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Goals for the Interim Time

What do you want most for Forest Hill United Church? Most of us can be pretty good at complaining – we don’t even have to work at it. Naming what’s wrong isn’t very hard. We know what the problems are.

At the Annual Meeting, the Transition Team presented goals for FHUC for the next couple of years. These identify some of the issues, titled: Identity, Governance, Communication, Youth and Children’s Ministry, and Finances. The energy of the conversations as the goals were discussed, one by one, suggests to me that we know what’s wrong. That’s good, insofar as it’s a starting point.

An obvious question is “Now what?” Where do we go from here? What’s the next step?

Perhaps you think it’s up to me, or up to the Transition Team to answer these questions. It IS up to us to offer possibilities and guidance. It’s not up to us to solve the problems.  In fact, I’d say most of the ‘problems’ aren’t fixable. They are directions in which we can move, opportunities for responding to God’s call to be the church.

So:

  • What is God inviting you to do?
  • What’s important to you for FHUC?
  • Which of these problems, goals, concerns matters most to you?
  • How?
  • How much?

Perhaps you think you’ve done your share. You can say that if you have no more dreams for FHUC, or if you imagine God has nothing more to say to you or through you. Remember, though, that God called Abram at 75 and Solomon reigned for 40 years (in a time of much shorter life expectancies than ours – and then there’s Methuselah who fathered a son at 187 and then lived another 782 years to 969!)

You might be done doing what you did as a young parent or have been on the Board long enough, but baptism is for a lifetime and that means serving God is for our lifetimes too. So, I’ll ask it this way, “Are your hopes and commitment to FHUC, and to God, sufficient to pull you out of your pew, onto your feet, and into working at one of these goals?” What’s the next step for you?

“Let the dreams we dream be larger than we’ve ever dreamed before.”  Gordon Light (M.V #145)

Pegi