Congregational Life Ministry Team

Last meeting: March 11, 2008

Attendees:

Ellen Evensen

Elizabeth Hensel

Emilie Larson

Deni Lundwall

Dong Pham

Staff:

Pastor Dismer

Karen Herbrich

Jean Monson

Excused:

Linda Schraa

Jean Wuethrich

Items that may require Council action:

• There is a need for more than just the Good Samaritan fund that helps with emergency monetary needs. We hope to start a new “member activities fund” (name and more details to be decided next month) to help members who cannot afford to attend the fellowship/social activities offered at FELC.

Other important items of information:

• No more LIFT meals until September. There are plans to restructure the Wednesday evening activities (staff discussion and decision to come). From The Wednesday after Memorial Day until the Wednesday before Labor Day, Wednesday activities will include a North Site worship only.

• The 2008 church picnic will be held on June 1 at the North Site.

• We discussed the need for an activities subsidy/fund for members who want to attend FELC fellowship/social activities, but cannot afford to. This could include 50+ activities, summer picnic, lay school, camp scholarships, etc. There will need to be rules/parameters decided for making these decisions (case by case, $ limit, etc). Our goal is to have this be led by a 2- to 3-person committee that will receive general information about the individual request from the FELC staff member who took the call/request (no confidential info given out), and this committee will make the decision about whether to pay for the tickets/event and how much.

• We need to explore ways to support the current Good Samaritan fund and generate funding for this new fund. Scholarships for camp and lay school, etc may be out of scope for this fund, since there are other funding options for these opportunities. Some of the options we discussed include using money from current fellowship activities/fundraisers, a coffee hour a month or profit from ECHOES for one day a month, to help support this fund. Ellen will discuss this with the FELC staff for more feedback and ideas, then e-mail details to all ministry teams to see what can be done in cooperation with the other groups, since this does pertain to all ministry teams.

• We continued brainstorming our member care goal to make every member feel like a part of this church community: a group of people not included in our list previously, are people who are grieving over the death of a loved one.

• There are two other needs that we discussed: Some members cannot do basic house/yard work and repairs and this gets expensive to hire contractors for every time. A handyman group of volunteers that are willing to do some of this work would be a great help to our members. Another need is for a hospitality group to help fix meals and give support for members battling a temporary illness or hospitalization in their household. We will continue this brainstorm discussion next month.

• In line with our goal of having every member feel like a part of this church community, our homework for the next month is to call someone from the Sunday prayer list or one of the new members or a member that we hear about in passing that might need help with something. We will call this person and offer support and see how we can help them. This is a test to see what kind of reactions we get and what sort of needs there may be with people we don’t necessarily talk to all the time.

Submitted by:

Emilie Larson