Various people have commented that various parts of the church buildings are “a mess”. In particular, I have heard comments about:

• the garage

• the garage annexe (the current second copier room, former freezer room)

• the upper and lower hall cupboards

• the notice boards and table in the hall vestibule

• the “book cellar”/”crypt” (the former boiler room)

• the book stand

• the vestry (not the mess but the lack of storage)

• the vestry passageway

• the church porch

• the second office (“Sam’s office”)

• the two side attics under the eaves

• the upper landing (“the Ethiopians’ office”)

Obviously a certain amount of tidying would alleviate some of the problems, but it seems there is a lack of storage space (and not only when we need to move the chairs out of the church for bazaars!).

This also bears on the question of meeting space (room above vestry, garage conversion), and of what we want to store, too. But that, too, will come up eventually when we consider the building proposals. This posting is just to provoke thoughts.

Over the past month Council has discussed a number of issues which might be suitable for the blog.

• What kind of tea we serve at coffee time (too trivial for Council to spend a lot of meeting time on!)
• Youth work (reports on progress, discussion about the way forward – does not fit neatly into the monthly intervals between Council meetings)
• Welcome (what we could do better)
• Data base (how we collect information, what we collect., how we use it, who has access to it, how it is organized)

There is also a case for using the blog for simple news items: the new light bulbs in church, the new photocopier, plans for the beamer, the e-magazine and plans for that.

And for information items: how things work, where things are – should there be a church wiki, for instance, or should the information appear on the Church website?

However, individuals cannot possibly “get anything out of it” unless they know what to expect from prayer and worship. And, it may indeed be boring, if the ingredients of the worship are not understood and/or if the styles of leadership are monotonous; but, in all fairness, we cannot expect worship (or even a family dinner) to provide the same eye and ear-catching movement of a stadium concert or of a multi-million dollar television production! People able to respond only to extravaganzas or entertainment need to broaden their capacities for other life events: a conversation with a friend, a relaxed hour with quiet music, a walk in the woods or a park, a meal among loved ones, and, yes, prayer and worship!

www.philosophy-religion.org/catechism/unit7.htm

A further saving should be possible, and even an economy of 10% would save us over Fr1000 a year. Some things we could look at would be:

1) replacing our freezer with a modern energy-efficient model. Would this pay for itself? (We might even qualify for a grant of up to Fr200 from EWB – see www.ewb.ch/oekofonds). A front-loading freezer would also have the advantage that the catering team could actually find things!

2) installing solar panels on the roof of church house for water heating. Said to effect impressive savings – and again grants are available

3) investigating the possibility of replacing our current oil-based system with a heat pump – cheaper and ecologically sounder

4) small, trivial things, like replacing the few incandescent light bulbs with energy-saving bulbs

1. A new sign put up outside HIGHER UP above the fence which permanently states when services take place, a pertinent bible quote
in German and English and the next 2 or 3 events.

2. What is a gracious way to encourage the parents of noisy children to adjoin to the creche, which is provided. How do we ask our own members (often the most long-standing ones) to just move towards the seats on each side and leave the aisle ones free for those coming later.

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3. The most welcoming gesture would be a smiling face guiding one to a seat. Even given that some seats are rickety and placed very close together, I have observed that there are seats, just often not reachable.
In Bible Study Fellowship, there are dedicated ladies assigned to guide people to first fill up the front, then the sides, then the isles. Will we be able to impliment this in church? It is counter-productive to keep emphasizing that we need a bigger church…
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4. I think our welcome is actually quite good and it is not the area of highest priority at the minute. How can we best harness our resources and encourage our members to seek God’s way forward through the present difficulties? This would be the central issue.

However, in relation “Welcoming”: New comers already seem to get the impression that we are a friendly and open church. It could be tightened up a bit with welcomers (with labels) standing outside the church and encouraging people to come through to the hall for coffee. It is important that new comers are not left alone to fend for themselves, but rather are included. There are several people who do this as a matter of course, who actively engage newcomers.

It is important to be able to give them a magazine and small welcome pack,(bombarding someone with paperwork is not helpful) but above all to engage them, to let them know that we are interested in them, that they are welcome and that there is a place for them in our midst. Without this whatever is organised will bear little fruit. Such welcomers would probably be the best people on the door at the start (ie. our sides people) I do not believe there is a direct link to pastoral care unless someone is in special need and expresses it; if they need to speak with a chaplain, they can be directly introduced.

This first step of welcome is essential but equally as important is what happens next. Welcome is about enabling new people to become a part of the community and they need to be engaged and helped to become part of the church by putting them in contact with groups such as: junior church, Friday night Bible Study, House Groups, music group, choir etc.

Making the system too complicated or over bureaucratic would be counterproductive. It is more about ensuring that the informal system we have at present is working properly and that we pick up responsibility for this ministry.

Brainstorming Meeting Held on 6 May 2007

As a follow up to this posting, I shall add a copy of the main points of our Welcome Meeting (without names)

The idea of a questionnaire came out of informal discussions between Tricia, Hector and Pieter.

The aim of the web-based survey was to:

• find out church council perceptions of key areas of ministry at St Ursula’s Church Berne
• evaluate the possibility of using the web-based tool to establish the perceptions of other groups within the congregation at a later date.

The idea is to find out what the needs of the congregation are. I would strongly recommend that we develop a questionnaire to present to the whole congregation as soon as possible.

If we put a team of say three people on this task now (April 2007), I think we could have a questionnaire developed and ready for launch by July 2007.

What do you think?

On 1 May I had a quick look at the planning of a questionnaire and came up with a project duration of 4.5 months (see pdf file. This is based on a small team of about 6 people and assumes that a part of the congregation would need to be helped.

To summarise the key advantages, it would:

• actively engage the congregation in the process of planning
• identify the needs of the congregation
• enable the council to set goals for meeting those needs
• enable council to formulate a plan for achieving these goals
• enable the congregation to consider their skills and offer these as expressions of Christian stewardship to God.

Finally, I think that we can include and consider far more members of our church community with such an approach.

If you have set up your browser correctly, your RSS feed should react to this posting and you should be notified of it. You may add comments, or add your own posting on this or a related subject.

There seem to be various options:

• leave the blog as it is, with a select few (Pieter, John, Richard, Tricia?) contributing to it.
• give up the whole idea
• educate the whole council (Maxine, Giuseppina, Hans-Karl, Simon, Linda) into using it rather than email

Note that posts can be password protected (ask Hector for the password). As far as I know, this means that the web crawlers like Google will not look at these – other posts will eventually be snapped by Google and Co, so be careful what you write!!

The search facility in the sidebar only searches postings, not comments. You may want to bear this in mind in deciding whether you are writing a new post or a comment.

 I suggest people look at the WordPress FAQ to find out what the system is capable of, and a few samples of WordPress blogs to see what can be done.

It appears that sub-categories only appear in the sidebar if the category they are under has a posting in it.