Mark Your Calendar
- Mar 1 – Men’s Breakfast 8:30-9:30 in the gym
- Mar 2 – Church Fellowship Lunch
- Apr 5 – Church Workday (and breakfast)
- Apr 19 – Spring Fling Outreach
- Jun 9-13 – Creative Arts Camp
- October 17-18 – Marriage Retreat
Church Fellowship Lunch
Our next Church Fellowship Lunch will be March 2nd right after the morning worship service. This is a great opportunity to invite family and friends — come for church and stay for lunch.
Church Workday
Plan to join us for a fun breakfast together combined with a couple of hours preparing for Spring Fling and Easter! We would like to make sure our campus looks good for Spring and the visitors we are sure to have with us. Men, Women, and Children will be welcome for breakfast and then some landscaping and cleaning work.
Spring Fling Outreach
Saturday April 19th; 11am-2pm; we will have food, inflatables, games, and candy! BUT we will need YOU to help staff those games and hand out those hotdogs! Please plan to join us for a few hours to show the love of Christ and invite families to our Easter service.
Creative Arts Camp
Thank you to everyone who has signed up for the creative arts camp for June! With this being our first summer doing this, we will be trying to plan ahead. We will have an info/Q&A meeting in a few weeks. If anyone is still interested in getting more information but you haven’t signed up yet, please do that in the church lobby.
Lord’s Supper Helper
We are looking for someone to help prepare the elements for the Lord’s Supper for the weeks that we celebrate. It takes about 10 minutes before Adult Bible Study or before the service. It is pouring the juice and preparing the crackers, then setting them up on the communion table at the front of the auditorium. If you are potentially willing to help with this approximately every 6 weeks, please let one of the deacons know.
Nursery Schedule
2/16 – Jim & Janet Saunders
2/23 – Sarah Wiggs, Tara Solomon
Constitution Update
In preparation for updating our constitution at the end of this year, the deacons will have the first section of proposed updates ready this Sunday for you to pick up and read.
From the Desk of Pastor Tom
We announced in January that the deacons will be working through the Constitution in 2025. We will have our first constitution update section ready on Sunday in the lobby for you to pick up and read through. We have a good constitution but there are a few things that can be refined. Our goal is to preserve and make our biblical beliefs clearer in the updated document. There is no desire to change theology or remove Scripture instead we desire to make it more clear, more readable, and more biblical. For example, this month we simplified the preamble and name sections while making the purpose section more clear and added supporting Scripture passages. As we work through the sections of the constitution, we will be providing them to you, the congregation, at each step of the way throughout the year. Please take time to read over these constitutional updates alongside God’s Word and feel free to ask questions. We are not perfect or inspired and unlike Scripture, this document will not be perfect or inspired. We do desire though to accurately present biblical truth. The hope is to work sequentially through our constitution, provide monthly updates, answer questions, and then vote on the completed document during our December church business meeting.
A few of the things that we notice at this point that need updates:
- There are long, confusing, run-on sentences that can be re-written to communicate better (ie. The preamble)
- Under the Articles of Faith, we do not have a section on God the Father (the Godhead section only addresses the Trinity)
- Under Sexuality/Morality, we would like to clarify our stance on biblical marriage between one man and one woman. Also, we would like to include a biblical statement on transgenderism.
- And all throughout the articles of Faith section, it will be helpful for us to add Scriptural references which will reinforce what we believe.
- We need to review the role and number of deacons – We have been blessed with numerous faithful and qualified men to serve in spiritual leadership. The constitution requires a minimum of 3 deacons and this is not biblical or wise to demand. Multiple spiritual leaders is always the goal and the desire is always for more! Every believer should desire to be recognized as biblically qualified and mature. However, if a church does not have enough qualified men, ignoring the biblical standards for qualification in order to fulfill a man-written constitution is a recipe for disaster. Our desire is to remove the requirement for 3 while recommending that minimum whenever biblically possible.
- Financially, the deacons have recommended raising the dollar amount for unbudgeted expenditures that they are able to approve due to rising costs in the years since the constitution was written.
These are a sample of what we have seen in our initial prayerful readings. Thank you for praying with us and reading through this as we go. You, the congregation, will see the suggested changes for each section as we work through them. I hope it will be clear that our desire is for transparency and a deep scriptural focus. We want our constitution and articles of faith to be as overwhelmingly Bible based and focused on the glory of God as we can possibly make them. Why do we believe what we believe? My prayer is that this process will bring us a document that is biblical and helpful for our church. I also pray that this process will cause good, Christ-honoring, gracious, spiritually beneficial conversations among God’s people.
