Dear Church Family,
It is hard to believe that 2015 is right around the corner. It is an exciting time as we finish out one year and prepare to begin a new one. We want to thank the church for the generous Christmas gift that we received at the Christmas party. I also appreciate all of the other cards and gifts. You are a very supportive and caring church family. Hoffman is an amazing place to serve. Thank you!
While this is our January newsletter, I realize that you will receive this before Christmas. With that in mind, I want to remind you to join us for Christmas Eve services at 7:00 and 10:00 PM. This year, we will be taking up an offering at our Christmas Eve services. All money given will go to support the Red Bird Mission. This is a mission to people living in poverty. This is a great opportunity to give to those in need this season!
As we move out of Advent and into a new year, our church eagerly anticipates the arrival of several baby boys who are on the way. Of course, Chanda, Wesley, and I are one of the homes that is expecting. While Chanda may be ready for the pregnancy to be over, we are in no way ready for this baby’s arrival. We still need to decide on a name, prepare the nursery, and do some shopping. When I ask Wesley what he is going to do with his baby brother, he says, “Play with cars and toys and sing him lullabies.” It is certainly a fun time at the Williams’ house.
Each year, our Annual Conference invites us to set Breakthrough Goals for our church. These goals give us a benchmark to look at throughout the year. Let me show you where we currently stand with our goals for this year:
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2014 Goal
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YTD Actual
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Average Weekly Worship Attendance
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193
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178
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New Members
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5
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17
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Baptisms
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5
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10
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Weekly Giving
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$4734
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$4637
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Apportionment Giving
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100%
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100%
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As you can see, we have exceeded our goals for new members and baptisms for 2014. This is very exciting news, because these are the two goals that relate directly to our mission of making disciples of Jesus. We have fallen short of our attendance and weekly giving goals. These were both directly related to the winter weather that we had in 2014. Now, that 2014 is almost over, we are ready to look at our goals for 2015. Our average weekly worship goal is 185. We hope to have 12 new members and 10 baptisms in 2015. We plan to pay 100% of our apportionments. Let’s pray for the breakthrough that God wants to do in Hoffman UMC in 2015.
Coming to Hoffman UMC in January is “The Gospel According to Disney.” During this 7-week series, we are going to look at the stories of transformation found in several Disney films and how they relate to our life and faith. Here are some of the titles of our upcoming sermons: “Frozen: From Fear to Love,” “Aladdin: From Bondage to Freedom,” “The Lion King: From Defeat to Deliverance,” and “Cinderella: From Rags to Riches.” During the series, we have some exciting surprises planned. We will also be showing two of the movies in the Activity Center. Frozen will be shown on January 7th at 6:30 PM and Cars on February 4th at 6:30 PM . We hope that you will join us for the series. This series was designed to attract people in our community. So, we hope you will invite your friends and neighbors. We will have postcards available for you to use to welcome others to join us for this series.
As we have talked about throughout this year, 2015 is also a time when we are moving to a new governance structure at our church. Our new Church Board will begin in January. Please be in prayer for them as they take on this new role and as we move in a new direction. It will take some time for us to live into this and continue to work out all of the details. We will also be spending January and February recruiting people for some of our new ministry teams. I hope you will consider joining us as we seek to be in ministry to our community and world.
Yours in Christ’s Service,
Posts
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