Over the past few years, the Stewardship Ministry has kept a focus on communicating with the congregation. Our church website continues to be a valuable source of information for everyone, along with our Facebook page, and our weekly Oldtown Update emails. Pastor Kelly also sent out daily devotional emails for almost all of the year, taking a brief break at the end of December. Of course, 2020 presented some unique new challenges for keeping in communication with everyone, as we have been unable to safely gather together in our sanctuary for worship since mid-March.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we scrambled to put together a YouTube channel for the church. Since then we all need to offer HUGE THANKS to Pastor Kelly and her husband Dan for all the hard work they do each and every week to produce, edit, and publish worship videos for the congregation. In September, they even began producing separate Household Huddle videos each week, so our church families could resume our unique and beloved form of Sunday School. The amount of work required to write, file, edit, produce, and publish all of these videos is enormous, and we are truly blessed to have such a dedicated pastor, and pastor’s husband!!!
When we resumed our online worship bulletins, we also resumed our weekly Stewardship Corner, keeping everything up to date on our congregational giving and the rest of our progress against our budget for the year. Though the church was unable to hold most of our fundraising events for the year, the entire congregation stepped up their efforts to support the church, and that in combination with a great effort to reduce our expenses as much as possible, avoided the financial woes that many churches have experienced during this pandemic.
As we look ahead to the coming year, we are excited to have new leadership, as Kevin Graves will be leading the Stewardship Ministry in 2021. Kevin brings a lot of excitement and some great new stewardship initiatives for the coming year. We look forward to helping everyone rekindle the fire of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and discover new and exciting ways to work together as the church to strengthen and grow our faith and to spread the message of God to the world.
Keep your eyes open for more communications from the Stewardship Ministry in the coming year, and let us know if you’d like to join us.
~ Jim Fennell, for the Oldtown Stewardship Ministry