KING’S ACADEMY

c/o Reformation Covenant Church
1201 JQ Adams St. Oregon City, OR 97045

(503) 656-9444

info@ka-oc.org

Sherlock Holmes and the West End Horror:

A Dinner Theater Fundraiser Complete with an Auction and Raffle

Friday, April 20 & Saturday, April 21 at 7 P.M.

$20

Contact elizabethprentice.stoos@gmail.com for tickets. 

How Can You Help?

Event Sponsor: Our event sponsors donate $500 (tax-deductible) to King’s Academy for the Dinner Theater. You will have your name on the tickets and on the front of the program and will also receive substantial recognition at the event. Please give us business cards, business brochures, or whatever marketing material you would like to have displayed. Since we are having two showings, we have the opportunity to have two event sponsors.

Table Sponsor: Our table sponsors donate $100 (tax deductible) to King’s Academy for the Dinner Theater. You will have your name in the program and will also get to place advertisement on one of the tables. Please give us business cards, business brochures, or whatever marketing material you would like to have displayed on your table. We will be creating a 5×7 advertisement to go in a table tent on your table (unless you would like to create the 5×7 ad yourself).

Auction/Raffle Donors: Our Auction and Raffle donors provide King’s Academy with a product or service (tax-deductible) that we can auction or raffle off at the event. You can donate gift certificates, gift baskets, or other products. You will have your name in the program and have it announced during the Auction/Raffle. Please approximate a value for your donated item. If your item is too large to mail, please call us and we will pick it up. 503-803-4535.

The long awaited January Newsletter is here at last! This issue contains information about several upcoming events, as well as examples of student work from Fall Term. Enjoy! 

Friday, February 10 at Reformation Covenant Church.

Join us for an evening of delicious desserts and appetizers, served by the students of King’s Academy, while the music of Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and other great artists draws you to the dance floor.

Tickets: $10

Contact Barb Kennedy at barbkennedy50@gmail.com

The theme of Winter Term at King’s Academy is community. Every morning in chapel, we read the Operation World prayer book for the nations, pray for believers in those nations, and ask that God would add to the community of His people in the world.  As we read Paul’s epistles in Bible Class, we are looking for the things he tells us about what a community of believers should look and act like, and applying them to our own lives. This week, as we study what Ephesians tells us about our redemption from sin and God’s plan to unite the World under Christ, we will watch Laura Waters Hinson’s film “As We Forgive.” This documentary shows how people in Rwanda forgave the ones who killed their family members during that country’s genocide. The following is an excerpt from an interview with her.

“It’s very interesting in Rwanda because what you have is the government there has released at least 60,000 genocide perpetrators from prison. They released the guys who confessed to the crime and said, “We’re sorry. What we did was wrong.” Because there really was no way all these people were going to get a trial or go through and have an official federal court process. The government made this really bold decision to release these prisoners and ask the people of Rwanda to reconcile and to reintegrate the killers into their communities.

And so it’s one thing for your government to ask you as a citizen to reconcile, but it’s a very different thing to actually do that in your heart.

I think the government there has understood that it’s really going to be the church’s role and the faith-based organizations and the different groups operating in Rwanda who were going to actually give people the tools and the mediation and the counseling and the healing workshops, et cetera, that are going to truly bring about the reconciliation that’s needed.

And so, I think the church has played a major role and is playing a major role in literally just bringing people back together again, just being a place where a killer and a survivor can meet on common ground.

Most of these people were Christians before. 85, 90 percent of Rwanda claims to be Christians, so you can’t imagine how a Christian nation could devolve into genocide.

But it’s really the church who’s coming alongside people and teaching them about who God is and what Jesus did. And when people are accepting this idea that they have been forgiven by God, it makes it so much more real for them to be able to extend that forgiveness to the killers.

The killers, once they understand that they’ve been forgiven themselves, they have a huge responsibility to go out and ask their neighbors for forgiveness.

And so, I think the church is doing a good job. They’re learning a lot more this idea of encouraging repentance first and then encouraging reconciliation and forgiveness second. The repentance is the number one thing. The killers have got to repent.

And so I’ve seen a number of different places in Rwanda the church trying to help people get to that point so that they could bring about more often reconciliation, as opposed to just paying lip service to reconciliation like most people would do.”

http://www.qideas.org/blog/how-can-you-forgive-a-killer.aspx

I found this article very interesting. The same basic idea is at the heart of King’s Academy’s philosophy of education: all is worship. The idea is also at the heart of classical education: you cannot teach “subjects” in a fragmented way.

Do You Feel Broken and Fragmented?

By Ann Voskamp

(http://www.qideas.org/blog/do-you-feel-broken-and-fragmented.aspx)

God has only one loom.

You wouldn’t think so by the fragmentation of our lives. Our days look like the scrap floor of a studio, frayed bits of work, remnants snipped off family, a heap of countless fabrics—ministry, creativity, worship, volunteerism. We’re ripped into pieces, and putting our lives together again is like turkey stitching a crazy quilt—driving us a bit crazy.

We’ve sheared the textile of our own lives. And it’s time to put down the scissors. Why cut up 100% pure avodah?

That’s what God’s weaving. God doesn’t experience a disconnect between our screens and our sanctuaries, between the people on our street and the paintbrushes on our desk. We have these labels for the bits and pieces of who we are and what we do. But God takes up the all the threads of being and weaves them into a seamless silk. He calls it avodah.

The Fabric of Work

He began the weaving in the beginning.  “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). We read the translated word “work” and think that is what God meant for us to do. The Hebrew word is avodah. It is the same word in Exodus 34:21, in the writing of the Ten Commandments, “Six days you shall work….”  Six days you shall avodah.

The Fabric of Worship

But we know we’re meant for more than work. We know we’re meant to glorify God, to worship with our lives. Exodus 3:12 speaks to God’s serious call to this life of worship: “When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” We read “worship.” In Hebrew, the word reads avodah.

The Fabric of Service

And yet, God Himself calls us to even more than work and worship. Deuteronomy 10:12 records the question and answer: “So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” We read the English translation: to serve—to minister unto God, unto his people, unto the needy, the seeking, the hurting. The Hebrew original: avodah.

The Fabric of Creativity

We work. We worship. We serve. But there’s another integral element to our identity as human beings, the part that we’ve inherited from our Father who can’t stop creating, producing designs, dreaming beauty. 1 Chronicles 28:21 refers to these innovative, imaginative efforts: “The divisions of the priests and Levites are ready for all the work on the temple of God, and every willing man skilled in any craft will help you in all the work.” The text renders it as craft—creative acts, the arts—and God whispers again: avodah. He emphasizes his singular loom by whispering avodah twice in this one verse: work and craft are both expressed as avodah in the original Hebrew.

The ancient Hebrews even used the term avodah to describe the sacrifices offered in the temple.  And that is the key. To live a fully devoted, interwoven life, we must see everything as a sacrifice to God.

Nearly four hundred years ago, a man peeling potatoes as an act of worship, Brother Lawrence, said, “Our sanctification does not depend as much on changing our activities as it does on doing them for God, rather than ourselves.” We don’t need to change activities from monetary work to missionary work to be devout. That very construct is false. All Christians are in full-time ministry. So we can stop tearing our lives into the categories of worldly and spiritual. We can put away the scissors of selfish ambitions and self-seeking comfort and self interests. If our lives feel fragmented, it’s because we are tearing up God’s one-piece fabric.

We wear God’s seamless silk when we mindfully offer everything we do as a sacrifice to God.  Paul explained this clearly to the Romans: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (Rom. 12:1 MSG).  When we see our lives as a sacrificial offering unto the Lord—avodah—our work becomes art and our art becomes ministry and our worship becomes serving and our serving becomes work.

Just as the “LORD our God is one LORD” (Deut. 6:4), so our God weaves all of life on only one loom, and there is only one word for the whole of lives rightly lived in sacrifice to Him.

100% pure Avodah.

Over the past twenty years, the country of Southern Sudan has been
filled with war, pain, and suffering. Christians there have been under
persecution by the Muslims in the North. Just as Paul says in I
Thessalonians, we should be in prayer for our brothers and sisters.
Today, even as Sudan is struggling to recover from the years of
bloodshed, violence continues to run rampant. With supplies in the
refugee camps running low, people are starting to turn back to their
homes, where bombing by the North continues. Even the camps are not
completely secure. On November 10, a refugee camp near Yida, Southern
Sudan was bombed.
The best way to comfort those in Sudan is to make some sort of contact
with them and help build up their church. Letters are a good idea, and
so are Christmas shoe boxes
(http://www.samaritanspurse.org/index.php/OCC/Pack_A_Shoe_Box/).
Ideally, Christians would go and visit the war-torn people of Sudan.
Unfortunately, this is not an option for most of us.
The students at King’s Academy are performing a Christmas Concert on
December 9 at 7 P.M. at Reformation Covenant Church. There will be a
jar at the concert for donations to the refugee camp in Yida.
Donations will be sent through the Samaritan’s Purse Organization to
provide food and medical supplies to these people.
There will be singing and there will be snacks. We strongly urge our
Christian brothers and sisters to join us in this act of love to help
those who are suffering in Sudan, and give some of the wealth God has
blessed you with to those in need.

Sincerely,

The King’s Academy Students

What do you put on your door at Christmas time? How about something that spreads holiday cheer!  Purchase lovely-smelling wreaths and garlands from King’s Academy students and make your home a happy place for the holidays.

Only ten days left to order! Contact elizabethprentice.stoos@gmail.com

The King’s Academy October Newsletter is now available on-line. Read about the start of the new school year, see pictures of our first field trip of the year, and learn about upcoming fundraisers! 

Come support Kings Academy and have an awesome time doing it! It is a costume dance, but they are not required.

Five dollars is the suggested donation at the door, though if you would like to give more it would certainly be appreciated! There will be baked goods for sale and drinks will be provided.

Also, to make things more interesting you could get a partner and enter as a sponsored couple for every hour that you dance. That means you have to keep dancing even if you don’t know the dance.
Of course you can come without a partner and dance anyways, and you don’t have to be courting or married to be a sponsored couple.