We need to avoid the splintering effect we felt when we decided to reduce our meetings a few years ago. If members attend irregularly, we can develop disjoint subgroups (e.g., those that attend 1st and 3rd week vs those that attend 2nd and 4th weeks, etc). We can loose the sense of community that for many is one of the strong reasons to belong to Forum. Our weekly attendence can fall so low that it becomes embarrassing to bring in guest speakers. With less consistent attendence our series of related topics become more splintered, with some having heard the previous session and others not. We need to avoid these pit falls and urge all members to make a committment to regular attendence. With regular attendence our sense of community can be even stronger than previously by coming together every week and having twice the blessing.
We will have many more meetings to plan. It is important that
we not dilute the quality of our meetings while doubling the number.
We have asked ourselves how we might improve our worship using this flexibility
of more meetings. There are things we have not done in recent years
due to reduced meetings. There are new things we might do to enhance
our worship. Let's accept the challange and fill these additional
services with new approaches and topics that will stimulate each of us.
Our current plans are for Dr Lester Wright to plan a series of discussion topics for the first Sabbath of each month. Dr Terry Anderson will be planning a discussion series for the third Sabbath. The fifth Sabbath, when it occurs, will be an all music service.
Terry's series will have some services continuing the series on Church History that Terry has been leading for several years. We are currently looking at beginnings of the Reformation. Most of the services will be a new series Terry is creating on ethics applied to life situations. We will begin with some background on the philosophical methods of ethics and then apply these to different situations each week. Services will be a short introduction to the topic and then consist mostly of group discussion. Possible topics include: ethics & business practice, ethics and family relations, ethics and medicine, ethics and lawyers, ethics and public policy. Occasionally we will have a guest expert to help us address the topic. For a more complete description see Ethics Series.
As the year develops, share your responses with us. Are the new services filling your additional unmet needs? Is there something else you'd like to see us doing in more services? Let's work together to make this an opportunity to meet the community's worship needs better.
There are Christians in the area whose worship needs are not being well met and that would gain a blessing from our services. We need to find them and invite them to our services. There are non-Christians in the area who would be attracted to our thoughful approach to issues and drawn to Christ through our services. We need to find them and invite them to our services.
We have a new opportunity for growth and outreach. At our spring
meeting we also chose to become a member of the Adventist Metro Federation,
a group sponsored by the Seventh-day Adventist North American Division,
to help foster and coordinate new approaches to reaching certain target
groups in the NY metro area. This group and its programs can help
us grow. For more information see Forum
Joins Adventist Metro Federation.
Last Modified: Friday, 05-Mar-2010 15:00:45 MST