The Raum Chapel/Rock Hall Church merger team met on Sunday 1/12 at Rock Hall Charge office. All team members were present.
Tonight our Merger team met at the Charge Office for an extended session. During this time, we began by spending time identifying and outlining the values that our churches possessed today in order to see which we might have in common.
Rock Hall values were identified to include generosity, youth, fellowship, and tradition. Raum Chapel identified values of encouragement, worship, prayer, fellowship, and status quo.
As we discussed these values, we found them to be very cooperative, certainly not conflicting. We also discussed the presence of any "skeletons in the closet", historical issues that could prove to damage the merger process. None were identified by the group.
Then we discussed our major take-aways from the book Vital Mergers:
We talked about our agreement with the for the "new ministry" to be the focus, not "our church's" survival.
We talked about the need to keep this process in prayer in our churches, in our private prayer life, and during our meetings. The prayer guide will be distributed in the churches, asking members to join us in this prayer campaign.
We discussed the element in the book where the author discusses the need for a new pastor to be appointed to lead the new ministry. I assured the team that I was willing to do what ever was necessary to see the new ministry succeed and if our advisers felt that a new pastor was required we should request this from the Cabinet at that time.
We then divided our group into two working groups. An administrative team and a vision team.
The Administrative Team (Maria C, Carol K, Debbie N, and Andy G.) will be working to deal with issues related to property and leadership. Property of our existing churches and that for the new ministry, managing existing property, handling shared assets, planning leadership structures, etc.
The Vision Team: Debbie B, Andrea E, Glenda D, and Dickie P) will be working to identify the values we want to possess in the new ministry and how we might structure the processes of the new ministry to develop those; what will our ministry to our community look like; what will our worship ministry look like; and what will our discipleship process look like. This team will spend time studying the demographics of our community in order to formulate plans to specifically address our community.
Present tonight were: Denny K., Glenda D., Andrea E., Maria C., Andy G., Debbie B., Dickie P., & Pastor Gary