Dear Friends,

I really enjoyed reflecting on your questions in worship last week, and have been thinking about how I might engage with the questions we didn’t have time for.  I’ve decided to offer a brief response to each one in this column through the fall.  Remember that you can listen to the questions and responses from Sunday here.

It seems we are losing many of our families.  What is the plan to reach out to them?

I’m concerned about this too, and I’m hoping that some of the lack of families’ participation on Sunday mornings is due to the usual summer attendance drop.  We’ve been reaching out to them throughout the pandemic, and have been reaching out more since we started being able to have people in the building.  Mandy and I created the “Busy Hands” corner for Sunday mornings when we started multiplatform worship, and she reached out to our families when we did that to invite them to check it out.  She’s planned several “field trip” type activities through the spring and summer and invited our youth to them, as well as a donation drive for Ukraine.  Over the last couple of weeks, she has called every family in our directory to try to re-engage with them in anticipation of the new church year, and to invite them to the family gathering after the water communion service, which we’re setting up to hear what our families would like.  She has put all of these invitations in the weekly newsletter and on our website as well as reaching out to families individually.  She’s currently planning our Coming of Age program, and she’s in the process of pairing our youth with mentors for this.  And we’re trying to re-build an RE Team, so it’s not just Mandy and me trying to figure out other ways to engage our families.  To be perfectly honest, it’s been frustrating for Mandy because she’s gotten so little response to these efforts.

We welcome your participation in this important work.  Please contact Mandy or me if you’d like to help.

In faith and love,

Karen