December 18, 2024
Dear friends,
As we near Christmas day, my prayer and hope is that God would increase our wonder and our gratitude. That we would know God’s grace in a deeper way as we contemplate the mystery of God taking on flesh to love and save us.
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”
(2 Corinthians 8:9)
There are several areas in the life of our church that are in motion these days, and I wanted to update you on a few of them.
We are in the midst of our elder nomination process, and as soon as we have a list of nominees who are willing to serve, we will make those names known. There is a congregational meeting scheduled for January 26th immediately following the service. Among other things we will pray and vote for our new elder(s) at that meeting.
Our council has decided that we will not require incoming elders to sign the Covenant for Officebearers. This is related to our conversation about whether Sanctuary will remain in the CRC – and the conviction that none of our current elders (or pastor) can sign this document “without reservation.” However we are not throwing away doctrinal (or character) standards for our leaders, and still believe that the creeds and confessions that the Christian Reformed Church has valued (not to mention the Bible itself!) will serve as guides to what we believe and how we live.
We are so grateful for the input we received at our October 27th town hall meeting, as well as the feedback that came through the survey we sent out shortly after. What we experienced in both settings is a strong sense of “togetherness” and unity around a shared commitment to this local church community even if Sanctuary were to leave the CRC. We also heard a sadness around losing connections that have been deeply formative and valuable over the years, especially for those who grew up in the CRC. And while there was a mixed response to how comfortable people would feel if we left the CRC without knowing where we would land, there is a strong desire to find a new home (denomination / network / association) that would feel like home, with support, accountability, resources, and the capacity to collaborate.
In addition to all of this, the Merger Team (made up of elders from United and Sanctuary) is beginning to work through the list of 25 areas to pay attention to in a merger (from the book Better Together). The work at this point is mostly assigning people or teams who will begin to address the various questions. The one issue we can definitely check off the list is debt: Neither church has any. Praise God!
With all these moving parts, we know communication between council, staff, and congregation is of paramount importance. We have created a place on our website to post various updates and related content to our discernment work with our relationship to both the CRC and United. Hopefully you have already seen everything we’ve already posted there, but in case you haven’t, please check out sanctuarycrc.org/toward-the-future/. We will do our best to communicate updates as they happen in our weekly email, on Sunday mornings, and through the website.
Finally, we want to express our deep gratitude to God for the generosity we see displayed in your faithful giving. We thank God! We thank you! In addition to the ways so many of you have already been generous this season (to families in need, the tiny house village, missionaries, and our staff), would you consider giving a year-end gift to our general fund? This fund supports the operations of the church including rent, salaries, staff support, PATH preschool, benevolence, youth and family ministries, supplies for our worship services, and many other crucial aspects of our life together as Christ’s church.
This can be done in all the usual ways (through the mail, online, cash or check in the offering box), but also through gifts of stock. If you are interested in giving stock or other assets, please contact our treasurer, Luke (treasurer@sanctuarycrc.org), and he will send you the appropriate form. As an update, 5 months into our fiscal year (July – November, 2024) our revenue is $113,761 while our expenses are $109,842.
In hope,
Mark (on behalf of council: Bob, Luke, Amy, Sarah, and Steve)
