Summary of the February Church Council Meeting

by SommerAnn McCulloughAt the most recent Council meeting on Wednesday, 2/11, we discussed many items pertaining to the next steps of our congregation after the vote at our Annual Meeting. One highlight was talking with The Rev. Emily Scott, pastor at St. Lydia's Church in Brooklyn. Her congregation is in a similar neighborhood to Logan Square and they wanted to find a space that represented their values of connecting people in the community and creating a space for people to come together. After one year of searching, they are now leasing a storefront property and share the space with freelance workers during the day to help make revenue. From her story, we took away the need to have more listening conversations and bring new groups in the church together during this process. We were also inspired to think about our own values and mission as we continue this journey and balance our traditional aspects with newer worship ideas. You can read more about Emily's conversation and specifics about their fundraising and capital campaign in the minutes. The meeting opened a lot of the Council's eyes up to the fact we need to do more to make our fundraising efforts effective. With that in mind, a church fundraising consultant has been contacted to help us do exactly that.Along a similar vein, we looked at the Real Estate Committee's proposal of brokers. There are currently 4 people on the list and the official proposal will be made to Council in March. We also discussed how to catalogue our property items and create criteria for how to decide what to take with us. Following both of these presentations we began to look at our March 1^st Lunch Conversation and how we want to structure that time and space for everyone to participate and feel like they have concrete take-away points. We want to present case studies to discuss and look at how our values line-up with these decisions and next steps. In addition we want to look at how to separate the temporary v. permanent location discussions and have a generative conversation with everyone in attendance.You can find a more detailed account of these discussions, as well as other business we went over, in the record of the official Minutes.