05/23/2026
MCC’s Sunday’s Happenings May 24, 2026
MCC’s Worship Services
This Sunday, May 24, Pastor Kerry Leeper will lead our Worship Service and share the message titled, “One Body, Many Parts – Ordered and Moved by the Holy Spirit.” The scripture is 1 Corinthians 12:1-14.
Key Point: God works through the Holy Spirit in Pentecost to develop the church through the use of gifts. We must welcome and celebrate those gifts. We must trust that the One God is at work in all of us, even though we differ and disagree.
Pre-Service Music begins at 9:15 AM. This is an opportunity, if you so desire, to prepare your heart to worship the Lord. We encourage you as you hear the music playing to pray or simply listen for the voice of God. And as you enter the sanctuary, focus your attention on the Lord as he prepares you for worship.
Pre-Service
•Gathering Music
•“Beautiful Things”
•Bell Choir: “Sonata in F #”
The Worship Service begins at 9:30 AM.
•Choir with Congregation Included: “Holy Spirit; Come to Us”
•Bell Choir: “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken”
•“Brokenness Aside”
•No Longer Slaves”
•“Made Alive”
•“Build Your Kingdom Here”
We encourage you to fill out our Check-In Form every time you watch our LiveStream. Click here …scroll down, and sign in every time you watch. This allows us to know who is worshipping with us and gives a way to connect with you.
Sunday School for Children and Adults
All Children will stay with parents at 9:30 AM for the beginning of the Worship Service. Children will go with the Children’s Ministry Staff during the service.
An Adult Sunday School class is typically held in the Grace Room immediately following the Worship Service around 10:45-11:45 AM.
An Adult Sunday school class meets immediately following the Worship Service. “Thrive: Flourishing in Stressful Times” is designed to discuss a separate topic each week, so you can attend all the Sundays or just the topics that speak to you.
What does it look like to truly flourish – body, mind, spirit, and relationships – the way God designed us to? Thrive explores that question through a faith-rooted lens, weaving Scripture with practical tools for everyday life. We’ll launch in May, pause over the summer and then resume in the fall. The class will be led by various teachers.
May’s topic is God’s Design for Our Bodies.
May 24 – Nutrition: Nourishing your body as an act of stewardship (Grace Room)
Prayer
If you need prayer at any time from our Prayer Team, please call Peggy Manning at 717-725-4311. You may send prayer requests to [email protected] or by clicking here and filling out the form on the Homepage.
Rich Hill’s Sermon Notes
BACKGROUND NOTES
For May 24, 2026
Pastor Kerry Leeper
1 Corinthians 12:1-14
One Body, Many Parts
How do we both recognize the importance of the individual but also value our need for each other? Or to put it in the terms of the church, how do we remember that God loves each one of us as an individual yet also calls us into a community? I think this is one of the questions that Paul struggles with throughout this letter of 1 Corinthians.
It appears to me that there were some in the Corinthian community who valued individualism over the community. This problem was seen in the way the church divided itself into groups claiming to follow Paul or Peter or Apollos (see 1 Corinthians 1:10-12).
It was seen when they came together for worship that included a meal. Some would start eating before others got there. Or make a big production of all that they had, while their neighbors went hungry (see 1 Corinthians 11:20-22). And it was seen in how certain members emphasized their spiritual gift over those of others (see 1 Corinthians 14:1-20). “Me First” is not a problem of just the modern world.
It is against this background of “me first” that we need to read this passage. Paul was trying to reconcile the uniqueness of each believer with the needs of the larger community. Paul acknowledges that we each have our own unique gifts. God did not stamp us all out of the same mold. When we come together, we bring different personalities and skills and interests as well as special callings from God.
But then Paul adds that while we are unique, we are to contribute our uniqueness for the good of the community, or as Paul puts in 1 Corinthians 12:7, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” It is not all about us as individuals. It is also about what we contribute to the community; that is, the church.
And so I come back to the question I started with: How do we recognize and celebrate the unique way God has made each of us, with our personalities, our skills, our interests, our way of seeing the world, and at the same time live together as a community, knowing that God has made us unique so that we can contribute our special skills for the good of the community?
I like what Paul says in the verses that follow this passage from 1 Corinthians. He says that just as the human body has many parts but is one body, so is the church. He goes on to say, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ (1 Corinthians 12:21).”
As a visual learning I can picture just a human head saying to the rest of the body, “get out of here, I do not need you,” and then seeing just the head on the table, wondering now how it is going to get from place to place or even eat. While we celebrate our uniqueness, we need to celebrate each other and realize that we need each other. We don’t need everyone to be like us, but we need others who can bring their skills to help us as we use our skills to help them, so that we work for the common good. But it is more than just helping each other, it is also contributing our skills to the common good.
There is also a second answer to that question. There is value in working together for the common good, but there are more than simply practical considerations. Paul envisioned a church made up of a variety of different people from different ethnic groups and traditions, from different economic status and social positions. In the church, these people did not lose their distinctions. They remained Jew and Greek.
But despite these differences there was one thing greater than what separated them, and that was their shared faith in Jesus Christ (see 1 Corinthians 12:12-13). It wasn’t the sameness that brought people together into a community, it was a common shared faith in Jesus. It was this shared faith in Jesus that allowed the church to rise above differences in cultures, traditions, thoughts, and
worship styles.
We bring our unique manner of thought, style, tradition, likes, and dislikes as we gather together in worship. But it is not our individual preferences, but our shared faith in Jesus Christ that makes us one community where we seek the good of not only ourselves, but of the others who worship with us.
