Where Do We Go From Here? Part 2.

With the end of summer and a new school year fast approaching I thought it would be a good time to take another look at where we are and where were headed.

Not long after my last post, we met with the folks involved in the Youth Ministry (Casey, Doug, elders, deacons, etc) to discuss ideas, misconceptions, concerns, disagreements and defuse some growing tensions. A special thanks goes to Dr. Alan Pogue for an excellent job facilitating the meeting. We probably still don't see eye to eye on everything but we did clear some things up and came away with a better understanding of each other's thinking. A tangible result of this meeting was we were able to move ahead with sending a number of kids from the girl's class that Allison was teaching and guys from Justin's class to Casey's Wednesday night class. Allison and Justin have also joined this class to provide familiar faces to help in the transition. From our perspective this move has been fairly successful.

D.A. and Laura Frost took 6 of our kids with them to church camp. Aside from a little homesickness, a small incident of resistance to authority, and two disintegrating van tires on the way home (what church trip would be complete without some sort of transportation breakdown), everyone had a good time. Hopefully we can send more next year.

As expected during the summer months and without the Wednesday meal the number of kids coming dropped. We fell from averaging over a 100 to around 40 each week. While I'm sad that we've missed out on a summer of opportunities with these kids, I'm extremely proud and grateful for the ones that have continued to come. I've got more to say about this but I'm going to save that for a separate post.

Some of the plans that we had for the fall we've had to put on hold for awhile. The eldership has decided to suspend the Wednesday night meals this fall to give all the associated ministries a little "breather". This time off will be a chance to step back and review the entire Wednesday night program from meals, to Community Outreach, to the Mother's class, to kid's classes, overall logistics, etc.

Over the next few weeks we will be planning for the fall and deciding what changes we need to make as we go forward. That's it for now, we'll try to keep everyone informed as we proceed and as always if anyone has suggestions, ideas or even complaints please let us know.

Mark

p.s. some of the above was stolen verbatim from an email from Ted, I wouldn't want to be accused of plagerism.