Steve has been an effective and hard working leader for our building and grounds. The building and grounds look great and are in great shape. Thanks, Steve, for your blood, sweat, and tears! But the time is coming when Steve should move on to other uses. It’s important to keep moving volunteers around regularly not only so volunteers don’t burn out but so that different strengths can contribute the the long-term health of the society. So the Pastor is looking for someone to volunteer to manage the building and grounds for a little while. If you think you would be able to serve this use, or know someone you think would be great, please talk to Amos Glenn.
April 24, 2006
Well, it’s been a while since there has even been a Pastor’s Council, much less news from the council. There isn’t much news except to let you know the new structure of this important council and who is service this use. There will be two parts of the Pastor’s Council: the Central Council and the Expanded Council. The Central Council will be very much like the pastor’s council that you have known and loved. The Central Council and the Pastor will meet regularly to work on issues in the congregation and ensure continuing, high-quality communication between the Pastor and the Congregation. There will be about five people on this council.
The Expanded Council is additional people who I can count on for feedback on things I’m thinking about as Pastor. There are times when an idea or project can’t wait for the next regularly scheduled meeting and I would like some fast feedback. If there are only five people to provide this feedback, if a few people are not available then I run the risk of not getting broad feedback. Members of the Expanded Council will not be responsible for bringing issues to the attention of the pastor (though they certainly may and everyone is encouraged to talk with me); they are only responsible for a rapid responds to the Pastor call for input. Members of the Central Council will be responsible for two-way communication. Email will be the primary medium for communication between the Pastor and the Expanded Council though certainly not restricted to any single method of communication. Email is great for this sort of communication because it allows me to broadcast the question, gives the responders time to consider their answer, and deliver their thoughts at any time.
Members of the Pastor’s Council
Finally, I am planning to restart regular whole-society Pastor’s Council Meetings like we had four years ago. Right now, I’m thinking about having two meeting each year that are open to everyone and anyone who would like to come and talk with the pastor and other about what’s going on at the Pittsburgh New Church. After the regular Pastor’s Council meetings get started, I’ll have a better picture of what would be most useful.
The School Advocates have been piling up successes! The First Impressions Team has done an amazing job of creating a more welcoming atmosphere by finding those little things we don’t normally think about and improving on them. We’ll be putting up some new signage because of their efforts. The Recruitment Team is plugging away at its long task list. We’ve almost finished a complete rewrite of the school handbook we send to prospective families. A clearer voice and message has made this key marketing tool even better than it was. The Fund Raising Team is compiling a list of school needs and beginning to find new ways of bringing money into school uses from new sources.
Our final meeting for this school year is on Monday, May 15 from 7:30-9:00 PM. Everyone is welcome to join us and advocate for our school. This meetings agenda includes a review of what has worked and what lessons we have learned; what new Action Teams would be useful; what organization of the Advocates would be useful; and the Doctrine of Use and the Importance of Good Assessments in school. Join us!
Our regular April meeting was replaced by dinner and conversation with the faculty of the Pittsburgh New Church School about the continuing efforts to educate more of the Lord’s children in our school. We discussed current successes and lessons learned and shared our anxieties about the risks of growing too fast or not fast enough. This was very useful to help everyone understand where we were in terms of recruiting new families to our school.
The second part of our meeting included a conference call with Erik Synnestvedt, who is spending three years working full-time on marketing the Glenview New Church School. He’s currently in the second year of a three-year plan and, like the rest of us, has more questions than answers. But talking with Erik was very inspiring. The Glenview New Church School has grown in the last two years and Erik was able to explain their plans, what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and what is impossible to measure but should be done anyway.
The goal of the conference was not to come away with a new and clearer plan for school marketing. Instead, we wanted to see how our plans are similar and dissimilar and ask all the questions we could think of about our goals and methods of marketing. We can then use the best of what has been working for Glenview and apply it to Pittsburgh (with a clear understanding of the differences).
From the conversation, we did collect a list of things we’d like to try but hadn’t thought of. Many of them are pretty clever, such as requiring school parents to select a certain number of volunteer hours. This not only helps the school in direct ways, but by mixing parents across classroom divides we encourage parents to keep their kids in the school for the higher grades.
One of the action items that we were excited about was what Erik calls the MAP (Mission Alignment Panel). The Glenview New Church School has formed a team to focus on developing some criteria for deciding what is essentially New Church education and implementing plans that stay focused on those criteria. The really exciting part, though, is that Erik is hoping to expand this panel beyond the boundaries of Glenview. He presented a vision of all New Church schools cooperating to answer some of the questions we all have and to assist each other in developing plans and processes that support the growth of New Church education. For example, while Glenview is developing marketing materials, Pittsburgh could be working on a good system for responding to families when they first contact the school, and Washington could be finding ways to encourage kindergarten students to move into first grade. And we share the products of our efforts with everyone else. In this way, we can move the marketing of New Church Education as a whole forward much, much faster. It is a hopeful prospect.
April 9, 2006
Everyone is welcome to join us to celebrate the kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ during our regular service from 11:00 AM to noon.