Brothers and sisters in Christ,
You no longer have to wear a mask at our church if you have been vaccinated!
Our online worship ministry will be a blessing this summer as you are able to travel and vacation. In addition to increases to our in-person worship attendance over last year, our online viewership has also increased. Statistics are not everything, but they can help to see the picture more clearly. In April 2020, we had 237 people view our weekend worship services online. In April 2021, we had 275 people join us for online worship. It’s really encouraging to see people coming to worship in person, for the first time, who have previously been worshipping online with us. We praise God for this!!
Lord willing, we will be receiving new members in June. Two of our new members will be Gerardo and Delin Hernandez. You have seen them leading us in song during communion distribution on Sunday mornings. They are also both in our Hispanic Theological Training and have never missed a weekly class in our 7 months! They are very excited about helping us to connect with our Hispanic neighbors. I am meeting with them to put our outreach plans together. We praise God for this!!
The search committee for our Worship and Music Director has worked very hard! I want to recognize and thank Diane Drabicki and Jerry Sigman for all of their hard work. We received over 20 resumes, which was an abundant blessing (largest number ever received). Many weeks we worked three evenings, going until 10:30 PM with interviews and follow-up conversations. At the conclusion of all this, we felt absolutely convinced that God has led us to the right candidate. We have presented this candidate to our Church Council to approve for recommendation to our Congregation to vote on extending a call to. Our Church Council has voted to recommend this candidate for your consideration. Because our church has not voted to extend them a call, we are not publishing their name (that would not be fair to them or to their current church); but you can ask myself, Jeff Chang, or anyone on Council and we will gladly tell you in person. Our Voters’ Meeting will be on June 27th. We praise God for this!!
V/r,
Pastor Jim