Chapel in the News

We'll post pictures of our Christmas Eve shortly, but we just had to do this first: Chapel on the Hill is on the front page of the Verona-Cedar Grove Times this week. Reporter Jennifer Blenner wrote an excellent article entitled "Chapel on the Hill reaches out to Katrina survivors."

The article starts,

They sit in the pew of Chapel on the Hill on Ridge Road on a recent morning, laughing and crying at how giving and receiving go hand-in-hand and at how a call answered can change everything.

They fit comfortably side by side in the pew for hours as their stories pour out of them. She starts and he finishes. She recalls when Hurricane Katrina first struck the Gulf Coast.

“I was shocked and I thought, what can we do to help?” said Donna-Jean Breckenridge, director of ministries at Chapel on the Hill.

When the strong Category 3 storm hit the Gulf States in late August, Associate Pastor Bill Breckenridge and his wife, Donna-Jean, watched in horror as entire towns were wiped off the map. With pictures of the devastation in Louisiana and Mississippi everywhere, the Breckenridges, along with their entire congregation, got involved in the relief efforts.

Jennifer Blenner describes what Chapel on the Hill did in the early days following Hurricane Katrina, and then how we heard about Lakeshore Baptist Church and sent a team of men in October. She writes,

“Mississippi was in total devastation,” said Bill, describing the scenery. “It assaulted your senses.”

While driving through the area, he noticed trees strewn about the road, cars upside down, a large boat sticking out of a school and miles of nothingness.

“I took 500 pictures and it doesn’t show anything,” he said. “It looked like a third world country.”

During their weeklong trip, the Chapel men did backbreaking work: clearing fallen trees from properties, removing debris from flooded homes and running the Federal Emergency Management Agency Point of Distribution Line.

The volunteers spent one and a half days gutting a house down to its studs.

“We had a pile in the road, which if emptied was their whole life,” Bill said. “It included trophies, pictures, and you could see these pictures and realize everything was gone.”

Read the rest of the article here. The print edition also contains three pictures of the Chapel team and our donations for Christmas. Chapel on the Hill is sending another team of men to Lakeshore on January 18th.

It's here!

It's Christmas Eve -

and tonight, Chapel on the Hill will present "Christmas Cameos" - powerful and beautiful music, highlighted by drama, which will tell of the Saviour's birth.

It will be at 8 p.m. on 560 Ridge Road in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. And tomorrow morning at 10:30, we will worship with joy the One who left heaven and came as a little baby, just so He could lay down His life for us, and redeem us.

What joy!

Just Around the Corner

Christmas is just around the corner - and Chapel on the Hill is getting ready!


The snow took care of outside decorations. But inside, there's lots of work to be done.



Beth and Maria sort through last year's boxes...



Stan and Bill start on the trees...



Johnny checks out the lighting...



and the guys figure out the stage changes...



The ladder's in use? No problem for Beth and Steve...



Chickie polishes pews...



and Ann, Lenka, and Pearl decorate the picture window (and yes, there's always coffee..)



And the choir rehearses, rehearses, rehearses...

It's going to be a beautiful Christmas! Chapel on the Hill's Christmas Eve Celebration will be Saturday, December 24th, at 8 p.m. And yes, on Sunday morning, Christmas Day, at 10:30 a.m., we will worship the Lord together.

A Great Day at Chapel

Such heavy equipment is not typical at Chapel on the Hill, but having a leak in the oil tank is not a typical situation. We've lived with the hole in the ground - and the burden on our shoulders - for so many months now, it's hard to believe all that took place on Monday.



As Chapel church family member Ken Swatt wrote,

"As to the blow by blow they arrived at 8:00 and were gone by 4:00. The area of contamination fortunately did not go too much deeper than the original hole and the sideways creep was not in the direction of the building but rather parallel. The sidewalk was not undermined. Contaminated soil was excavated to a depth of 14’ and 6 truckloads were removed to Mt. Hope to be burned. The hole was filled with clean aggregate and then topsoil. Some of that will need to be re-excavated when the new tank is put in – no big deal. The lab will have the soil test results back to the environmental consultant in about 2 weeks. He prepares the report to the State, which requires a number of items to be collected. This takes 90 days. We can hope to receive a “No Further Action” letter from the State by the end of 2006. Yes that’s right - good government moves fast."

Thank you, Ken, and so many others, for your faithful work on this project. And we praise the Lord - thank you, Father! - for His mercy and for answered prayer. This could have been much worse and much more costly (the man who did the work at church said he had just been to one place where the soil contamination was so great that it cost $50,000!). Ours was fixed in one day, and the contamination was very limited.

Praise the Lord! (and thank you, Ken, for the pictures and the report)

Chapel in the News

About a month ago, reporter Jennifer LaFleur of the Dallas Morning News called Pastor Bill and me both, and interviewed us regarding how Chapel on the Hill found out about the needs of the Lakeshore Baptist Church.

Her article - "Pastor finds Web of friends" - is now in print, and can be read in its entirety here.

It's a great story of how the internet, and specifically the 'blogosphere,' provided the route God used to connect churches across the country with Pastor Don Elbourne, and the needs of the devastated Lakeshore church. And here's the part about us:

For the crew from New Jersey, the opportunity to help Lakeshore provided something hands-on to do, said Donna-Jean Breckenridge, director of ministries for Chapel on the Hill.

"Instead of just sending money somewhere, which I know is needed, we really wanted to do something for people."

After finding a link to Mr. Elbourne's blog, she contacted him by e-mail. In October, a group from the church spent four days in Lakeshore.

From there, the word spread, as the volunteers blogged about their experiences helping Lakeshore.

"It has been 2 days since the Chapel crew pulled back into the church parking lot after the 1,300 mile return trip from Lakeshore, Mississippi, to Cedar Grove, New Jersey," Bill Breckenridge, pastor of Chapel on the Hill, wrote. "It has taken nearly that long to clear my mind enough to even begin to reflect on what I saw and did there."

Yes, Pastor Bill is the Associate Pastor - but otherwise, it's a great article! Read it, and thank Jennifer LaFleur for some terrific reporting.(jlafleur@dallasnews.com)

Must-See Pictures, and a Mississippi Blog

Finding an up-to-date blog about what's happening along the Mississippi coast hasn't been easy - but I just found a terrific one. It's MSNBC's "Rising From Ruin" and it focuses on two towns, Bay St.Louis and Waveland (Lakeshore borders Waveland on the west, so it's like seeing Lakeshore). It includes citizen diaries, in-depth features, and daily dispatches.


It included a wonderful article about my new friend Pam Lackey's efforts at creating a Christmas for Lakeshore.

One thing I kept thinking when Pastor Bill and the men told us (here, here, here, and here)all about their trip in October (another trip is being scheduled for January), and when they showed us their pictures.... The devastation was clear. The pictures were stunning....

But what is it like for those who know what it's supposed to look like? We (whether there or in pictures) see broken trees, destroyed homes, water lines, or just a cement slab. They see woods, neighborhoods, stores, streets - all gone. On the Rising from Ruin site, a man named John Wilkerson has a series of Before and After pictures that are a must-see.