Rector’s Update: Changes
Pictured above: We had a great turnout at our event for The Anglican Relief and Development Fund! (That is the Executive Director, Rev. Jake Stum, who is welcoming us.)
Dear Restoration,
“He turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water… Whoever is wise, let that person attend to these things; let them consider the steadfast love of the Lord.” (Psalm 107: 35, 43)
Dear Restoration,
This will be the last Rector’s Update that you get through the platform we call ‘CCB’ or Church Community Builder. We will still use CCB as our online database, giving portal, facility calendar, etc. We are just moving all of our newsletter publications to MailChimp.
Restoration has a number of excellent weekly newsletters. On the front page of our website, about halfway down, is a new ‘subscription’ button. When you click it, you will go to our subscription portal, which gives you freedom to choose which newsletter(s) you will receive each week.
I encourage you to receive the Friday Newsletter and the Rector’s Update each week. If you would like to stay current on the great things that our happening with our kids of all ages, I invite you to subscribe to the Apex and Kids’ newsletters!
Because you are already receiving my Rector’s Update newsletter, there is nothing you need to do to continue to receive it. Your email address will transition to our MailChimp platform and next week this update will come from that portal. If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this email. It will go directly to me. I think you will find this to be fairly seamless.
You are welcome to unsubscribe from the Rector’s Update and you will have the opportunity to do so, through one click, every time you receive it. You are also warmly invited to receive other Resto newsletters- whatever your interest and inbox can sustain! Feel free to share our newsletters with friends and colleagues who may have interest in what God is doing through our church. We think the MailChimp platform will make that a lot easier for you.
Fasting and Praying
Our vestry has chosen to fast and pray together this Friday, June 16th, in advance of our June Vestry meeting on Tuesday, June 20th. I want to invite you to join us in fasting from something and taking intentional time to pray this Friday.
The vestry (and many of you!) has been working very hard with our advisory teams (Finance, Personnel, Facility, Race+Reconciliation, Outreach) to discern the budget and plans for the coming year that align with the good things God is currently growing in our church. We believe that God is doing a lot, perhaps something new. In order to be good stewards of the way His power and generosity is moving among us, we want to intentionally pause… and listen… before we meet to discuss our fiscal year 2024 budget next week.
I’m trying not to overstate what we are sensing from the Lord, but I am also trying to ‘raise my hand’ and say- God is doing something! Let’s pay attention. Let’s ‘consider the steadfast love of the Lord.’ Let’s look for the ways we can “thank GOD for his marvelous love, for his miracle mercy to the children he loves.” (Referencing Psalm 107, The Message)
Here are some ways that you can pray with us:
1. We want a clear direction from the Lord regarding our openness to start a new campus that will become a new church to the west of us: RestoWest. Pray for confirmation, for a location with availability on Sunday morning, for the servant team that will be leading it to come together, for a Kid’s SG staff person, for a musician. Would you join us in asking the Lord to make His will clear to us?
2. We want to serve Restoration Immigration Legal Aid and encourage the work they are doing in an environment where the policy around immigration is regularly changing. On June 23rd, RILA and The Trinity Forum are hosting an online conversation called, Hospitality to Strangers with my friend, Dr. Daniel Carol Rojas, who teaches at Wheaton and has been active in the Matthew 25 Initiative that I help to facilitate. He is a GREAT Bible teacher. This forum will answer lots of questions for how Christians should approach those who are migrating in this world because of violence, famine, and oppression. I am so proud of the work RILA is doing. Please pray for this forum and consider taking an hour to watch it. You can register, here.
3. We want to grow our staff team. Would you pray for interested applicants in our Kids’ Small Group Coordinator and Worship Coordinator positions? Would you consider sharing the job descriptions with your network of people? Would you pray that these two positions would be filled by September 1 (big prayer!)?
4. We want to take good care of our facility and make any physical changes that might be helpful for the ministry we do on Quincy Street. Our facility is used from 6am to 9pm on 4 or 5 days a week. We have corporate worship. We have small groups meeting for Bible Study. We have RILA staff and Restoration staff doing their work. We host RILA clinics. We have leadership team meetings. We host lots and lots of events for our neighbors and our members. I love how generous we are with the building and how many people come through here each week. Pray for wisdom as we upgrade dated systems and discern changes that can help the building be even more useful!
5. Our Clergy Development Program is becoming more and more effective. We have a number of people who are considering Holy Orders. We have curates who are learning how to be pastors. It’s a beautiful way we are serving the church. Join us in praying as we listen to what the Lord has for this program in the coming year.
6. We want to keep inviting our friends and loved ones to respond to love of God, expressed in the work of His Son, and affirmed in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Pray for your friends who need to know that God loves them. Pray for your friends to choose ‘the welcome’ God has made possible through Jesus.
7. Pray for our generous discernment as the vestry and our outreach advisory team respond to the grant requests from our outreach partners. There are so many people and organizations who are doing good work in our community and around the world. We want to be wise about our ‘yeses’ and our ‘nos’. Pray for us to be courageously generous and carefully smart about this.
8. Pray for our province, the Anglican Church in North America. Next week our College of Bishops is meeting. Pray for deep humility to cover their interactions. Many of you have asked about the situation in the Diocese of the Upper Midwest. My encouragement is to pray- that our bishops would remember the victims and act in a way that cares for them; that our bishops would remember the good future of the province and act in a way that keeps us moving forward with integrity on behalf of the generations to come.
It’s a lot to pray. Maybe you have space to take it all on. Maybe you just grab a few of these things. We will be fasting and praying this Friday and we invite you to join us as the Lord leads.
I think the Lord is growing something beautiful at Restoration. We can see bits of it and we are wanting to be very intentional in not rushing ahead and not moving too slow. But we want to see it! He is the Lord who turns a parched land into springs of water. That’s a big change! Perhaps those changes are happening at Restoration as well. Let’s pray.
-David
