Dear Calvary Family,
Merry Christmas! What a joy it is to take time to reflect on God’s greatest Gift, Emmanuel, God with us!
As a church family, we’ve seen God with us consistently throughout this ministry year. You may recall in June we provided clarity and reaffirmed our mission to be a disciple-making ministry by “helping people follow Jesus together.” Specifically as elders, we outlined four priorities: implementation, Constitutional & Policy Manual review, transparent & timely communication, and progressing our role within the Calvary family. Through almost six months of our ministry year, we’ve made progress in all these areas; some more than others.
Relative to implementation, the Calvary staff is heavily engaged in assessing our various ministry strategies and programming, evaluating effectiveness through the lens of being and making disciples. Budget constraints continue to be a concern, but we remain steadfast to minimize costs and trust God’s faithfulness through His people to meet our most critical needs.
Reviewing our Constitution and policies has proven challenging; however, we have identified several areas that need evaluating, updating and/or adjusting. Our desire is to focus more attention to this area in the second half of the ministry year.
We’ve received a great deal of positive comments relative to our communications, visibility, and shepherding. As a result of your feedback in June, these areas are where we’ve spent the majority of our energy. We’ve been especially intentional through various channels to ensure you are aware of who we are, increasing our visibility and accessibility, as well as sharing what we’re working on and how it fits into the mission God has for us. We still have work to do and realize this will be an on-going effort, so we will continue to leverage multiple channels to ensure you have confidence in the leadership as we continue to move forward.
We plan to invite the entire Calvary family to a special evening discussion where we will provide greater detail into these areas and solicit your feedback. We’re currently targeting early February, so look for an invitation soon.
We indeed have much to be thankful for and we give God all the glory. Praise Him for His precious Gift and for His faithfulness to us all!
Merry Christmas,
Calvary Elder Board:
Paul Ellinger
Chris Gregory
Bob Malcolm
Neal Murrin
David Qian
Dave Riddle (VE), Vice-Chair
Paul Trulock, Chair
Bob Yerks