Church news - meetings and updates

Annual Stated Meeting:
This will be held on Sun 1 July, immediately after worship, to receive our annual accounts.
We missed the deadline by a week...!
With the change of Treasurer, and changes to duties [outsourcing our accounts for preparation],
we were slightly held up this year.
Happy to report that we're now on track, and next year should be much more straightforward
[or is that tempting fate??!]

Presbytery Support:
As a congregation, and as a Session, we've had a hard time of it in this last wee while.
As Minister, I continue to be in awe of the resilience and strength of the congregation.
Our Kirk Session has virtually halved over the last 15 months -
most of these unforseen circumstances - leaving the area, retiring; illness, and deaths.
Some of these were long-standing Office holders.
Given our circumstances, Presbytery has offered to provide some support.
This will be done by sending 4 Assessor Elders to come and help us for a wee while -
especially in some areas where we have lost long-held knowledge on particular
office-holder tasks. This is why it's great to be Presbyterian[!!] - and not an independent
congregation, and we're hugely grateful for the help that Presbytery are sending
to get us back up to speed once more. Our Assessor Elders are yet to be appointed,
but once they are, I'll let you know more.

Local Church Review Update:
Many meetings later, along with 'Biscuits and Blethers' and questionnaires,
we are at the stage where our facilitators are processing all the information.
With summer approaching, they have agreed to bring their report to our
September Kirk Session meeting - with our appointed LCR members of the congregation
in attendance. This will be an open meeting, so any other members of the congregation
would be most welcome to attend for that particular piece of business.
The date for that meeting of Session will be 27 Sept at 7pm.
At that meeting, it is also anticipated that our new Assessor Elders will be in attendance.
With the information presented in the report, we hope to put together our 5 year Forward Plan
and, once done, this would be presented to the December meeting of Presbytery.

On a side note:
It's been an interesting time being part of a new process -
'guinea pigs' along with several other parishes [none of whom have yet completed].
Having been on, and 'fronted' LCR teams to other parishes in the 'old' format,
I've found that this new way has taken a lot longer than the previous way of doing things.
Not necessarily a bad thing, but helpful to identify for future time-scales.
Part of that has been new facilitators adjusting, building up relationships of trust, and ironing out some glitches in the new format.
So, with that done, what of the process so far?
I feel it's gone a lot deeper, and been more meaningful than the previous approach:
while the system we had before was okay, sometimes it could feel, at times, almost a
'tick box' kind of exercise. Given that, then new process has been more challenging - but I think
some useful things have come from it.
It's been a mutual learning process - for facilitators and parish - but I think, in the end,
despite some of the early hiccups, that it has been good to be a trial parish.
I'm looking forward to see what transpires from the report in September,
and looking ahead to doing a little forward planning for our next five years.
One thing that I think that would already be a good idea to embed into that plan
is doing 'Biscuits and Blethers' style meetings on an annual basis -
good to have the wider conversations in the various communities within the parish...
although, next time, I'll try NOT to hold one on a long weekend - oops! [still learning!]