Good day siblings in Christ,
There are a few additional items for the congregation besides the usual announcements. This weekend will be our tag sale on Saturday. If you have items to donate, please leave them by the downstairs door under the fellowship hall. Please do not leave them on the parsonage deck as I cannot bring them over until Saturday morning. The other big announcement is the last Sunday of October will be Confirmation! Please bring your favorite Bible verse and sign the Bibles for the confirmands with the youth.
Now for the updates:
The first is the congregation no longer has access to an unlimited Zoom account. We have not used Zoom for worship services in over a year and use Facebook instead. We have sporadically used Zoom for meetings. Since 2020, both Microsoft and Google have improved their apps for online meetings and they are free to use, so we will use those going forward for online meetings.
The second item is we are cleaning our membership rolls. Part of the interim process was to ensure the church rolls were up to date with members, visitors, and non-members. I am now in my fifth year of ministry at Our Saviour and I am an advocate for clean church rolls to help us as a congregation know what we truly look like in terms of membership. We did not change the rolls during the pandemic. I also made no recommendations a year after as we began to return to worship. Since we have an in-person annual meeting coming, we will need to know who are voting members and who are not, so we are in the process of updating after five years.
According to our constitution, a voting member is defined as someone who has communed and/or made a donation within the last 3 years. If this has not been done, we will move a family to member non-voting or another appropriate category. Within our congregational rolls, the primary categories are voting members, non-voting members, friends of the congregation, and visitors.
The final item is about becoming a Reconciling in Christ congregation. Due to the time between our original campaign in 2019 and now, how a congregation becomes a RIC congregation has changed, so we will need to begin again. This is not a bad thing as life has changed, so it would be good to get a new perspective. We will start with a simple questionnaire about our language, who we are, and whether or not we want to become a RIC congregation. Look for that soon.
Pastor Johnson