April 30, 2010

Today, our Elders head to Arnold for our annual 2-day Retreat.  While the timing is because of the priority of establishing a proposed budget for the coming fiscal year, this is hardly the concern that will receive the most attention.

Our REVEAL study “revealed” that we have lots of people who are growing Christians but who are not faithfully practicing basic Christian disciplines and are not regularly living out a Christ-centered life.  So we will ask ourselves…how can we help people (including ourselves!) become daily readers of God’s Word, involved in ministry, generous stewards with our resources, consistent in their prayer life, actively reaching out to others in evangelism and compassion both across the street and around the world, etc.

We also continue to have lots of new visitors to SBC that fail to integrate into our ongoing ministry, and we will be seeking ways to better connect people, first of all, to Christ and then to His Body so they can be actively growing as Christians.   Actually, when you look at our highest level agenda items, it looks like what we are mostly concerned about is how we can “introduce people to Christ and together become more like Him” more effectively!  It’s good to know that our main concerns are how we can live out our purpose better!

We are also “reassigning” two of our Elders to less elder work and more missions involvement:  Bill Polley is becoming “emeritus” in order to give more time and energy to our ROR (Russian Orphan Rescue) missions outreach, and Mark Wildoner is going to be giving less elder time so he has more missions preparation time for a possible “Halftime” adjustment to some area of medical missions.  Sounds like they are doing what we could wish everyone in our church family would be doing:  focusing primarily on fulfilling Christ’s Great Commission in our world!

We would appreciate your prayers this weekend.

Pastor Mark