August 2025

Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act. – Psalm 37:5

Grace and peace to you all! I hope you enjoyed a surprisingly mild July and are staying cool as the weather starts to heat up again.

With the 100th anniversary behind us and the latter half of this year ahead, the time comes to look to where we place our feet as we move forward. Who are we? How to do we want to show ourselves to the community and world around us? What actions are we going to take to make clear our commitment to the work of the Gospel?

We’ve seen the movement of the Spirit through our congregation in the past few months as we celebrated 100 years of ministry, the culmination of a century of community and a year’s hard work by members of our congregation to commemorate it. We had our annual July 4th fireworks booth and saw the blessings of our work returned to us. Our numbers in worship have mostly been on the uptick, and we have people choosing to join us as members as recently as this week.

The Spirit is moving us; now we need to discern where. Part of this work will be done by your Council during our annual retreat at the end of this month. The people you have elected as your representatives are going to consider goals for our congregation for the next year, September 2025 to August 2026, which will be offered to each of our boards to guide their actions for the next year. This congregation has the passion to do great things; now we just need to point ourselves in a direction and go.

There will also need to be some changes to what we are doing. Your president, Chet, rightly points to a growing issue in our congregation: none of us are getting any younger, but the work is still being done by the same people with some holding two or three positions among our congregational boards. I can appreciate that; without volunteers, most functions here are the church won’t happen.

But the time has come to shift how we are doing things. We need to decide what is absolutely vital and what can be left alone for a while, and then we need to let those things lapse. We need to let some things go unfinished so that others can realize that if they want these things to happen, they have to help.

This will be scary for a moment, but our entire faith is based around abandoning our fears and trusting in God. If we are to live the life God wants for us, we have to trust that God will act. God will not abandon us but will provide what we need – our congregation’s daily bread. These blessings may not come in the way we expect, but when we commit our ways to the Lord, we will see what the Lord can do.

Be bold and have faith, and the Lord will provide.