Pastoral Reflections


Rev. Dr. Jack Haberer Beloved FPCA Friend,


Happy Veterans-Tanks- Christmas-Year. Ah, yes, ’tis the season for the holidays. I love the appreciation holidays: Veterans Day and Tanksgiving. I thrill over the expectation holidays: Christmas and New Year’s Day.


Tis past October 28, just three days prior to the 500th


anniversary of the


beginning of the Reformation, many of us gathered for the Discipleship Café: Fall Leadership Gathering. As with the holidays, it provided us a chance to look back and look ahead. We reflected together on our past, expressing awe over the legacy of missional innovation and caring leadership that our FPCA forebears have entrusted to us. We contemplated the commission to mission thrust upon us by our Lord, dreaming out loud of ministries to be launched in our shared tomorrows.


I offered a newcomer’s first-year impressions of the present status of that legacy and those dreams.


I highlighted the most glaring need expressed immediately upon my arrival a year ago: revival of our children’s and youth ministries. With joy, I outlined steps in that direction taken over the previous 12 months:


• Building a top-quality playground for the children around us


• Strengthening our staff by employing Kathy Schmied as


Director of Family Ministry


• Adding JoAnn Jones as Director of Children’s Ministry…


• …Dana Yashou as Director of High School Youth Ministry


• …Kieran Kehlor as Director of Middle School


Youth Ministry


• Launching DIG, the K-through-5th


graders’


Faith Formation and Children’s Choir ministries that have turned Sunday mornings into a Disney World of celebration for the kids.


We are off and running into a bright new year of adventures with youth and children.


Using the motif of “worship, study, service, and relationships” reflected in our mission statement, I outlined other areas I hope we can bolster, laying out some of my BHAGs—big, hairy, audacious goals.


Worship


• Promoting Christ-encounters in languages and styles that utilize the indigenous language forms and styles of our members and guests


• Cultivating lives of prayer and devotion that are daily moving us


one step closer to Christ


• Upgrading the sound system in the sanctuary and making other


upgrades throughout the facilities Study


• Developing small groups for people of all ages, interests, and gifts and callings, so that we all are becoming fully equipped to carry God’s will into the world


• Continuing to accentuate the quality of faith formation and


nurture in our preschool, nursery and all other age- and interest- grouped studies


Service • Providing parental skills training


• Building relationships with unreached people-groups in the


3


In the Discipleship Café, we considered these specific ideas as we discussed the broad rubric of our missional theme: “Rooted in Christ: Growing as Disciples in Community.” When all was said and done, our look back through the appreciation holidays to the One in Whom we are rooted and our expectant look ahead to the anticipation holidays set us on a path of exciting discoveries for all God will do.


Great things are in store! Grace and peace to you and yours,


area, while also deepening our existing relationships with the diverse people-groups within our congregation in order to help as many as possible to move one step closer to Christ


• Organizing a mission blitz event at least once a year, with an eye


toward sending more and more workers into the center city and other mission outposts


• Developing innovative summer children’s and youth outreaches


via music camp(s) and/or sports camp(s) in addition to our ever- popular Vacation Bible School


Relationships


• Utilizing small groups as the first line of care for one another—the first persons we would call in a time of celebration or crisis, the first ones who will check up on us in a time of absence


• Unleashing the congregation- wide gifts of empathy to build


visitation teams to blanket the infirm and elderly with love so that we live up to the benchmark of extending a “100 percent care rate” toward all


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