I hope your summer has been great so far. Your pictures of vacations, beach trips and swimming pools have filled my social media feed. My family has been working hard to squeeze every bit of fun we can out of our time. I have also been doing a ton of reading, praying and thinking about the future. I’ve spoken with many of you and want to speak with more. There are some changes that I want to lead us through.
One of the problems we need to address is the overall lack of Adult Education/Bible Study time. Offering a weekday evening class has delivered meager results. Our response is to add a permanent Adult Bible Study every Sunday. To do this, our 8:30 service will shift to 8:00, allowing a 9am Education time. People coming to early service can grab a coffee and make their way to the class and people attending late service can come early for the class.
To assist the goal of becoming a more Bible-understanding community, we also will make some changes to our worship service. For the next year we will subscribe to a new set of lessons that allows for a more continual reading of the Bible. Each week our lector will read only one reading allowing me to focus our sermon material on just one lesson. Additionally, the Adult Bible Study each week will follow the Sunday worship lesson.
The second problem we need to consider is the current disconnect between our kids and worship. Having Sunday school during 2nd service makes it difficult for me to have much interaction with our youngest members. Therefore, we will have all the kids start Sunday morning worship with their parents in the sanctuary, then after a kid-friendly opening section they will be dismissed to their classes to deeper explore the same reading used in church with their teachers.
I hope you allow yourselves and our community to stretch our spiritual muscles and give these changes a try. Becoming a more Bible educated, family-centered community is our goal and together we can make it happen.
Have a great remainder of the summer. See you on Sunday, Pastor Dave