AuthorRev. Craig Ross

Senior Pastor
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The vibrancy of life here at St. Peter’s makes my service on our staff a joy and privilege. Visitation, teaching and preaching are the ministries that feed my pastoral identity, as together our staff and lay members share in our missional calling … Building a community of faith by God’s grace.

yellow flowers
HE IS RISEN!

PASTOR ROSS EASTER SERMON Preaching Text – Luke 24:1-12 — But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they…

Missional Community

SUNDAY SERMON – TRADITIONAL WORSHIP JANUARY 23, 2022 — PASTOR ROSS             If you have sat in the pews of church over the years, and listened to a few sermons, you are aware that each of the Gospel writers bring a unique spirit to their telling of the Jesus story.  Matthew is a churchman that…

A Visit With Our Bishop

Our Lower Susquehanna Synod Bishop, the Rev. James Dunlop, visited with Congregation Council two weeks ago. The Bishop joined us in order to speak about the call process details for a future new pastor following Pr. Ross’ retirement in a few years.  While every part of the process was not discussed, the Bishop made a…

Filling the Void

“He squinted against the sun. Worry is something you create. Why would we create worry? To fill a void. A void of what? Faith” — Mitch Albom, The Stranger in the Lifeboat             There are lots of things that get in the way of our faith.  You and I could laundry list a bucket-full of…

Penultimate Resurrection

Do you recognize these flowers?  One of our church members sent me a picture of these interesting flowers from her garden.  They bloom in the spring, as do most flowers, and then die off in the mid-summer.  But just when you are ready to trim them back, cause they’re looking so ratty and spent ……

Life

The image which heads this week’s email devotion, is a snapshot of two shelves that are part of the bookshelf which sits in my impromptu home office. I have never really had a home office, per se, until Covid hit, and I found myself trying to repurpose what we call our “organ room” at home…

Playful Creativity

I’ll give you three guesses … go ahead … three guesses on what the cover picture to this devotion is. Nope … this is a picture of the tape we had used to mark off the church sanctuary when we opened up worship on June 6th.  We taped off every other pew as a help…

The Rats in Our Lives

Our thanks to Greg Hand for offering this week’s devotion! Plato was reported to have said, “The greater part of instruction is being reminded of things you already know.” Samuel Johnson put it a slightly different way: “Man needs more to be reminded than instructed.” And Robert Fulgham probably received substantial royalties from his book,…

A Perfect Day

FUNERAL ANNOUNCEMENT — for those who wish to attend the funeral service for Pastor Dick Geib, it will be this Friday, July 2nd at 1:00 p.m. in the church sanctuary. Bring a mask as we will be singing two hymns. A time of greeting with the family will be held from Noon to 1:00 p.m.…