Transition Team Update
October 30, 2011
Your transition team is hard at work. The team includes Mark Moore, Ken Wright, Joey Haire, Tony Milan, Jerry Mize, Leroy Adams, Bridgette Hilton, Tim Brendle, and Meagan Wall.
Our Intentional Interim Pastor, Dr. John Tadlock, solicited nominations from the congregation and formed the Transition Team. These names were presented at a regular quarterly business meeting for affirmation. Our first meeting was held on September 19th and we have met seven times. Time has been spent sharing our personal spiritual journeys with one another and in bible study and prayer. Our work to date has included, training for the tasks we need to accomplish, adoption of a covenant to guide our work, review of data and trends, and building our team relationships. We have had many open conversations about the issues and realities that our church currently faces.
The congregation was invited to attend a presentation by Dr. Glenn Akins of the Virginia Baptist mission Board on October 12th. Dr. Akins did an excellent job of leading the church through a review of data from ten years of annual church profile reports and helping us to understand the demographics of our community. The transition team further reviewed this data on October 17th.
Over the past two days, we have spent over eight hours together in a retreat. We have emerged from that time together with a clear outline for our work and a timeline to guide us. We are committed to this task and keenly aware that the challenge is great and the potential benefits significant. We have elected Tim Brendle to serve as our chairman, Ken Wright as vice chairman, and Meagan Wall to serve as Recording Secretary.
This work cannot be done in a day, but we are working steadily toward the goal of helping our church develop a clear mission, solid core values, and ultimately becoming a spiritually healthy congregation that can be effective in reaching our community for Christ.
We covet your prayers; we ask for your patience; we ask you to put aside any temptation to judge or criticize one another. We believe in God’s power to transform this church and to use imperfect people to accomplish his perfect will.
During the next two weeks you will begin to see the church’s history unfold before you and you will be invited to become personally involved in celebrating what God has done in the past. There will also be opportunity for us to find release from some of the painful experiences we have shared together. We pray that this will launch our journey toward rebirth.
We will keep you informed about our work with regular reports in the Torch, on the Website, and during Sunday morning worship time. We invite your input and must have your participation at every step. Please be ready to do your part when asked to participate and give feedback. Together, with God’s help, we can experience resurrection power.
