April 2024 Town Hall Meetings Report

Thank you to all who were able to attend the Town Hall meetings the past two Sundays. For those of you who were not able to attend and for further clarification please continue reading for the highlights:

Purpose of Elder/Deacon groups: These groups have been set up for Elders & Deacons to have specific groups of people to shepherd and pray over. This is also so church members have a contact they can go to for questions and/or concerns. If you have not received any emails from an Elder or Deacon, please reach out to Heather Vroom at heather@adventurelife.org and she will get you added.

**Please do not address programs or day-to-day issues with staff, they may be following the direction from leadership. Please reach out to leadership with those concerns at deacons@adventurelife.org .

PST (Pastoral Search Team) Update:  We are close to posting on different websites & different seminary schools for the position. The team has been busy meeting every week working on cleaning up/creating the promotional package, questionnaire, interview questions & researching “best” places to post the job opening.

Questions from Town Hall meeting:  Why has this taken so long? Before beginning the search process, we needed to make sure a benefits and compensation package was complete. With leaving the RCA this is something that we need to provide on our own and make sure we are prepared to offer potential pastors. This took extensive time and effort by many individuals within the congregation, and we extend a HUGE thank you to all involved.

Childrens Ministry & Worship leader position update:  We are still looking for a Childrens Ministry leader. We had 1 interested candidate that we did not continue to seek out as we did not feel they would be a good fit for ALC. Melinda Vander Velden & Cathy Bouska have graciously been filling in for the past 4 months and Cathy with continue the summer Sunday Adventure Kids. Leadership has been discussing different avenues on how to proceed going forward such as possibly breaking the position up and have different leaders for Sunday mornings & Wednesday nights. Also, looking at requesting all volunteers come to a brainstorming meeting to see how we can fill positions.

Worship leader position – the Process & Procedures team has been combing through all that tasks that this position holds to create the job posting and will be posting very soon. We are also looking at how to fill in the event we do not have a replacement prior to August. Looking for volunteers to help different areas of worship.

Thank you to everyone who has supported ALC monetarily & by volunteering – Leadership wants to extend our very heartfelt THANK YOU’s to everyone who has been able to continue to support ALC. Your time, talents & treasures have been truly appreciative, and we do not tell you this enough, but THANK YOU!!

VBS: July 7-11 – Mark your calendars! A church-wide announcement and start of volunteer sign-ups coming April 28th. Childrens sign up with be mid-May. We generally have an attendance of 125-150 (with a large number of this not ALC attendees), so this is a tremendous community outreach. WE NEED YOUR HELP! Along with volunteer for the evenings we will also need food donations (snacks & Volunteer meals). A huge THANK YOU to Jenny Wall & Angie Lawrence for coordinating everything this year.

40-Days of Prayer:  Sunday, April 21 we will be kicking off 40-Days of Prayer. As Leadership has been processing through all the changes over this past year, we know we just cannot do this on our terms. We need God’s direction, and we urge everyone in the congregation to be part of this journey. As we continue to move forward, we need to be seeking God in everything we do as this is HIS church not our own. As a church we must dig deeper into prayer and be seeking to hear/see where the Holy Spirit is moving us. We will be going through the book “Praying for Renewal in our Church: A 40-Day Prayer Experience to Pray for our Church Into a New & Fruitful Future”. Every day there are a couple verses to read & pray through, a specific prayer for the church body, as well as a notes area. We will also be having a weekly corporate prayer time on Wednesday evenings beginning at 5:45pm. Again, we are urging ALL to join this.

Consulting Firm announcement – Again, with all the changes we have had in the past year we have concluded that we are stuck as a church and need help to move forward. Hearing words such as “strategy” and “direction” in the church does not feel right, does it? It feels too business like. But the more & more we dug into this concept, the more it does make sense. We need help. If we want ALC to continue moving forward and reaching the community, we need figure out what we have been doing wrong to just keep going in this cycle of starting something & never following through or feeling like we do not get traction. We looked into 5 consulting firms: 95Network, Auxano, Ascending Leaders, Coram Deo & The UnStuck Church. All 5 of these firms offer wonderful services and we could benefit from any of them, but we ultimately decided on 95 Network. One of the benefits of 95 Network is that they really understand small to medium size churches; it is part of their name. Roughly 95% of the churches in the United States are considered small to medium size. They understand the constraints we encounter of having limited resources. They have created what they call a Vision Day. This is where 8-12 individuals (consisting of leadership, staff & church members) meet for a full day digging into the history of the church (last 20 years), assessing current constraints (what works, what doesn’t), target demographics, understanding our mission, 3-year vision, and actions for growth. We feel doing this Vision Day on June 8th which is shortly after the completion of ‘40-Days of Prayer’ will really help give us a better sense direction and Holy Spirit led focus moving forward. Please visit www.95Network.org  to read more about them. They have many wonderful podcasts that we highly recommend.

From Interim Pastor Carl Boersma: “I’m eager to join ALC in our ’40-days of Prayer’ and urge everyone to join us. I’m confident the Holy Spirit will work in and through us in the weeks ahead. My prayer is that the Lord will empower and enable ALC as we pray together and then process with 95 Network consultant in early June concerning vision & strategy for ministry. God’s word: ’Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, ‘says the Lord Almighty.’ Zechariah 4:6 “