Below my musings you will find the minutes from the council meeting with our district superintendent, John Tucker, held last Friday. I would highly recommend you read through them. John also met with several people not on council to get a good sense of how committed we are to our request for a full time pastor. He came away feeling optimistic about our future. The idea is that he will continue to search for a pastor who would spend 20 hours a week maintaining our current worship service and the other 20 hours a week doing a new church plant (they currently do not have such a critter in our conference, but will look beyond the conference). We are declining in numbers and younger folks are just not interested in how we worship on Sunday mornings. Yes, there are anecdotal examples of young people joining worship services like ours, but all the major research being done says trying to convince young people to join us is fruitless.
We have a flurry of work to be done in the next few months, and once the council has had a chance to review the goals Chrys, Jean, and I worked out with our Rural Church consultant, Lynn Egli, we will get copies of those flow charts to you. We will also begin to ask you to join us in some very specific tasks to prepare ourselves to be a lay led congregation until a full time pastor can be found.
The single most repeated command in scripture is “Be not afraid.” So I invite you to let go of fear, open yourself to the Holy Spirit, and pray, pray, pray for God to send us the pastor who fits with us and our community.
Shalom,
Pastor Helen
For a copy of the Church Council minutes, please contact the church office at klamathfumc@gmail.com.
