written, and it might be one of history's first notices or whatever of a letter being written.
The letter was written by King David to his general, Joab, instructing Joab to kill Uriah the Hittite, to set him up in the formation on the front line so that he would surely die. That is a very ominous start to letter writing, if you ask me.
But since it is mentioned so matter of factly there in II Samuel 11 it is pretty certain that letter writing was a common practice already in BC when David lived, and it likely had been something that had been going on regularly for centuries.
Homer even mentions letter writing in the Illiad. He wrote in BC , and he supposedly wrote about things that happened in about BC. So, we are getting pretty far back in history. Historians, who generally do not believe the Bible and do not credit it with anything, say that the first substantiated letter was written by a Persian queen named Atossa around BC That seems kind of late, if you ask me. But we can safely say that letter writing has been around since early antiquity, with evidence of it coming from places as far spread as India, Egypt, Sumer, Rome, Greece, and China.
You know, the Chinese and the Japanese have very rigid rules about writing and calligraphy and that sort of thing, so they have taken it very seriously for many centuries. Now, the need to write letters, that is to send private, secret, or personal information to another at a distance, may have been one of the reasons why we have writing at all. It might have been the reason why writing systems were created in the first place. Just think about it. It would be very difficult to rule a wide area of people without the ability to communicate your wishes, your commands, your decrees to those people that you were ruling over.
You have to be able to find some way to transmit information and orders, so some method had to be to devised to do this so you could send a message to your chief lieutenant to tell him to attack a certain city or to guard a certain place. So symbols or marks of some kind that were recognized by both the sender and the receiver, scratched on wood or on a potsherd or something like that, or pressed into clay or wax, were likely mankind's first letters.
We know from the Bible that letters are significant, especially in the New Testament. But I have to mention that they are pretty important in the Old Testament too because there are several important letters that were written, or there are decrees that are given by various kings in books like Jeremiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther that are very important to God's record.
I am thinking particularly of Jeremiah's letter to the exiles that he wrote after the fall of Jerusalem to tell them that it would be 70 years before they would be able to come back. Also the decrees of Cyrus and Darius and the other king of Xerxes who were telling the Jews certain things like, "Go back and build your temple" or "Go ahead and build a wall" or whatever it is.
There were a lot of communications going back and forth between peoples at that time, but in the New Testament it is ramped up significantly, this letter writing, such as the epistles of Paul.
Most people who are more fundamentalist in their beliefs, and traditional, believe that he has 14 letters in the New Testament. Of course, you have to add the the epistles of the other apostles and when you come down to it, 21 out of 27 New Testament books are letters.
Very significant. And Luke and Acts, if you read their introductions, you find that though they are technically not letters, they are more like biographies, or a history, those books seem to have been written under a cover letter to Theophilus, who had perhaps commissioned both of those books. We also should not forget that Jesus Himself writes seven letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3. So even the many of the books that are not letters actually have letters in them.
By the time of the Greeks and the Romans, and this is the period we are talking about, the first century, all Greek and Roman schools taught a similar formula for writing letters. There was a certain way it had to be done. So they began with a salutation—Hello, Hey, Greetings. But this salutation had to have certain elements in it. It had to identify the writer of the letter, and it also had to identify the recipient of the letter.
The salutation contained both elements and in our modern day we do not do it that way. We say, Dear Jim or whatever, and then at the end, we say who wrote the letter in our closing. They did it differently so that the first thing you saw was who it was from and who it was addressed to. This salutation was often followed by a short greeting.
You know, saying something nice about them. Next came the main body of the letter that the writer was trying to get across, his real message to whoever the recipient was. And after that was done, the author would conclude with another greeting. Often that is what it was again, "greetings" or "greetings from my wife" or greeting from this or that person, which also might include well wishes for good health, and they would also then say "farewell.
There are a few letters that are not quite like that where they leave something out or whatever, but most of the New Testament letters follow this formula, this Greco-Roman formula to a T. So we have an understanding of this, and I hope I am not treating it too much like you do not understand. But I want to show you in an epistle how this works. We are going to look at the book of Philemon for a moment to see how Paul used this same formula in this letter.
We could have gone to pretty much any one of Paul's letters to see how he wrote these letters. The only one that would not have worked would have been the book of Hebrews. But we will see this in Philemon. We are just going to read a few verses to get the sense of how he used these various parts of the formula.
Philemon Paul [He is the the writer, the author. He describes himself], a prisoner of Christ Jesus and Timothy our brother [Timothy is also included as one of the authors of this letter], to Philemon [Now he tells who he is addressing it to, who is supposed to receive this] our beloved friend and fellow laborer, to the beloved Apphia, Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house [This letter has multiple authors and multiple recipients, and they are all there, right in the first two verses.
And then we get to this place where we have a short greeting. He does not use "Greetings" in this one. He does in a couple other letters where it will actually say "Greetings. We could go through and read verses but I will not because that is the body of Paul's letter. Paul writes to Philemon to get him to accept the fact that Onesimus, who used to be his slave and who ran away from Philemon, came and found Paul and he was converted.
And he is asking Philemon to accept Onesimus, not as his former slave necessarily, but as a brother in Christ. Because Onesimus had done wonderful things for Paul. He had helped him in many ways, and he wanted to make sure that Onesimus going back to Philemon was not going to cause any kind of rift either between Onesimus and Philemon, or between Philemon and Paul. He wanted to make sure that all of this was worked out properly.
So he wrote in this letter and said, make sure Philemon gets this before Onesimus gets there so that all of this will be understood. And Paul masterfully writes this letter using psychology to help Philemon accept Onesimus as a brother.
But then we get to verse 23, which is when Paul begins closing the letter. So he says, "Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus greets you [So there is new greetings at the end of the letter], as do Mark, Aristarchas, Demas, Luke, my fellow laborers.
So that is the general way a letter would go in the Greco-Roman world. This is very typical of how one would be written. This is how Paul wrote most of his letters. And because of this, because of the way it is followed so well, so strongly in the Bible, that is why they balk at Hebrews because it is not written like one of these.
It is a little bit different. It starts out more like a treatise, that is one side of an argument, almost like it is a term paper, something where he is arguing one opinion.
But then when you get to chapter 13 it ends like a letter, with all the the things that are supposed to be in a formal letter. So they are saying, "Yeah, maybe it sounds like Paul at the end, but maybe not in the first part. But, like I said, all of his other letters, as well as those from James and Peter and John and Jude pretty much followed this same formula. You know, when you first start to read a letter in the Bible that that is what it is.
It is a letter, an epistle. And then I did mention that there are letters that are not one book by themselves. Let us go to the book of Acts, chapter We have read both of these letters in a recent sermon.
It is the letter of James to the Gentiles. Acts Then it pleased the apostles and elders, with the whole church, to send chosen men of their own company to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas , namely, Judas who was also named Barsabas, and Silas, leading men among the brethren.
They wrote this letter by them: The apostles, the elders, and the brethren [That is who wrote it. Since we have heard that some who went out from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your souls, saying, "You must be circumcised and keep the whole law"—to whom we gave no such commandment.
This is the body of the letter, what they are trying to mostly get across. We will drop down to verse He is talking about these things that they told him not to do. Acts [T]hat you abstain from things offered to idols, from blood, from things strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. And then he says] Farewell. So James and the others who wrote this letter used the same format. Let us go to chapter 23 and we will go over a letter that Martin mentioned in his sermons from a Roman centurion, who is writing to the governor Felix about Paul's being imprisoned with him.
We will just read verses , and we will see that this letter is written the exact same way. Acts He wrote a letter in the following manner: Claudius Lysias, To the most excellent governor Felix: Greetings.
Acts And when it was told me that the Jews lay in wait for the man, I sent him immediately to you, and also commanded his accusers to state before you the charges against him. So pretty much the same. This is more like an interoffice memo as it would be today. Some officer sending to his commander or his the governor of the region, telling him what was going on. There is not a whole lot of flowery stuff going going on, not the blessings and such, but it is written essentially the same way.
So it looks like everybody did it this way. This was just the way it was done, and our formal letters today are influenced by the letters of the Enlightenment period, like the letters of Washington or the letters of Jefferson or Adams and those men and others which were influenced by their classical reading, which they did quite a bit of. They read a lot of Roman and Greek stuff in their education. That has come down to us because our format of letters is remarkably similar.
Like Solomon said, "There is nothing new under the sun. Now that we are thoroughly educated on historical letter writing, we will plunge into the aforementioned letters to the seven churches.
Not so fast, says Paul: the end-of-the-age rebellion against God must take place first, so go back to normal Christian living. The letter demonstrates that lamentable conditions in the church do not characterize the postapostolic church alone. Paul also stresses the collection that he wants to gather from the church for the Christians in Jerusalem.
Philemon: Plea for a Runaway Slave A.
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