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Vacation Bible School—Monday, June 22 to 26from 9 a.m. till noon for all ages. Contact Sharonnow to find out how you can be part of it! Registerchildren ages 3 to 12. Suggestion donation 20 perfamily.Christian Summer Day Camp at St. Paul’s UMC located at on 1314 Foulk Road, will be heldSharon Jennelly, Director ofChildren’s Ministry &Aldersgate Preschool302.478.2575 ext.118sharon.jennelly@aldersgatede.orgfrom 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. the weeks of July 20 to 24 and July 27 to July 31. Before care from 8 to 9a.m. and/or after care 4 to 6 p.m. available for an additional fee. Register children ages 4 to 12years. 110 per week per student.To get more information, register for, or volunteer to help with VBS and/orChristian Summer Day Camp visit www.aldersgatede.org!Mission UFriday, July 17Wyoming Methodist Church – Dover, DEBy Stacie DiGiacoma, UMW Communications ChairEach year United Methodist Women members prepare for faithful living and action through mission studies. All Aldersgatewomen are invited to join women throughout the Peninsula-Delaware Conference to participate in a one day overview of thisyear’s Mission Studies (listed below) on Friday, July 17. This is a wonderful opportunity for fellowship, worship, and study. Foradditional information or to register, please contact Aldersgate UMW President, Sherri Stiles at 302-478 -0424or sheriestiles@hotmail.com by June 22. Cost is 60 (will be partially subsidized by Aldersgate UMW) and carpools will bearranged.2015 Courses of Study Happiness: Spiritual Growth Study By: Cynthia A. Bond Hopson & Sarah Heaner LancasterThis study will examine the understanding of happiness and how to live the life that God calls us to.Leaders: Reverend Michael Johnson & Debbie O’Neil Latin America: A Geographic Study By: Sonia Maria Barbosa DiasThis study will examine the history, challenges, and the role of the church in Latin America.Leaders: Praveena Balasundaram & Diane M. MillerIt finally feels like summer is here! That was a rough winter forthis “southern transplant”.On May 31, we welcome our new confirmands for the year,and this event is easily my favorite one on the churchcalendar. I love how our students are welcomed intomembership in the church by the entire church body. It’sawesome to see a student decided to embrace the covenant that their family and the church made at the time of their baptism andI feel deeply blessed to be a small part of their journey.As summer approaches it also means we send students out of the student ministry and into their lives beyond high school, which isalways bittersweet. It’s great to see students embrace their calling in life, but sometimes that pulls them away from theWilmington area. It has been an honor working with the seniors this year, and I look forward to watching as you all do great thingsin the future.During the summer in student ministry, we don’t get to see students quite as much as we do during the school year. I would loveto help parents and families continue along their spiritual journey this summer even if I do not see them as much and to accomplishthis, I have created a Pinterest board for students and families. On it you will find everything from theology articles to familyactivities. I hope the board will serve as a tool to help shape your families’ faith journey. You can find the board on Pinterest bysearching AldersgateDE Student Ministry. Enjoy your summer and we’ll see you around church!AdamShare the Journey5June 2015

Don’t Forget! Highmark Walk for a Healthy Community on June 6thBy Nancy HoughThe second annual Highmark Walk for a Healthy Community takes place Saturday, June 6, at Bellevue State Park, Figure 8 Barn inWilmington. The 5K walk starts at 9 a.m. and the 1-mile fun walk starts at 9:15 a.m.Won’t you consider supporting one or more of the teams where many of our Aldersgate members are active? Delaware Guidance Services – The mission for Delaware Guidance is to provide quality mental health services to children,youth and their families. Join or support the team: Pennington Panthers Family Promise of Northern New Castle County – Aldersgate is an active participant in Family Promise, hosting families at ourchurch four times a year. The Mission of Family Promise is preventing and ending homelessness for families by engagingfaith-based congregations, volunteers and donors. Join or support the team: Aldersgate Partners Neighborhood House, Inc. – Neighborhood House is a National Mission Institution of The United Methodist Women. Themission of Neighborhood House is to assist and guide people with finding their own paths of awareness, self-sufficiency,productivity, hopefulness and success; and provide leadership, support, and advocacy for a comprehensive approach tocommunity, economic, and leadership development. Join or support the team: Judy’s Jaunters Read Aloud Delaware – The mission of Read Aloud Delaware is to prevent illiteracy by ensuring that each preschool child inDelaware is regularly read to one-on-one. Join or support the team: Hough ‘n PuffersThe names of the other 14 agencies can be found on the Highmark Walk website and provide a broad array of services to thecommunity, reaching those in need in Wilmington and across the state.Register today as a walker, “virtual walker”, or to donate via the website atwww.walkforahealthycommunity.org.For more information, see Christy Pennington, Judy Morton or Nancy HoughShare the Journey6June 2015

Can Music Be Used as Medicine?Submitted by Jeff Manns, Director of Music MinistryBiometric trackers are helping scientists tap into the body's response to songs and sound.“Because you listened to Drake, how about Future next?” Pandora, Spotify, and other music-streaming services try to predict whatusers might like to listen to, based on their tastes and what’s popular with people near them. People make playlists for certainmoods and activities—going to the gym, going to bed. But imagine if those apps could predict exactly which song would be best tohelp you focus, or to slow your heart rate after a run. (“You seem stressed. How about Sigur Ros?”) And if technology could predicthow music affects the body, could it suggest music to treat symptoms of a disease?That idea is the basis of The Sync Project, a new company based in Boston. Its mission is, as CEO and co-founder Alexis Kopikis putsit, “To figure out if music can truly be used as medicine.” Music’s effect on the mind and body has long been acknowledgedanecdotally—who hasn’t tried to use music to influence their mood? Kopikis says it’s only now, though, that the technologies inboth the music and health industries are advanced enough to provide the opportunity for this research.“We have this super interesting moment where, [in] the last 10 years, major companies have put millions of songs in [everyone’s]pockets,” he says. “Then we have a bunch of technology companies trying to develop every possible sensor that you can put onyour body to measure physiology. So we thought it was probably the first and most opportune moment to say, ‘Let's takeeverything we know and understand about music, take everything we're learning and understanding and [that] now can be trackedin real-time in human physiology, and figure out what's going on.’”The Sync Project currently takes the form of an online and mobile platform that pairs users’ music-streaming services with theirwearable body monitors—Fitbits and the like—to track how music might be interacting with their body. The collected data is thenshared with scientists who may be able to use it for their own research.Imagine if those apps could predict exactly which song would be best to help you focus, or to slow your heart rate after a run.The real-world information coming through the platform is crucial for researchers who want to analyze and understand the effectsof music in realistic contexts, says Ketki Karanam, the co-founder and head of science innovation at The Sync Project.“There's some really good research out there indicating that music has the potential to bring about significant benefits in manyhealth conditions, but not all the studies were well-designed,” she says. “The evaluations of what music does in the body werebased on subjective responses and lacked the objective real-time measurements of physiology. That was really the motivation forus to launch The Sync Project and build a platform that would enable all researchers and clinicians to run more studies, betterstudies, and objectively track what the music was doing under different conditions in different contexts and on biological systems,and hopefully pinpoint the properties of music that were effective for different conditions.”The Sync Project, which was officially launched at the 2015 South by Southwest conference, is still in its infancy. Currently, theplatform is only being tested within a small group of scientists and researchers—the company won’t say how many right now—with plans to roll out to larger groups, and eventually the public, later. The idea, though, is that a user’s biometric device, like aFitBit, would track things like steps taken, heart rate, and sleep patterns. Then the user would connect to The Sync Project app onher phone, which would bring in her music via Spotify, iTunes, or another music service. As the user goes about her day, the appwould track which songs she listened to, and the biometric data from the device at the time music was being played—was sherunning to Rihanna? Resting to John Legend? In turn, that data would be used to inform the user—plus scientists andresearchers—what music might have helped her fall asleep faster, or focus on a task better. (Of course, this is dependent on whatkind of biometric data available wearable devices are able to track. At present, the test users are tracking variables like bloodpressure, steps taken, EEG, galvanic skin response, sleep pattern, and concentration—whichever is available on each user’s device.)In the future, The Sync Project imagines it would focus on certain metrics, such as tracking sleep patterns, that could make for largeand comprehensive case studies for researchers who are studying related conditions.“In the last 10 years, there's been enormous advancement in the technologies of analyzing music, for the purpose of making youlisten to more music while you're on Spotify or any one of these platforms,” Kopikis explains. “We're taking that depth ofknowledge and marrying it with deep analysis of what is going on in your physiology, for the purpose of improving people's lives.”Current research into how music affects the body and brain shows that there is at least some degree of influence, physically andpsychologically.(Can Music.Continued on page 8)Share the Journey7June 2015

(Can Music.Continued from page 7)For instance, research published in 2005 by Theresa Lesiuk at the University of Windsor, Canada, concluded that music helped toimprove the quality and timeliness of office work, as well as overall positive attitudes while people were working on those tasks. Areview in 2012 by Costas Karageorghis found there was “evidence to suggest that carefully selected music can promote ergogenicand psychological benefits during high-intensity exercise.” Meanwhile, Stefan Koelsch in Berlin has found “music can evoke activitychanges in the core brain regions that underlie emotion,” and physically, “happy” music triggers zygomatic muscle activity—that is,smiling—and “sad” music “leads to the activation of the corrugator muscle”—the frowning muscle in the brow.How Brains See Music as LanguageHowever, the long-term effects still need to be parsed more thoroughly, plus it’s still unclear if and how, exactly, music might beused as treatment.“Just because music—or anything else—acts upon a part of the brain, does not mean that mental health can be influenced,”Robert Zatorre, a neurologist at McGill University and a scientific advisor for The Sync Project, wrote in an email. “We need farmore sophisticated understandings of what is going on in a given disease before we can really answer” the question of if music candefinitively affect mental or physical health. “That said, there are a few promising avenues that people are trying with particulardisorders, and hopefully that work will accelerate in future.”One such condition is Parkinson’s disease. Jessica Grahn is a neuroscientist at Western University in Ontario who’s been studyingthe relationship between music and movement, and she points to research that has shown that even when people don’t seem tobe physically responding to music—by tapping their foot or dancing—fMRI scans reveal that their brain’s motor systems areresponding internally. “When we look at what happens when someone appears to be very passively listening to music, and they'renot doing anything to it, we see quite a lot of the brain responding,” she says.People in these studies, done by Grahn and others, seem to be responding to a song’s rhythm. The rhythm, Grahn says, reallydrives responses in the brain’s movement areas, and these responses tend to be stronger with music that has a clear beat thatpeople can follow. Now, the next step for researchers is to find out if rhythm can be used to activate motor brain areas in peoplewho have problems there.Parkinson’s patients, for example, often experience “breaks” or “freezing,” and have trouble initiating movement. “It's not entirelyclear why freezing happens,” Grahn says. But “one thing that people have observed is that if you play music that has a steady beat,or sometimes even just a metronome with a steady beat, these patients seem to have improvements in their walking.” Grahn hasalso observed music seeming effective in elongating and improving the gait of Parkinson's patients, which is often jerky andunsteady.Still, there are a lot of variables that haven't been studied yet, from figuring out the strength and duration of these apparent effectsto whether an individual’s musical abilities have an impact. A major boon, Grahn says, would be obtaining data—much, much moreof it, and from patients in real-world situations."If you play music that has a steady beat, or even just a metronome, patients with Parkinson's seem to have improvements in theirwalking."“Patients really vary; some have a very fast progression in the disease, some have a slow progression,” she says. “It's impossible totest enough patients to really capture every kind of patient with every kind of musical ability in the lab.”She sees The Sync Project (which consulted with her about her research in the past) as an intriguing opportunity. “You can imagineit the same way that your phone knows where you are, they have these accelerometers in it. When you're walking, it jars thephone,” she explains. “A phone can also deliver music. So it'd be very easy to have an app for Parkinson's patients that record theirwalking and records what music they were listening to at the time, and then sends that data back to a researcher.”Kopikis agrees that the lab structure in research can limit what kind of data scientists can gather. “Some of the leading scientists inthe field have been working for 30 years with dementia and Alzheimer's patients, whose studies are based on observation,” hesays. “In many of these populations, you cannot tell exactly what is going on by just observing. Where scientists get very excited is(Can Music.Continued on page 9)Share the Journey8June 2015

(Can Music.Continued from page 8)the ability to combine what they're observing with a whole plethora of biometrics that can lead them to much more accurate understanding of what actually is going on.”Recently, Zatorre has been gauging interest in the program from research groups around the world, and says he has already foundmany of them to be enthusiastic.“I think that it could create a good dialogue between scientists and industry. That could be very valuable for both sides, of course.Furthermore, it could help to jump-start direct applications of our research,” he wrote.Meanwhile, Zatorre does warn that trying to use music as treatment can be risky—especially for a serious condition likeParkinson's.“It's very complicated to do research with clinical populations because you're dealing with people who have some disorder; youhave to be quite careful,” Zatorre says. “You can't tell them all, ‘We're going to try a treatment on you and have you forego thestandard treatments that you would know are probably useful.’”Still, if a patient finds that a certain song can improve her mood and outlook, why not try to reap the benefits and learn more aboutwhat’s going on?“I think there's a lot of hype about what music can do,” Grahn says. “I don't think it's a sort of cure-all or replacement for a lot ofthings, but I certainly think it has potential. And the great thing about it is there is generally no bad side effects, it gives patients asense of control over their treatment, and that's really Food Collection for Friendship HouseSponsored by “The Crazy Ladies of Aldersgate”Please bring non-perishable food items to church on Sunday, July12. The Crazy Ladies of Aldersgate will deliver all food collected onthis Sunday to Neighborhood House on Tuesday, July 14.SoupStewCanned tunaCanned VegetablesPeanut ButterJelly & JamPastaSpaghetti SauceRiceTuna or hamburger helperBoxed macaroni & cheeseVienna SausagesCanned SalmonBaked beansCerealOatmealDry MilkCorned BeefSpamBisquickCookies & CrackersPaper Products“The Crazy Ladies” of Aldersgate are a group of women who studied Francis Chan’sBible Study entitled “Crazy Love” over the winter months. At the conclusion of thestudy we were encouraged to find a way to reach out in “Crazy Love” to help in ourchurch or community. This is one of the service projects toward that goal.The Crazy Ladies of Aldersgate are: Sandy Anderson, Barbara Buckley, Betsy Diemer,Nancy Hough and Mary Jane Prince. Thanks!Share the Journey9June 2015

What’s Inside.A Summer Sermon Series:The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—What the Kingdom is LikeSunday, June 14 through Sunday, September 13Contemporary @ 9 a.m. & Traditional @ 10 a.m.Join as Pastor Chris and Pastor Don teach us “Whatthe Kingdom is Like” based on selected verses fromMark 4, 5, 6, 7, John 6 and 2 Timothy 3.Pastor Chris’ Message1, 2Church News3Finance Update4Little Helping Hands4Children’s Update5Student Ministry5UMW Mission U5Walk for a Healthy Community6Can Music Be Used As Medicine?7.8,9Christmas in July—Crazy Ladies Service Project9Good, Bad, Ugly Sermon Series10See you at church!Aldersgate United Methodist Church—A significant place where disciples are made!ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED19850Wilmington, DE598PA I DU.S. PostageOrganizationNon-Profit

The man who took the son gets everything!' God gave His son 2,000 years ago to die on the cross. Much like the auctioneer, His message today is: 'The son, the son, who'll take the son?' ecause, you see, whoever takes the Son gets everything. FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD HE GAVE HIS ONLY EGOTTEN S