2021 Member Meeting

For those of you without children in Youth Group, you may not know what the youth ministry has looked like over the course of 2020 so let me tell you a little bit about it. Despite the challenges that we faced last year, we were able to continue Youth Group throughout the year.

Youth Group had a strong start in 2020 with a weekend winter retreat at Camp Morrow where fifteen high school students went away for dedicated time in the word and in fellowship with one another. At that point, the ministry was showing signs of health as it was growing with more and more students engaged in the ministry.

Around that same time, we begin a sermon series through Habakkuk. While I thought it would be another sermon series, I had no idea how timely our time in Habakkuk would be as three weeks into that series, Youth Group would be shut down due to COVID-19. After a week of navigating options with how to move forward, Youth Group went digital through zoom gathering every week on Wednesday evening. And while Zoom was no replacement for gathering in person, it allowed us to continue gathering and where we finished Habakkuk and we could continue to hear the word and break into small groups. And to get a taste of how timely Habakkuk was and even in the height of the shutdown listen to these verses:

Habakkuk 3:17–18 ESV

17 Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, 18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

Those were timely words then, and continue to be even now.

The Lord sustained the YG through 13 meetings on Zoom.

When the church started in person gatherings again, YG also resumed in person gatherings. Throughout the year we have enjoyed a variety of sermon series including the Sermon on the Mount, and the great chapter on the resurrection from the dead found in 1 Corinthians 15.

While 2020 was a difficult year of ministry, we can none the less look back and see how the Lord worked even in spite of me.

As we look ahead there are a lot of exciting things to look forward to. Lord willing, YG will return to a sense of normalcy after nearly a year of all sorts of unconventional strategies. We are working towards implementing some of the old YG strategies again like camps, extra events. As those begin, you will hear more about them.

Now let me shift our focus to Kids ministry.

Since David has stepped down in November, I began overseeing the Kids ministry.

Since we have resumed our in person gatherings we have been able to offer childcare for the Nursery and Toddler classrooms, but all the other classes have not resumed since the shut down began.

But I’m excited to announce that on May 9th, that’s on Mother’s Day, we will be opening up classes for Pre-K through 1st grade! But there is a lot that needs to happen before those classes can open up. I’ll tell you a bit about it in a moment.

As for the 2nd - 5th grade classrooms, those will open at a later date. While there are plans to provide classes for 2nd - 5th graders, we are not ready to open those classes yet. In order for those classes to open again, we need to get back to having only one service. I don’t have time to go into the details about this, but if you have questions I’d be glad to talk with you about it after the meeting.

As we move forward with student discipleship, here is how you can help:

Prayer... apart form the Lord, our plans and efforts are futile. So please be praying for the youth and kids ministries.

Also we need plenty of volunteers to get the preK-1st grade classrooms open. In order to get those classrooms up and running, we will need a lot of volunteers, about 20 of them, so if you’re interested in serving in those classrooms please let me know, I’d be happy to tell you more about it!