Welcome to the New Year! I hope you all had a great holiday season however you chose to celebrate and you’re all heading into 2022 full of hope and enthusiasm. I wanted to fill everyone in on what the Board has been up to recently and give you some information on the status of the church. It’s no secret that the Covid Pandemic and subsequent shut down has thrown the whole world for a loop, our church included. Our membership, and in turn our budget, has been affected by the pandemic and the shutdown and has left us in a serious budget deficit. Rev. Leland’s decision to take an early retirement definitely helped shrink the deficit, but left us with some other challenges to work through as well.
The board’s focus has been on how to bring the church membership back, and how to run the church until we’re in a position to hire a minister again. The Board met with the previous Minister Search Committee in 2021 to discuss creating a committee to help revitalize the church and bring in new members. Progress has been made, and they’ve had a few meetings to get things going. They have a working title of The Revitalization Committee. They’re currently looking for people that would like to help bring our church back and recently sent an email out to the Church Bulletin Board with more information. In normal times the Board focuses more on big picture long range planning and setting church policies while the Executive Team handles the day to day operations. The Board and the Executive Team are both low on members, so we have decided to temporarily join forces to run the church. We feel there is nothing more important to the church right now than building the church membership back up while retaining our current membership and combining forces just makes the most sense at this point.
This leads me to the last point I wanted to bring up – the church could use your help! I hear the collective groan as many of us are burnt out from over volunteering. I understand, but we’re at a critical point in the survival of our Church. We can’t continue to survive if our membership continues to shrink, and we need your help to make that happen. The Board, Executive Team, Revitalization Team, Stewardship Team and more are all short membership. If you’re already on a committee, thank you! If you haven’t been on a committee for a while, we hope you’ll consider coming back if only for a short time till we get back on our feet. If you’ve never volunteered and don’t know where to start, please feel free to contact me and I’ll be glad to help. We love our church, and if we band together we can bring back what we used to have.
Thanks for listening to me, and I look forward to seeing you all soon!
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