Congregational Meeting

Emerging Vision of the New Church

Act 1—A New Beginning
Easter 2006, we opened Capitol Hill Presbyterian New Church Development as a merger of two congregations. Church at the Center-a 13 year old church from lower Queen Ann, with the tag line "real, relevant and a little bit radical" came togethere with Westminster-a 110 year old church devoted to traditional doctrines and liturgy.
We began with wild hopes of mission and growth with 3 plus pastors on staff.
Act 2—Reality Intrudes
We worked hard to settle into a new life together, devoting ourselves to prayer, a mission partnership in Africa, children and youth ministries, outreach to the international students next door, contemporary worship, emergent worship. We were a busy church. But we did not grow. We did not shrink either. It became clear to the leadership, that we were not growing to the size necessary to support our abundant pastoral staff. So, after much prayer, discussion and honest soul searching, we let our two associate pastors go October 15, 2007. At the same time, our InterVarsity pastor who provided leadership for our evangelism ministries went on sabbatical. our children's director left as well as our church administrator. Then James, our senior pastor, left for Africa for 2 weeks. Our busy church became quiet for a season.
Act 3—Signs of New Life
In retrospect, our downsizing of staff meant the end of our old church system. While it was painful at the time, it cleared the ground for the new church to emerge. Since then, our steering committee has focused on Discipleship. We narrowed our focus to 5 ministry priorities:
Worship
Prayer
Community
Bibilical Literacy
Service
We also heard a clear call to "get our house in order."
A group of elders visited "Adventure in Faith" a Presbyterian church in Port Orchard. They were impressed with their governance structure. This thriving church has three groups of leaders: Elders, Deacons and Ministry Team Leaders. Elders provide leadership through prayer, visioning, ministry priorities and evaluation. The Deacons provide ministries of pastoral care. The ministry team leaders will do simpl that--lead ministry teams--youth, children's ministry, finance, facilities, mission partners, etc.
This reduce the work load by involving more people with more specifically focused tasks.
A Date for Chartering—June 15
Chartering is when a New Church Development--like us--becomes a full fledged church. This means we will be free to make our decisions without a group from Presbytery reviewing our actions.
Why charter now?
When we started the new church Easter of 2006, we could have chartered that first sunday. We did not, because we wanted to give God time and space to end our former church systems and begin a new way of doing things. Since the departure of staff in the Fall, the STeering Committee has witnessed the emergence of this new church. Therefore, it is time to set that new direction by chartering.
This will mean a number of tasks, including:
The Selection and training of elders and deacons.
If you are feeling a desire to be an elder or deacon, if you know of someone in the congregation who would be a good elder or deacon, talk to James or a member of Steering Committee. We are beginning to meet to prayerfully decided on the new leadership of the church.
Stay tuned for a New Member’s class. Everyone wishing to be a charter member of the new church will need to take the class where James will be teaching about the mission of God through Jesus Christ and how our church is following that mission with the individual ministries of our church.

We have also been discussing the shape of Sunday morning. In an effort to make room for Adult Education, we are discussing 2 options
 Keep things the same and adding classes during worship.
 Going to One service with a designated education hour for children, youth and adults.
Continue to pray for wisdom for your leaders.

Finally, Jan Supler passed out a financial summary of 2007 and a first draft for 2008. Miraclously, through all the ups and downs of the past year, we are doing fine. We are paying our bills and even have some money to use for what's next. Remember that Mike and Heather are still receiving their salaries until April 15th as severance.
We finished the meeting with a few questions. But that is basically what happened.
God continues to lead us forward step by step. We are uncertain of the long term, but we are confident of God leading us in the future. The question is, will we be faithful?
Courage,
James