December 2025 - Monthly Newsletter
- Helms Jarrell
- Nov 25, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 17, 2025
AT A GLANCE
Upcoming Events
Gathering Dates
2025 BCC worship gathering dates: Nov 30, Dec 7, 14, & 21
2026 dates: Jan 11-Epiphany party, Jan 25- Covenant Sunday, Feb 8, Feb 18- Ash Wed, Feb 22, March 1, March 15, March 29-Palm Sunday, April 5- Easter, April 26- Nina Simone Day, May 10, May 24- Pentecost, June 7, June 21, July 5- Funeral for the Empire, July 19, Aug 2, Aug 16, Sept 13, Sept 27, Oct 4, Oct 18, Nov 1- All Saints/Children’s Blessing, Nov 15, Nov 29. Dec 6, Dec 13, Dec 20.
Big News! We got the CASA grant! There'll but updates coming soon with more details on the goodness coming our way in 2026.
Community Life
Save the date for the Epiphany Party on January 11th at 5:00pm. Get your tickets now. QC Family Tree's team member, Teresa Bone, will be reaching out with ways to volunteer with set up, clean up, food supplies, and/or performing at open mic.
CALL FOR ART: We Remember Our Neighbors
Honoring Our Detained Neighbors through Collective Creative WitnessCharlotte, NC
Artists of Charlotte,
We invite you to join a citywide creative witness that refuses to forget our detained neighbors.
Each person held in immigration detention is a life of immeasurable worth—
someone with a story, a family, a place in our community, and a seat at the table that now sits heartbreakingly empty.
Through art, we will hold space for reverence, remembrance, and resistance.
Public Art Drop: Share your work on social media and in public spaces anytime between now and Jan 6th, 2026. More details here.
Attention muralists: We encourage you to create a mural at the TAOH Outdoor Art gallery at 2200 N. Brevard Street where there will be a community-wide gathering on the evening of January 6th.
Leadership at Gatherings:
Date | Childcare | Prayers for the People | Creative Contemplation |
Nov 30 (Advent Season) | Laura P. | Judy and Tom J | Greg J |
Dec 7 (Advent Season) | Karim H | Christine N | Mattie B |
Dec 14 (Advent Season) | Tim N | Gretchen H | Seth P. |
Dec 21 (Advent Season) | Mattie B | Shelly M | Chris M |
Jan 11- Epiphany Party | party on , yall! | ||
Jan 25 (Epiphany Season) | Everyone together | tbd | tbd |
Feb 8 (Epiphany Season) | Greg J | Karim H | Helms |
Governance
The next Governance meeting will be (date TBD) via zoom at 7:00pm
Here’s the link: https://commonchange.zoom.us/j/7046546546
Here’s our Governance meeting agenda:
Check in
Debrief how the activation went, in terms of BCC leadership/hosting.
Looking ahead at 2026 calendar.
Working group updates
Comms
Justice praxis
Visitors
Budget/finance
Childcare
Misc
UCC grant status
Space updates
Close
Remember to RSVP
Please remember to RSVP to the Google Calendar Invite for BCC Gatherings so that we can make proper childcare arrangements.
Beloved Community School for the Common Good
forming a culture of justice, connection, and collective care.
Nov 30, 2025- Feb 17, 2026
This third season of school for the common good, we journey as travelers who make the path by walking—trusting that each step of faith, care, and connection shapes the way ahead. Like Mary, we carry and nurture a future not our own, tending what is growing even when we cannot yet see its fullness.
Rooted in interdependence and mutuality, we seek to build eco-community: networks of care grounded in shared governance, mutual aid, and economic redistribution.
Our work is to plant, water, and build—trusting that the kin-dom of God emerges through our collective becoming. We practice this becoming not through grand gestures, but through the ordinary acts that sustain life: sharing meals, tending gardens, visiting the sick, repairing what is broken, marking sacred moments, listening well, exchanging stories, and mourning together. These small, steady gestures teach us that to be human is to be in relationship—to care and be cared for, to depend and be depended upon.
The rhythms of body and earth, through song, ritual, and embodied practice, teach us that each act of love creates a pathway toward wholeness. Together, we make the path while walking—an ongoing creation of community rooted in love, solidarity, and hope.
Interdependence and mutuality: building networks of care through mutual aid, shared governance, and economic redistribution.
Seasonal and embodied rhythms: engaging the body, the arts, and the senses through ritual, song, movement, and observance of cultural- social, imagination, historical, economic- and ecological cycles.
Activation= This season, our activation for the School for the Common Good will be a Sacred Direct Action that pairs ritual, art, and public witness to honor our neighbors who were taken and to proclaim that our community remembers and will not forget. Beloved Community Charlotte will help lead a coordinated midday art drop across the city, placing historical-marker-style signs at sites where neighbors were detained, creating spaces for prayer, remembrance, and reverence in everyday public places. That evening, we will help steward a community-wide service centered on collective grief, truth-telling, and shared hope—featuring prayer, the reading of names, artistic expression, and invitations for participants to visibly mark their longing for the return of our neighbors. Through our presence, leadership, and care for one another, we will bear witness, hold sacred space for those most impacted, and affirm that each person is significant and beloved. Save the date: January 6th. More details to come.
Toolkit - Resources to use at home, with family, and in small groups. become a sponsor of the school to receive an all seasons pass to this toolkit or order a season at time. Here’s a link to a pdf of our toolkit for this season of the School for the Common Good. In it, you’ll find all sorts of DIY resources.
Beloved Community Circles: Tim and Christine are hosting the community circle this season. Stay tuned for address, date, and time coming soon.
Ritual Gatherings: Bi-weekly practices of ceremony, creative contemplation, story sharing, and connection rooted in the Christian tradition at Ophelia Garmon Brown Community Center, 2647 Freedom Dr, Charlotte, NC 28208, from 5pm - 7pm.
Communications
Ways to stay up to date
Slack is a communication tool that BCC folks use to update each other throughout the week. If you want to join the slack, let Helms know.
If you don’t want to find us on Slack, you can still find updates on our Linktree.
You can also add the Beloved Community Charlotte Google calendar to your calendar.
If someone you know wants to join our belovedcommunityclt email list, email iamhelmsie@gmail.com and she’ll add you to the list.
If you want to schedule some time to connect with Helms, feel free to find a time that works for you using this link: https://calendly.com/helmsjarrell
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