Session Retreat
Every year our Session plans to spend a weekend away to pray and plan for what’s coming next in the life of the church. This is an essential aspect to our leading and shepherding Saint Andrew’s well. So what does that weekend look like?
Well, in order to save some money, we met at my parents place in Sunnyside (they weren’t there with us… I gently kicked them out). We cooked dinner together on Thursday evening, and then enjoyed a time of evening prayer together. After that we moved into what looks more like a normal session meeting, dealing with the business of the church. One thing of note, that we will bring to you all at our annual meeting, are two proposed bylaw changes. For those who aren’t familiar with this language, our bylaws work alongside the BCO to guide and govern how we do church together. The two proposed changes would be to lower the voting age to 16 (so that our young members have a chance to vote before they move away), and to require three different households to nominate an officer (to avoid nepotism and to find men who have been seen by multiple people to have the giftings of elder/deacon). There will be more on this coming out later but bylaw changes require a ¾ vote of the members.
The other thing that we spent some time discussing is the need to continue to develop our diaconate. We are planning on taking nominations for the office of deacon at our annual meeting this year. Those that are nominated and decide to enter the training process will enter a 6 month training before they would be put before the church to vote into the office of Deacon. I will be preaching a sermon about this in January, but if you are reading about this and have any questions feel free to reach out.
The last thing we discussed on our first evening was budget. Both reviewing where we are at and thinking through the new year. The budget, as always, will be presented at our annual meeting. After this riveting talk we prayed, and then enjoyed the evening together.
The next day we began with food and morning prayer. Most of this day was spent around strategic planning for the church. This included thinking through church core values. Core values help shape the way in which we do life together. We hope to present them to you before the end of the year. Then we went over previous years SWOT analysis which reviews strengths and weaknesses. It was interesting to see how we’ve grown in some areas that we were weak in last year.
The last part of the strategic plan was thinking about our five year vision and what we need to focus on this year to help us get there. We picked six areas of focus for this year to help us continue to grow into the church we desire to be. Our places of focus are:
1. Continuing to build our our financial systems (establishing a finance committee, move to a new accountant).
2. Discipleship Ministry (Continuing to build out our discipleship ministry making plans for Discipleship groups and Sunday School).
3. The Diaconate - training and installing new deacons.
4. Hiring a Headmaster for the school - We are going to try to hire a full time headmaster for the start of the 2025 school year.
5. Regional and National MNA Relationship Development - This is focused on growing regional and national relationships with ministries that can help us continue to be a part of what is happening in the wider body of the PCA.
I will say these aren’t the most flashy of focus areas, but these are important because they help us stabilize where we are before we start adding new stuff to the mix. We all agreed we needed time to stabilize and allow our systems to catch up to where we are before we are ready to add anything new.
It was an important time of continuing to build our friendship and encourage one another as we seek to shepherd this church faithfully. We are excited to see where God leads us this next year. It is the honor of a lifetime to be your pastor.
Craig