Hello all:
I just wanted to let you know I haven’t forgotten that I left you hanging….however, things are much more dynamic then I thought…things are changing even more than I thought….I will resume writing after we have a worship ministry meeting tomorrow.
I’ll leave you with a painting from the Iconoclast period of “The Theotokis and Child”. (Theotokis means Mother of God).
-Clarke
Hello all:
In the past year, the little congregation that my family is a part of has gone through a period of ups and downs. We placed membership just a little over a year ago, and became a part of a group of only a couple of younger families in the congregation. My wife was baptized on Christmas of last year, not long after we placed membership, so we had a honeymoon experience with the church.
Not long after, we were fully immersed in the culture of this group of believers. We found out that the church had had close to 350 members before a series of splits occured, caused mostly by the former minister who had finally been thrown out of the congregation six months or so before we arrived. Morning worship attendance was now down to around 65.
I was brought into the worship ministry, which was trying to reform the worship into something a ltitle more “modern”. I was also asked to teach the teenagers, which was something I had a big interest in doing. We stayed very active in the events of the church, with my wife getting involved with lots of projects.
It became very apparent that one of our two elders had cancer and would not survive much longer. Plans were made for governing the church without an eldership or deaconate. Weekly attendance rose during this time period, and we ended up with about 85 people every Sunday morning, which created some optomism for all of us.
After Charlie passed away, a group of ministries was formed, each to govern their section of the church, along with a monthly men’s meeting that served as a business meeting. We also held congregational meetings to communicate with everyone what was going on.
The congregational meetings served as nothing else than a place for people to argue and fight. We in the worship ministry decided this would not be tolerated, and made it clear that abuse would not be allowed to occur. We lost a couple of members during this time, but that was okay because they were chasing visitors away and yelling at anyone who disagreed with them.
It became very apparent that the men’s meeting system was not working, and that the church was in financial trouble. During this time, attendance started to fall, and we are now back to around 65 people on Sunday morning, where we started.
We knew that we needed to do something, but we weren’t sure what.
To be continued…
-Clarke
Good evening everyone.
I obviously haven’t written in a while. Life has crept up and I’ve been busy. I just finished fall term at school and walked away with a 4.0 GPA again. I’m very thankful for that.
I’m also finishing up a fire engineering academy at work, and that is finally done next week.
I’ve had things to write about, but I’ve kept them to myself so that I had more time to think about what I’m going to say.
So, in the next week or so I’m planning (hoping) to write a couple of posts about what I’ve been up to recently as far as church goes, because a lot has happened just in the last couple of weeks. I also want to take some time and read up on what others have been talking about and I want to comment on recent events such as Richland Hills COC adding a Saturday night service featuring instrumental music.
So, I’ll leave you with that teaser for this second. I’m hoping that my long absense hasn’t pushed too many people away. I’m sure that some people will get their notification email and come over and unsubscribe. I guess we’ll see.
-Clarke