Hi Grace family,
Love you all. It's a joy to be your pastor.
We wanted to do the very best we can to present the plan for the week. Rather than hour-by-hour or day-by-day updates, we wanted to lay out a course for the week. Some of these decisions are specific to advice from health officials and some are specific to GF circumstances.
We will reevaluate this plan on Monday, March 23rd. Thanks for your flexibility and patience with us.
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The Plan for March 16-22:
Events:
All Grace teaching, training and equipping events are postponed this week (Grace Greenhouse and our Lenten Ladies study)
Grace Home Groups will not officially meet until further notice but they will continue to serve as the primary place to give and receive familial care in our church. Your home group leaders will be in touch with a plan that best addresses the individuals in your group.
We will plan to gather via a Congregational Zoom meeting on Sunday, March 22nd. It will look much like yesterday’s meeting. We will pray, share, hear from God’s word, and sing a hymn.
Other Resources:
We will be providing a number of devotional resources for your use throughout the week. Stay tuned through our social channels, or here on Grace’s blog (gracebham.org/blog). Those will be our primary places. We will continue to do some emails, but many of those are getting lost in the volume of emails from employers/other groups.
We are working toward some specific Grace Kids’ Resources.
We are working on a Congregational Needs Google Form that can be filled in for internal Grace needs.
Again, we will revisit these things next Monday, March 23rd, to make a plan for that week.
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A Window into Our Thinking
There are four values that are guiding are decisions. These are not checkpoints, as much as criteria for how our ministry leadership is processing things and weighing hard decisions. I thought it might be helpful to share these with you all:
Unity: The Lord has given us particular circumstances at Grace. A third of our folks are in the healthcare field. Also, for a church our size, we have a number of health concerns. Satan can use this as an opportunity to introduce division. Any decisions we make we want to think in terms of unity.
Wisdom/Humility: God gives grace to the humble (1 Peter 5:5-6) and he is honored by wisdom. In fact, Jesus is the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24). We want to listen to the God-gifted health officials in our city, and our own people healthcare workers who have done a tremendous job serving us. We are making decisions based on collective wisdom from reputable sources outside our church and inside (By the way, you guys know who you are…and I publicly want to thank you for this).
Love: We want to be conscientiously loving and serving the folks in our church struggling disproportionately with fear and worry. We want to do this with gentleness and grace even when and if some of us do not personally feel those emotions.
Faith/Hope: The Lord is at work. I see the gifts of our folks coming to the forefront. I think he is inviting us into something special that we could not have planned for. We have faith in him. We trust him. We are hopeful for how he is going to shape our church family in this crisis. Our hearts are, ironically, full and eager and enthusiastic. We are asking the Grace Fellowship 2020 question. And it goes like this: “Here is our circumstances. What is the invitation from our Lord?"
Love you all,
Joel