Online Announcements

Services

Sunday: 10:30 AM ET CHURCH (& ONLINE) -- BI-WEEKLY BIBLE STUDY Wednesday 7PM

ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR ONLINE FOLKS

02/24 We have found that our Lighthouse Ministries COG ROKU Channel is now updating almost immediately once new recordings are uploaded. Last year, after our channel was upgraded from a private ROKU channel to a public one, we found that there was a lag -- sometimes of days -- between the time we uploaded a video to the time that it was published. Our video publisher (Christian World Media) was at a loss to correct the situation, saying that ROKU itself controlled the updates on the channel. Well, it appears the delay has been solved by someone because we are finding that new videos are being published within moments of being uploaded.

01/21/2024 We regret we have to cancel church and the Souper Supper following. We had the parking lot plowed and the front walk shoveled, but ice formed in the parking lot and Pastor did not want to put our congregants at risk. Stay home. Stay safe. Feel free to watch one of the multiple years of past services we have available on this website.


2023:

10/22 Our stream last week had issues. The software we use to stream had been upgraded and some settings were lost, creating a rather poor product. We hoped the stream this week would be back to normal, but it's still a problem. We will work on it this week.

09/06 Given the passing of our brother this morning, we will restart the Wednesday evening Bible study next week, 09/13. The upcoming baptism will also be postponed until a date to be announced later.

09/06 This morning, one of our family, Joe Polo, went home to be with the Lord from a hit-and-run accident.  Please pray for his wife Claudia and his family.

07/14 There will be a memorial service streaming for Robin Rodbell on Saturday July 15 at 2 PM ET.

07/10 After noticing that the July 2 service was missing from our Roku channel, we discovered that the video for that service is somehow defective. Most of the sermon is missing. We will see if we have a local copy we can upload to CWM later this week.

05/20 The website issue has been corrected. The Bulletin for May 21 has been uploaded.

05/19 Reminder that our last bi-weekly Wednesday night Bible study before the summer break will be on May 31.

05/13 A website issue kept us from updating the Bulletin for May 14. We are in touch with our website provider to get this fixed for next week.

05/12 My (Russ) apologies for not keeping the announcements section up to date. I intend to do better going forward.

01/01/2023 We'll be celebrating the New Year with our annual fast. If you want to do a 21-day fast like we have in the past, consider starting on January 11, which will take you until the end of the month. However, Pastor is suggesting that we consider a 7-day intense time of fasting, concentrating on putting the Lord first as we begin the year. Put something of value aside -- dinner, dessert, TV, sports... you name it -- and use that time to focus on the Lord and where He is going to lead you this year.


2022:

11/30 The work to restore the interior of the building from the plumbing-based flood is finally underway as of 11/20! We are hoping to have most of the rooms fully functional again in time for the Christmas Banquet on 12/11!

11/05 The Thanksgiving Project 2022 has begun! We will combine all your written statements of thanksgiving to the Lord into a video in time for Thanksgiving Day!  This is our third year for this Project, so join us as we build a video testimony of the goodness of God!  Send a sentence or two to russ@lhm.church by November 17 to be added to the video.

08/24 Our Roku channel (Lighthouse Ministries COG) is sometimes seeing delays of days, and recently, over a week before it updates. The expectation is that service videos should be available on the channel within hours, not days, of completion.  We are following up with our streaming provider, Christian World Media. Although CWM is being very responsive, it appears something is happening on the Roku side of things.  We will continue to watch this situation.

08/12 Some last minute schedule conflicts have required us to reschedule the baptism scheduled for August 13. Instead, it will be held on September 3 at 5 pm. Contact Pastor Hamby by August 28 if you'd like to be baptised.

07/09 The new pressure tank is in place and the plumbing is in, so we'll be having service as usual tomorrow!  Praise God we only had to miss one Sunday!  Given that we didn't do our Red, White, and Blue celebration last week, we will have a special drawing this week with prizes after church.

07/03 Well, believe it or not, we had our second flood this year! The pressure tank from the well pump erupted and swamped the place! That's why there was no service today. Thanks be to God that we hadn't yet put down the new floor from the last flood, so we just have to dry out the place and replace the tank!

05/21 Reminder that our last Bible Study for the spring will be on Wednesday June 1. We'll take a break for the summer and restart around Labor Day.

05/20 We've been having ongoing discussions with the company doing our reconstruction over what materials to use and we're finally getting close to rebuilding the damaged walls and floors (yes, this took a LOT longer than we initially hoped!). But watch this space for an announcement when the work is completed.  In the meantime, we continue to have services and studies in the building as usual. It's not pretty, but it works!

03/25 After realizing the amount of water damage caused by the flooding from the ruptured pipe, we have called in professional help to remove moisture from the church.  The floors in a few of the rooms have been removed, and a good bit of drywall has been removed as well.  As a result, this Sunday's (3/27) service will be Virtual ONLY -- we can't have people in the church under these conditions.  Please pray that the remediation process proceeds quickly and that we will be back in the building soon!  In the meantime, join us ONLINE this Sunday for a special Virtual-Only service!

03/23 We have a broken water pipe at the church. Thanks to everyone who helped clean up the mess! We cannot have the Bible Study tonight because the water is still off in the building, but we hope to have eveything working by Sunday!

03/08 Our public Roku channel is available from the Roku Channel Store! Search on "Lighthouse Ministries" to find it. Praise God for an extremely fast turnaround after we lost our private channel about 2 weeks ago!  Note that there is another Lighthouse Ministries channel in Ohio (not related to us); make sure you choose the one from Maryland.  From  this new channel, you'll be able to watch the live stream, plus have access to dozens of recordings of recent services and Bible Studies!

02/23 Our Roku channel is no longer available. That's because Roku has discontinued the support for private channels, also called non-certified channels.  We are working with our streaming provider (Christian World Media) to submit our channel as a certified channel, so it will be available from the Roku Channel Store.  We don't know how long this might take. At one point, Roku was taking a few months to approve channels, but we haven't heard how long it takes in recent times. Please pray that the new channel will be approved quickly.

02/09 After considering the increase in fuel costs (we have a number of folks who are not local to the church), it was decided to switch our weekly Wednesday Bible Studies to Bi-Weekly from now until the end of March.  We will re-evaluate the situation next month.

02/06 Due to some changes we made earlier this week with Tithe.ly, our "Click to Give" function on the Give page stopped functioning correctly.  We discovered that during the morning service and corrected it later in the day.  Our apologies for any inconvenience.

02/01 The weekly Bible Study resumes this Wednesday Feb 2 at 7pm.  This Wednesday's gathering will NOT be online, however, as we will be viewing a Christian film "I Am Gabriel" in the sanctuary.  Due to copyright restrictions, we will not be streaming the film online.  If you want to see it, join us in the sanctuary, watch it on PureFlix.com, or purchase a DVD from leading retailers.

01/30/2022 Join us as we celebrate those who have birthdays in the month of January!  If you were born in January, make sure that you join us this Sunday! 


2021:

10/16 During the current mid-week series, "The End Times in the Headlines," the online stream will be from the Virtual Church LIVE page, not the Fellowship Room page.  This series is more of a teaching than the normal around-the-table conversation, so we are using the pulpit and the Virtual Church set up.  We will return to using the Fellowship Room set up after the close of this series.

10/9 Apologies for the delay in posting the last 2 Bible Study videos.  They are now available in the archive as normally expected.

10/1 SCHEDULE CHANGE: Pastor Appreciation Day will now be held on Sunday 10/24, instead of 10/17 as originally planned. Something we have planned on that day required us to move it by a week. Please join us in person (if you can) or online to honor Pastor Hamby on this day for all that she has done for our congregation!

9/1 Due to the the Flash Flood Warning as a result of the hurricane's intrusion into the area, we are cancelling tonight's Bible Study.  Stay safe at home -- we will resume our Wednesday night Bible Studies next week at 7 PM.

7/26 Join us as we start reading through the Book of Matthew!  Pastor asks that we read a chapter a day, paying special attention to the miracles and to the words of Jesus.  It will be a blessing and encouragement to us all!

7/18 We will hold a church clean-up on Friday and Saturday September 17 & 18.  If you are local during those days, please consider coming in to help clean and re-organize various parts of the church.

6/19 Last Sunday, June 13, was the first time we've ever had a guest preacher join us via the Internet!  Pastor Greg Young of the Chosen Generation Radio program delivered a stirring testimony from the studio in his home in Texas, while being present virtually on the screens in the sanctuary!  If you missed it, see the video in the archives.  In addition, this opens up the possibility of more remote special speakers in the future, which is very exciting!

5/2 We had some bandwidth issues during the service today which degraded the video quality for about 5 minutes during our livestream.  We have replaced the copy of the service in the archives with our local copy, which has no issues.  You can see the improved copy of the service here.

4/18 This week, Pastor suggests we all read the book of Philippians, which is just 4 chapters.  We are also beginning to study the book of Galatians on Wednesday evenings.

4/4 Happy Resurrection Sunday!  It may not have been evident on the livestream, but we have two new TV screens in the sanctuary to eventually replace the old projector and screen we have used for many years.  We are still working out the kinks, but praise God, they were up and working today!  If you are in the area, we hope you will drop by some Sunday and check them out!

3/10  Last minute scheduling issues caused the cancelling of the Bible Study for this week.

3/7  We had technical problems at the beginning of the service.  We had a stream up, but had no sound or video to put on it.  By the grace of God, we got things working again around the time of the offering.  The video from this week starts there and includes the entire sermon.

3/4  The Bible Study from Feb 24 was finally uploaded into the Sermons Archive, as well as the Bible Study from March 3.  Apologies for the delay.

1/12  We are celebrating 7 years of streaming online!  Can you believe it?  7 years ago we began streaming and almost all the recordings can be reviewed in the Sermons page!  The first 6 years were lower quality, but as the Covid restrictions descended, we upgraded to a 720p video with much clearer audio!  Check out years of sermons and worship on our Sermons page.

1/3  We are reading the Book of Acts in January as a church. We are reading sequentially starting with Acts chapter 1 on Monday January 4.  Pastor is asking that we read one chapter a day.  If you want to read more, by all means, read more!  But let's read the Book of Acts together at the start of this year!

1/2  As we have done for several years, we will have a congregational fast this month.  Join us January 11 through January 31 as we lay down something in a fast before the Lord.  For some, it might be a Daniel Fast (no meats, no sweets).  For others, it might be one meal a day.  Or two.  Or television.  Or social media.  You decide.  Whatever it is, use the time freed up to read the Word and pray.  Focus on growing closer to the Lord in the year ahead!

1/1/2021  We wish you all a Happy New Year!


2020:

12/23  Our Wednesday evening Bible Studies are on hiatus until February 3 due to the Christmas and winter schedules of many of our congregants.  Join us again in February, either online in the Fellowship Room, or in-person in the sanctuary at church.

12/5  The Thanksgiving Project is complete!  See the results on the Archive page and share it with your friends on social media!

11/29  Change of plan on the Christmas Banquet: given the restrictions on gatherings for Montgomery County and the concerns of our congregants, we are not having a banquet this year.  However, on Sunday 12/6, we will still have fun after the service.  There will be giveaways, prizes, singing, and more!  Join us on 12/6!

11/19  If you want to submit your statement of thanks to the Thanksgiving Project, you can either put it in the Chat Box during the live service and mark it "My thanksgiving:" or send an email to russ@lhm.church .  Keep them short if you can (one sentence is great).  If you have a lot to be thankful for, submit more than one!  You can choose to include your name in the text or just leave it as is; your choice.

11/19  We are happy to announce that copies of the bulletin are now available to our online visitors.  They can be found on this page (below), as well as the Virtual Church Live page.

11/11  Bible Study was cancelled due to the bandwidth issue (we expected several people to join online that evening), so there is no video in the archives.

11/08  We ran into bandwidth problems with our Internet Service Provider.  As a result, people trying to watch online didn't get an acceptable stream to watch.  During the week, we contacted Comcast and the problem was corrected. Our service on 11/15 streamed without a hitch, so if you were put off by the problems, fear not; they've been remedied!  We did manage to record Pastor's sermon locally, and we uploaded it to the archives.

11/04/2020  We forgot to post the video for the Bible Study in the archives.  Sorry about that.  It was posted on 11/19.

WANT more annouNcements? CHECK OUT OUR CURRENT BULLETIN

Are you part of the Virtual Church and you want to see what's in the bulletin people recieved in the sanctuary?  Or did you attend service and misplace your bulletin afterwards?  Check out the content of our latest bulletin right here!