Our merger team met again after church on Sunday.
We met with only a couple of items on our agenda, yet we didn't complete them. Instead, we spent most all of the meeting making some very important plans.
We met originally to discuss the ministry names which we, as a team had been praying over the past week, and to clarify the values which we believed were the unifying factors for the merger of our ministries. Very soon though it became clear that we needed to get clarity on what each of our churches thought of our work to date.
It has become clear in our meetings, that for the most part, the merger team is on the same page. We feel that we share an identity as traditionally Wesleyan in both belief and practice, we share a call to serve our community, we share a love for connecting as a body in worship, the importance of group discipleship, ministry to the whole family, and reaching out to our neighbors. While it's true we need to clarify our thinking in order to clearly communicate these to our churches, in our conversations as a team there is strong agreement on both the reason for and calling to merge our ministries.
This leads us to begin to plan for the next major group of tasks dealing with property issues and leadership structure of our new ministry. But before we do that, we feel we want to hear from our church members.
We have decided to prepare a report of our work to date to be first presented to a combined meeting of our leadership boards, fielding their questions; then present again charge wide so that we can update everyone on where we are in the process of planning for a new unified ministry. Each Church Ad Board would be asked to approve our work and endorse our moving forward with the "heavy lifting" of developing a plan for our facilities.
This Work to Date Report will be available in October, prior to our meeting with our leadership boards.
We closed in prayer at 12:00.
We are scheduled to meet every two weeks immediately after church, next will be September 6th.
Present yesterday were: Debbie N., Debbie B., Maryetta R., Carol K., Glenda D., Andy G., Dave K., Maria C., Artie K., Elizabeth G. & Pastor Gary
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