Weekly Announcements from Pastor Valerie Brown-Greenly, Senior Pastor
Dear Friends,
This is my 65th email to you since the beginning of the pandemic. If some of them weren’t so repetitive, I could publish them as a little book and record for the last several months.
There are a few important items I want to bring up and also review with you today. First: the numbers and cases of COVID in Minnesota are trending down. Daily, we all track these numbers and we live in the hope that the trend continues. Like you, I am anxious to open up the church. That being said, we are not there yet. As presented before, we have a numerical formula for when to start the re-opening: basically, a 5% percent infection rate in Anoka and Hennepin counties that are stable for a minimum of two weeks. We also are following the trends for the State’s re-opening of restaurants and bars; hoping as we practice safe measures, those numbers don’t trend up. Another factor, and one more of the positive trends, is the in-person return to class for our elementary students. It is everyone’s hope the middle school and high school students will be able to follow the same path as numbers improve.
Along these same lines, I think of our theme this year: ‘running the race set before us‘. We have done such a wonderful job of holding the line and doing what needs to be done for our community and for the care of our neighbors. Perhaps we can imagine together that ‘we are getting there,’ but, we are not there yet. We have come this far together and I suggest we finish well. Let’s look forward to the time when we re-open to gather together for worship and all of our activities and events. We are well on the road to recovery.
Please know we will update you as information becomes available and plans are made for the future of in-person worship and gatherings. Thank you for your patience and your willingness to work through this together.
As I mentioned in the announcements on Sunday, we appreciate your continued donations to the Food Shelf. Please use next week on Tuesday and Wednesday morning for drop offs and donations. I am asking we take a break from donation drop-offs and drop-ins on the last full week of this month.
Why do I ask this?
A few years ago, Peace Lutheran Church filed with Anoka County to be a response site for natural disasters. With that, our building can be used as a mass vaccination site. During the last week of January we are honored to be able to do that very thing. We will be using our site for vaccinating Mental Health Care Workers. We look forward to a successful week. The future hope is we will be allowed to use our site again as a vaccination site for those who are 65 and older. There are no dates set for that event, and you understand, it depends on many things, the least of which is requesting and obtaining the vaccine for such a purpose. I will keep you posted and let you know when we will be the site with the opportunity to vaccinate the next group. I want to be clear though: this first vaccination clinic, which will hopefully be the last full week of January, is for Mental Health Care Workers. These folks will be making appointments through a link. I will let you know when our turn comes. Thank you so much for understanding and celebrating with me that Peace can serve our community in this way.
I wanted to offer some general information about our Annual Meeting. The Annual Meeting of Peace Lutheran Church will be Sunday, February 14, at 11:00am. This meeting will be held on Zoom for our members. You will receive directions on how to be included from your computer or your phone. I do not have the sign-on details or the particulars. If you are a member of Peace Lutheran, you will have ample notice and we will assist you so you will be included in the meeting.
With that, the Church Council has been discussing elections for 2021. The general hope is if you were serving on a board or committee that you would consider serving again this year? The hope is we can leave our elected positions in a sort of stasis, by that, basically going on as if 2020 did not happen as far as elections are concerned. Many who were elected did not have an opportunity to fulfill the positions for which they were elected. Those who were serving in groups, they too, for the most part, didn’t have an opportunity to fulfill all the work they had hoped for the last year. Please offer your feedback on this proposal. The Church Council, Finance Team, and Endowment Board were all approached about this possibility. If you have been elected to a group, please consider serving again this year. If you do not want to serve an additional year, please contact me and I’ll pass on the information to our leadership. Thank you for all of your patience as we make preparations to be together on Zoom for our Annual Meeting. The Annual Meeting will be the time for you to receive the budget for 2021, discuss it and approve it, along with all other business of our church. Your opinions and input matter greatly!
I hope this email wasn’t too overwhelming. I’ll update you again next week. Thank you so much for all of your continued generosity and support!
Have a good week! Take care…Be safe…
Pastor Valerie
Cell: 612-280-6493 Email: [email protected]
Church: 763-757-4459 Email: [email protected]