The Church Requel Board of Directors met last evening at the Pierce's home. After a good session of prayer and a review of the church finances, the board made several decisions.
We spent the longest period of time discussing our plans for December 27th, the last Sunday evening of the year. The Mid-Ohio Conference Center is not available to us that evening. However another church had given us permission to use their church for that evening. On one hand we have a good amount of momentum going our way right now and we want to keep it going. The last thing we want to have happen is to have someone show up and our church not be meeting. On the other hand, we know that most of the people who would be with us on the 27th would be the leaders and volunteers, who work so tirelessly. We figured that many others would be still celebrating the Christmas holidays with their families and wouldn't be as likely to come. In the end, we decided not to hold services on the 27th and to give our leaders and volunteers a break.
We also discussed plans for December 24th, Christmas Eve. Mosaic, another new church in Mansfield, has invited us to join them for a low-key Christmas Eve service. This seemed like a great opportunity to support another new ministry in Mansfield. So for the next two weekends, we'll be announcing the Christmas Eve service at Mosaic.
We decided to renew our contract with Church Community Builder, a web-based, church management software company. It's hard to believe, but on December 21st, it will be a year since I first set up the fledgling Church Requel with CCB. It was one of the very first things I did. Now all of our database information for our young church is entrusted with our CCB partner. I still think it was one of the best decisions I've made so far and look forward to many more great years with them.
We decided to pay the pastor (that would be me) a salary through March 2010. Since September, when I received our first monthly compensation as the pastor, our board has been making the compensation decision on a month to month basis. Last night we decided to go ahead and set the compensation through the first quarter of next year and then review it again. I guess we're beginning to feel comfortable enough that we can afford me for another four months!
We had several advertising opportunities before us last night, but we decided to hold off on any further advertising until next Spring. Finally we reviewed a proposal that has been tabled ever since we opened up public services in October regarding lighting and an electronic drum set. These were initial up front costs in our initial plans that we just weren't comfortable spending when we started meeting publicly. Last night, we set a maximum dollar cap and authorized our technology and music folks to see if they could find solid solutions within the budget that we must work within.
All together, our meeting began around 7PM and ended shortly after 10PM. Before we left we decided to meet again in two weeks. But this next meeting will be more of a social gathering and will involve our spouses too. We'll each bring a dessert and some good conversation. We closed in prayer, thanking God for how He has marvelously blessed us so far!
