May 11, 2022

Hello everyone, what a beautiful day again today, the sun is shining and spirits are soaring.  Life is hard, as the old saying goes, but it is good to be alive!

I am back to work in the office this week finally having completed an unscheduled quarantine period.  Barb is now healthy and life is retuning a bit to normal.  It is good to be back in the office and to see and connect with people once again.  This week is a busy week, but a wonderful kind of busy.  I look forward to each conversation and meeting that is scheduled and I also enjoy the unscheduled visits and conversations as well.

The week began with a celebration of life for Gwendolyn Willms, a long term and very dedicated member of the congregation who served on session and who herself was in charge of funeral receptions for a while.  It was a good service with people from Gwen’s family joining together with people from the congregation.

I also had an initial meeting with Cathy Stewart from Creedence Consulting.  They are helping us as a congregation to determine a governance model (a decision making model) that will serve the congregation well in the years ahead.  Cathy is interviewing a number of leaders from within the congregation and then will report back her findings to the Governance Review team.  This is an exciting endeavour that will help us to understand the ‘system’ that is St. Andrew’s, to give us insights about what we do well in terms of decision making and what how we need to improve.  I believe this to be very important and crucial work at this point in our history.

Today I have meetings with Lauren Wasyluk.  We are shooting a video that welcomes people to our web page and encourages them to become engaged in some capacity.  This is the last piece to be finalized before the launch of our new website.  Stay tuned because I think you will enjoy and appreciate the new website.  It is more user friendly, easier to navigate and has lots of information about our church.  This is part of our initiative to have a stronger internet presence and move in the direction of offering strong hybrid worship and ministry.  Hopefully by Friday the new website will be launched.

Lauren and I are also meeting with Dave Mitchell to go over the new worship presentation software called ProPresenter.  It is designed to make hybrid worship possible as well which means that people can participate in the worship service live by doing a reading, making an announcement or offering a prayer from their own home while still watching the live service.  Technology truly enables us to worship together whether we all in the same location or not.

And another major meeting this week is the worship planning team meeting on Friday where we will plans out the themes, songs and readings for the services between now and labour Day.  This advance planning helps the music team in preparation for the worship services as well.

Finally, this coming Sunday is a special service of installation for both Ann-Marie MacDairmid into her position as Director of Music and Gord Burnett into his position as Choir Director.  It will be a service of special music, hymns chosen by Ann-Marie and Gord themselves and a true celebration of music and art as a means of sensing the presence of God and the call of God to be God’s people in the world.

So lots happening.

I hope and pray you have a wonderful and blessed week

Take good care

 Marty