What an exciting time to be a part of Hoffman United Methodist Church! I believe that God is going to use our church to do great things in our community in 2012. I hope that you believe that as well.
We have spent the past 5 Sundays talking about prayer—reaching up toward God. I hope that each of you have been able to make prayer a part of your life. We talked about the acronym PRAY—Praise, Repent, Ask, and Yield. So, as you pray, praise God for what he has done through Hoffman, repent as you seek God’s forgiveness of when we have neglected to follow his will, ask God to meet our needs, and yield to God’s will for your life and our church. Pray for our church. Pray for me. Pray for our community. Pray that God will use you and our church to reach new people in our community.
I have had an amazing time throughout this series as I have spent time in prayer each morning (around 5:30) in our sanctuary—praying for you, my family, our church, and our community. It has defiantly strengthened my prayer life, and I hope that your prayer life has been strengthened as well. As you know, Chanda and I are anticipating the birth of our first child. The due date is May 8th. We appreciate your prayers as we enter into this exciting phase of our lives.
As many of you are aware, we have just entered into the 40 days (not including Sundays) leading up to Easter, which we call Lent. Lent is a time for rest, repentance, prayer, service, self-examination, and self-denial. It is a time for Christian growth and renewal. As we prepare for the time when we reflect on Christ’s gift of salvation to us, we generally make sacrifices by fasting. This is not necessarily a fast from food, but it is sacrificially giving up something in our lives. During Lent, we fast from something that we do a lot and find pleasure in. This fasting is done as a discipline of self-control and to help us identify with Christ’s sufferings on our behalf. Consider what you might give up this Lenten season and share it with me and others. It can be an opportunity to share your faith.
To encourage awareness of global health issues, especially in our partnerships, the conference has invited us to participate in a common challenge. Our goal for the Walking to the Four Corners of the World challenge is to get as many people in the West Ohio Conference to contribute to walking the total distance around the world, passing through the four partnerships, and ending at Lakeside, in time for the 2012 Annual Conference to begin. Roughly 27,000 miles.
We have created a team for Hoffman, and we hope you will consider joining us as we walk to the 4 corners of the world. Sign up and be sure to join the Hoffman team and start tracking how many miles you walk today!
During the month of March we are going to be looking at a new sermon series, called Reaching Up, Reaching In, Reaching Out. During this series, we are going to look at how to prepare ourselves to reach out to others. We are going to focus on caring for others, being in prayer for others, and sharing with others. I hope that you will join us for this series as we look at reaching up, reaching in, and reaching out. Reaching out is always important for us as a church; however, as we anticipate the beginning of a new worship service, it is more important than ever. If our new service is going to be successful, we need to be intentional about reaching out. Our new worship service will be called The Open Door, and it will officially begin on April 1, 2011 at 11:15 AM. We are hoping to reach new people in our community who do not have a church home. The music in the service will be lead by a praise band. Our tagline for the service is “Come as you are,” letting people know that it will be less formal and welcoming to all people. We are excited about whom God is going to bring to Hoffman through The Open Door.
The actual success of this new service relies heavily upon our own members. Statistics show that a personal invitation to someone is at least 20 times more effective than a public announcement. If we wanted 50 new people in our church, we would need to send out about 6,700 postcards to get close to that number, which would cost around $3,000. For the same result, we could ask each of our church members to invite three people, which is FREE. Now, that is statistics, and statistics are not everything, but I think that you can agree that personal invitations are much more effective and cheaper. I hope that you will begin to think about people whom you might invite to The Open Door at Hoffman.
This past month, we had some exciting things happening as we anticipate the start of our new service. We had the opportunity to have an Evening of Praise and Worship at Hoffman to officially launch our promotional efforts of The Open Door. We did not promote this event heavily, but we did invite Young Spirits and our church family. We had 69 people in attendance! We will be having another Evening of Praise and Worship on Saturday, March 17. We hope to at least double our attendance at this event. We want to invite everyone in our community to this evening. There will not be a sermon, but it will be packed with music, scripture, and more. It will give them an opportunity to see a little about what the new service will be like.
March is an exciting month for the Open Door. We will be having three Worship Preview Services. These services will be held on Sundays at 11:15. They will be on March 11, 18, and 25. These services give us the opportunity to get in the rhythm of having two services prior to our launch in April. They also give us a chance to “rehearse” what worship will look like. We hope that you will come and help us evaluate what went well and what we could do better.
We also welcome you to invite friends to the Worship Preview Services. There are several reasons why inviting people to the worship preview service will be valuable for us and possibly easier for you. First of all, you can tell them that it is not really a worship service, but it is a preview of our worship service. When you invite them, you can say something like, “We are getting ready to start a new service at our church in April. We are having some previews for the service in March. We are trying to be open to new people. We would like to get the opinion of someone who is not part of our church. We have been there so long, it is hard for us to get the perspective of someone who is not there. Would you come and help us out?”
This is non-threatening. In asking in this way, you let them know that we value their opinion and feedback. We allow them to have a voice. It also gives them an opportunity to be a part of the service before it officially starts, which may cause them to want to be a part of it or at least to come back to see what it is like.
Because of the cost effective nature of publicity on Facebook, our church has tried to utilize it to keep people in our community aware of what is going on at our church. We currently have 121 fans of our Hoffman page. The Facebook page for The Open Door received 49 fans in its first 4 days. Be sure to go to Facebook and like our pages. Talk about them. Invite your friends to join them.
Well, I have been at Hoffman for 18 months now, and I believe God wants to use Hoffman UMC to reach our community with the message of God’s love, hope, and grace. Pray for our church, our community, and your pastor on a daily basis.
Yours In Christ’s Service,
Pastor Justin
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