From your Church Council President
On Sunday, March 30, Pastor and the church council met for an extended council meeting and retreat. During our regular business meeting, we reviewed the Pastor's report, Treasurer's report, and had committee updates. We then reflected on opportunities to strengthen our congregation and community in the coming year. As we shared ideas and individual visions, we also discussed the current and potential challenges facing our congregation and community as we move forward. Our council oversees the core activities defined by our committee structure. As we discussed potential areas of focus over the next 12 months, we identified the following themes:
Build stronger relationships. Relationships are built with the investment of time and shared positive experiences. We want to give opportunities to connect you with your church family, so you know you are a part of a community. This can happen through worship, conversation, fellowship, social activities, working alongside one another, and learning together. We hope you will trust each other with your joys, blessings, sorrows, and challenges. We want to build relationships within the community so others will know we are here for them when they need us.
Increase opportunities to learn. We would like to increase opportunities for our members to learn together and from one another. We had so many thoughts around life skills such as building maintenance, CPR, financial management, health insurance, legislation, cooking, and hobbies. We also discussed the value of improving our biblical literacy to allow the Bible to be the living word of God in a practical way.
Be of service to our community. Grace has a long history of collectively and individually serving our community, and we want to continue to be of service to our community. We are helpers. We shared our concerns about the community gaps that are being created as a result of federal and state funding cuts. As the preschool closes at the end of May, we are eyeing new opportunities to share our property, both inside and outside of our building, for the good of the community.
I am so grateful for Pastor Tania, Todd, Paul, Suzanne, Abby, Dave, Lori, Lisa, and David and their willingness to spend time to focus on you, our church family, and our community and to then identify ministry opportunities. I hope that you too will spend some time reflecting on Grace and articulating what you need from us and what you can offer. We hope that you will join us in service to Grace and to the community!
With love,
Jody Holmes
