Advancing Toward our Goals
posted by Matt on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010
Believe it or not the summer season is coming to a close. Another school year is starting. Fall sports are shaping the lives of families. And new ministries are beginning at Reformation.
You may or may not recall during the unrelenting barrage of winter weather that the officers of Reformation held a retreat in February. During that time we discussed biblical goals for our church that we hoped would materialize in the next year. The focus was upon several areas of ministry: music, youth ministry, missions, outreach, and shepherding. While we are not yet where we want to be as a church in all these areas, there has been great progress. Karen Kuykendall joins our staff this month to enhance our worship and music ministry. Youth ministry (6th ? 12th grade) at Reformation is starting up this month for the academic year. Our congregation has been organized into shepherding groups under the care of our elders and deacons. And outreach has been primarily the work of God's people to invite friends and acquaintances for a visit (the best and most biblical from of outreach!). In fact, God has blessed us with many visitors and 30 new members over the past year.
Other avenues of ministry have yet to be developed, but our plan is continued effort to work and pray toward advances in all of these areas. I mention these things not only as an update of God's work in our congregation, but also because we want to plan for these ministries in our 2011 budget. The process of developing a wish list for next year's budget has begun. We are laying everything on the table, including requests for money in areas like youth ministry, a short-term mission trip, advertising for special events, and the Director of Music position.
From the time I wrote the article for the February newsletter to inform the congregation of our goals, my desire has been to keep before you a vision of these things. They are part of God's vision for his church and therefore they are important to us. They take prayer, effort (Spirit empowered man-power) and resources (primarily God provided money-power). Since we all want to be part of God's work here, we all need to be aware of how we can contribute. Financially, that means prayerful consideration of the advances in ministry in which we plan to support next year with our offerings when we vote on the budget in November. Spiritually, we should be preparing ourselves to using our gifts to serve the kingdom through the various opportunities at Reformation. So let's continue to labor and pray toward the goal of advancing God's kingdom in these ways.