Faith In Brooklyn for August 1

August 1, 2018 By Francesca Norsen Tate, Religion Editor Brooklyn Daily Eagle

A Brooklyn girl created the winning work in the third grade art category. Artwork courtesy of the Olech family

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Third Grader from Gravesend Wins Prayer-Based Art Contest

A student at Our Lady of Grace Catholic Academy in Brooklyn’s Gravesend neighborhood was named a first-place winner in the 2018 “Try Prayer! It Works” Contest.

Family Rosary sponsors this national competition that encourages students to express their faith through art, poetry and prose. Each year, children and teens from Catholic schools, parishes and other Catholic organizations across the globe utilize their creative skills to illustrate a different faith-based theme.

The 20th annual contest, which attracted nearly 800 entries from across the U.S., was themed “Mary, the New Eve.” The winner from Brooklyn is Lisa Olech, a third-grader at Our Lady of Grace Catholic Academy. Her prize was in the art category.

The Try Prayer! It works! Contest focuses on family faith enrichment in the home. The goal is to bring the Catholic Church’s teachings to life around the dinner table with discussion prompts, reflection question, prayer ideas and creativity.

Students from kindergarten through 12th grade creatively depicted in various forms how their families are united through prayer and faith.

This year the theme was Mary, the New Eve. Students from kindergarten through 12th grade creatively depicted in various forms how their families are united through prayer and faith.

Entries were judged on content, ability to capture and interpret the theme, artistic and technical proficiency, and adherence to rules.

Each year, in the United States, three winners are chosen per grade, one each from three categories: Art, Poetry and Prose. First place winners are awarded $100 U.S., and the sponsoring organization earns $ 100 U.S. All the teachers involved are given a memento and each student who participated a Certificate of Appreciation.

Family Rosary was founded in 1942 by Father Patrick Peyton, C.S.C.

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Acclaimed German Youth Choir Will Sing at Zion Church in Heights

Zion German Evangelical Lutheran Church will host 40 young people from Germany, as their ensemble gives a concert here on Wednesday, August 8.

The award-winning youth choir, Vivida Banda (“Rasselbunde” in German, or “A Gang of Rascals”) has begun its U.S. tour this summer. The first performance of the tour by the choir, which hails from St. Peter’s Church in Weinheim, Germany, was at the University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The ensemble presented a varied program of contemporary and classical songs in German and English.

Vivida Banda is considered the most advanced choir of the St. Peter’s Church Singschule (song school). Children begin singing with the Singschule from the age of one and continue through age 21 in a graded choral program. They learn music of all epochs and genres. The only requirement is that the music is of high quality. Vivida Banda regularly sings in services and concerts in and around Weinheim, which is near Mannheim, near the Rhine and Neckar rivers.

Director Anne Langenbach founded Vivida Banda in 2009, and won the prestigious ECHO Klassik award for promoting young people in 2013. In recent years, Vivida Banda has sung at Rosengarten, Congress Center Mannheim, and on ZDF television. This biennial tour is the ensemble’s first one to the United States.

The August 8 concert at Zion German Evangelical Lutheran Church (125 Henry St. in Brooklyn Heights) begins at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free; donations are welcome.

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Faith-Based Agency Holds ‘Courageous Conversations’ On Trauma-Informed Care’

The Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA) recently celebrated the culmination of its first ever Courageous Conversations Leadership Development Series. Participants from all three professional development tracks — Faith Leaders: Healing the Healers, Nonprofit Staff: Nonprofit Resiliency, and Women of Color: At Work & in the World – are now equipped to minister in trauma-informed care.

They are also empowered to build on and access networks, assess needs for organizational transformation at work, make recommendations to improve work-life balance, identify ways in which trauma affects the mind, body and spirit, and realize the fundamental importance of self-care.

This Leadership Development Series set out to support community and faith leaders in deepening their understanding of trauma-informed care, incorporating and modeling trauma-responsive practices into their service delivery model, and working more holistically to create healthy and sustainable communities.

FPWA is an anti-poverty, policy and advocacy nonprofit with a membership network of nearly 170 human service and faith-based organizations.

FPWA has been a prominent force in New York City’s social services system for more than 95 years, advocating for fair public policies, collaborating with partner agencies, and growing its community-based membership network to meet the needs of New Yorkers.

Jennifer Jones Austin, chief executive officer and executive director, spoke at the church where she grew up and her late father pastored for many years, Bethany Baptist Church, in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

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Religion in the Original Eagle: Churches Eulogize Moralist William Jennings Bryan

The Brooklyn Eagle of August 3, 1925 reported that noted and controversial politician and moralist William Jennings Bryan was eulogized in several churches around the borough.

“William Jennings Bryan dead has awakened in America a determination that assaults on religion must cease,” declared Canon William Sheafe Chase in his sermon at Christ Protestant Episcopal Church on Bedford Avenue.

Another Episcopal cleric at Church of the Redeemer, the Rev. Thomas J. Lacey, said that Bryan “was noble of heart and of even temperament, unruffled in defeat and singularly free from personal animosities.”

Noting this although Bryan’s personal magnetism didn’t always him win his causes, but that his gifts were in social betterment rather than in political prominence. Dr. Lacey also noted that “the attitude of the Episcopal Church is ‘decidedly liberal’ to the theory of evolution. It is only those men hostile to faith that have selected evolution as a sort of veiled weapon to undermine and destroy the foundations of religion.”

Church of the Redeemer no longer exists, having been deconsecrated in 2012 and the property sold to a real estate developer.