March Session Report
This month we opened our meeting in prayer, praying for several families of Saint Andrew’s by name. Josh and David joined us via FaceTime because they were in Florida at a denominational conference on church planting and multiplication. We hope to get an official report about their trip next month.
After our opening prayer we moved into our initial business; approving last meetings minutes, reviewing last month’s giving/attendance numbers, deciding to add a communion line starting Palm Sunday, and a shepherding group update.
Another topic that is going to be coming up at our annual General Assembly this year is the requirement of background checks for officers in the church. I think many, if not most churches practice this already, but it is not mandatory in the PCA at this time. We decided that it would be a good thing to make it official now to require all officers and staff to have background checks done every two years.
The next 2 hours of our meeting was spent in planning for future things in the church. This includes reviewing our structure of governance over Immanuel Classical school (our session is the board for the school), as well as plans for adding a children’s ministry component to our Sunday morning rhythm this Fall. For those who have been around you’ll remember that we have long talked about adding a nursery during the sermon on Sundays, as well as a children’s Sunday School before or after our service. Keep your eye out for a survey to help us know how to plan for this ministry. I think this is an important addition for our church as we aim to help each other train our children up into all godliness and truth. Also exciting to announce that Lauren Jamison will be moving into the role of Children’s Ministry director over the summer to help plan and lead this ministry.
We also spent a good amount of time with our new director of missions and outreach, Jesse Babcock, as he helps us grow into the “serve yakima”, and “multiply the church” portion of our mission Statement. As an aside it is important for you to know that anything we add must be in alignment with our vision/mission as a church. We did this by talking through his fundraising plans and strategy for building this ministry. He is going to be putting together a local/foreign missions strategy committee to help our church think through how best to tackle outreach in Yakima, and to the world. Once we have a solid strategy in place we will work toward putting together teams to help implement these strategies.
We also spent some time working through our new visions/mission statements as a church. From the beginning of the church plant, I anticipated our first session working through our vision/mission statements to help them align better with who we are. It is important to note that these new statements, once adopted, won’t change anything we are currently doing, but they will help to better guide and focus our efforts in the future. Much of the mission statement changes are more wordsmithing changes than substantive changes. Stay tuned for more on this!
Also of note, we made the decision to move our meetings to the third Tuesday of the month now, so if you ever would like to attend please let me know!
As always, if you have any questions or concerns about anything please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or another member of the session. As our session grows into its role, I think it is important that when you have areas of potential conflict that you come and talk to us, and resist the temptation that we all might have at times to grumble to others. We very much value your input into the life of the church.
It is a privilege to be able to serve you all.
In Christ,
Pastor Craig on behalf of the session