Dear Chapel Hill,
For those who traveled and were not able to attend the All Church Meeting on May 3, 2015, the following summarizes some main points presented by the Holy Conversation’s team.
First, the Holy Conversations Team consists of 8 people including the pastor; they are listed here for your information: Mai Le, Margaret Young, Andrea Rains, Mel and Lee Willhite, Kelly Patterson, Bitsy Laney, and Howard Stansell. Please feel free to call any of us if you have questions or to share your thoughts.
Second, as a team serving the Chapel Hill UMC congregation, we facilitated conversations with all church members to discern God’s directions for our church for the next 2-5 years.
As facilitators we will not make any decisions concerning the direction of the church without you. We gather input, discuss with John Thornburg, our consultant, and with one another. After each meeting or as soon as we can, the information we gather is communicated to you through announcements, newsletter articles, COM & committees meetings, Sunday School class leaders (or speakers), and one on one meetings when possible. In other words we try to find as many ways to pass on this information to you as we can. In other words, we seek your participation. The work of this team cannot be completed without you. Your thoughts, comments, suggestions, and ideas are invaluable for the success of this effort. With that said we need you to engage with this effort through prayer, support and input. Without God and without you as a body of Christ, this effort is meaningless.
In addition there have been questions whether or not this effort is intended to evaluate the outreach program. It is not. While outreach ministry is an important ministry for the life of the church, our mission is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Our interviews to different organizations around Farmers Branch are to determine the makeup of our neighbors and their needs. For these interviews, we have a handout of raw data to pass on to you.
But the work is far from complete. We discovered that many of the needs that organizations tell us we have already met (in one form or another). What do we need more and what are we missing? We believe there are cries for help that we have not heard. There is so much room for us to listen. We want you to help us to listen to the cries of spiritual, mental and physical distress with which the good news of Jesus Christ is the source of healing. Currently our team has set out to pray every morning at 7 am wherever we are, driving, working, etc., we ask that you be with us in this prayer time.
Please take time this week to fill out our questionnaire and bring it back no later than NEXT Sunday, May 10. You can either email it to Pastor Mai or Debbie. You can download the questionnaire or stop by the office and pick up a copy. We thank all of you for participating so far with us and look forward to some hopefully “Ah-ha’s” in the next 6 months.
See you at Worship on Sunday!
~ Your Holy Conversations Team
holyconversations@chapelhillumc.org
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