A New Start for 2015

As a spiritual discipline, for years I have taken an inventory of events of the past year and set goals or resolutions for the coming year. I thought about the great things our church did this past year. We started a strategic visioning team and came up with a new mission statement for our church, for the first time in 30 years, "Primed 4 you!"  Pretty significant shift for Deerfield UMC.  Our church found some Holy Spirit courage and tried some new things, like inviting the whole community to an Easter Egg Hunt, and we filled the fellowship hall. From that event, one family joined our church. We are so blessed to have Dennis and Rebecca O'Neal with us. We also tried more community outreach events called "Celebrate Summer" and invited the whole community again.  This fall the church hosted a prayer tent for the month of September and offered prayer for people who wanted to come by to have someone pray with them. We had several folks who came to ask for prayer. We were paying attention to the line of cars that back up in traffic in front of the driveway of the church every day. This fall we also launched an emergent worship service using contemporary music and ran the launch in October and November with between 30 to 50 people attending weekly. These are some of the new things we tried last year.
One of our speakers for the Prime Time worship event was Principal Costin from Parkway Elementary. She spoke on the impact our church had had on children that we had tutored in reading last year, and thanked us for wanting to continue to partner with their school.  The worship team took up food for the schools of Watauga County for our Thanksgiving mission and we delivered several boxes of food to be distributed to the schools in the most need in our county.
We continue to seek to be an obedient church in doing the will of the Lord in our community and we do look forward to all the good things and God things that are in store for our church in the coming year.