Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,
Greetings from your recently appointed Transition/Call Team. We met twice in July to put together a strategy regarding the creation of a Ministry Site Profile. A Ministry Site Profile is a cross between a resume and a job posting. In the profile, we tell prospective candidates about our church and our community. We also do our best to capture the direction the congregation would like to go in the future. We highlight the pastoral duties most important to our congregation.
To do the best job possible, it is our responsibility to listen to you, the members of Immanuel Lutheran. To facilitate that listening, we will be holding chat sessions on several Sundays in August and September with groups of 6 or less in the conference room. Signup sheets will be available in the Fellowship Hall. Please sign up for a Sunday that works for you. Then grab your treats and head to the conference room. We will do our best to keep these sessions to one hour.
These sessions are confidential. We will have a note taker there to capture ideas and opinions, but names will not be attached to them. We ask that you follow the same confidentiality. This will help people feel comfortable sharing. We are all there to listen & understand.
If none of these sessions work for you, please contact one of the Transition Team members. We will be adding evening sessions in September if the need is there. Also, note that the sessions on August 18 and 25th will be offered remotely as well as in person. Contact Dave Howe if that is how you will be joining. We are also going to be making the questions available online. Our goal is to listen to everyone that wants their voice to be heard.
To prepare, be thinking about: What do we need to do to thrive? And what does thrive mean to you? What makes our congregation different from other Lutheran churches in the area? What are our gifts? What are you willing to let die for the growth of the church and what things must remain? Why do people leave our church? What would cause you to leave?
More importantly, it is our job to listen for God’s voice in this process. This is true for all of us, not just the members of the Transition/Call team. We are asking all members to meditate on Jeremiah 31:33-34.
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
Read this often and meditate on what it means to us as a community of faith and for you personally. Finally, we ask that you pray for the team and all members to have quiet time to listen to what God has in mind for this congregation at this time and in this place.
Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you!
Alvin Arens, Lindsey Atchison, Emily Hartog, David Howe, Donna Oslund, Mel Pioske, Shirley Zierke