Ministry Center
Psalm 133:1
How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!
Church Conference: November 24, 2009
| On behalf of your SUMC Building Committee we’d like to thank our church family for an excellent turnout on Sunday evening, November 22. With our District Superintendent presiding we were able to listen to speakers from our congregation affirm what they liked and suggest areas of concern for our consideration. Our prayerful hope before the meeting was for speakers to speak with kindness. This was achieved and our church took another step forward in how to discern through Holy Conferencing. When it was time to vote the congregation came back with a decision that was almost a draw, 101 no, 94 yes. Seven votes, the number often used in Biblical allegory to denote perfection. |  Upper Level Rendering |
Perfect consensus will be the goal of the Building Committee in the coming weeks and months. For even if the vote had been reversed, seven votes denotes that we need to work just a bit longer on finding and confirming those areas of unity. Seven votes is not a mandate for or against the preliminary plans. A Church Conference we feel is not a basketball game to be decided by one point or a few votes. Had the yes votes been in the majority by seven, we would be proceeding no differently but would step back, listen faithfully, adjust the plans accordingly and then come back before the congregation again in a few months for another Church Conference where we will all get the chance to vote again.
 Lower Level Rendering | For consensus, compromise and unity to be achieved our church family will have to work on bringing to the task not just open hearts and open minds but open ears! Methodists have been conferencing for almost 300 years. We must listen with ears to hear. As your Building Committee we did listen Sunday night and will continue to listen to our church family until we find the appropriate ways to compromise on budget, design and how to utilize shared spaces such as the kitchen. Pray earnestly that others will agree to compromise also because we cannot please one ministry of our church at the expense or hardship of another. |
The unified message we did hear though is that our church does want a Ministry Center, we all support the educational mission of this church to create young and old disciples, and that we may need to look at a less ambitious plan and budget.
Seven votes. The journey towards the vision of a Ministry Center for our church continues.
Julia Batten Wax and John McLean, Co-Chairs