It is that time again in the life of our congregation when we gather together and seek God for direction in our upcoming year of worship. We rely heavily upon all of the congregation’s gifts, perspectives, wisdom and discernment in determining what our worship year will look like and what themes we should be exploring. Sunday morning is probably the only time we gather together in one place… it holds a great potential for unleashing vision and direction for the church. God has called each of our Elders, Commission Directors, and Worship Planners into positions of leadership and the congregation has entrusted them with various its ministries. That is why we feel it is important for each of these groups to be present, involved and heard from in our worship planning retreats! Each brings their best thinking cap and a prayerful spirit and together we seek to strategically align our Sunday morning worship with the direction and vision that God is giving Neffsville Mennonite Church!

Our annual worship planning retreat is quickly approaching and we are looking forward to our time together!   We will meet this Saturday, May 19^th at the Journey 24:15 House from 9 AM – 3 PM

As many of you know, we have just completed our purposeful planning process and it is clear that our congregation has a desire to engage more deeply with the Bible. Churches all over the world are identifying a need to encourage its members to become more familiar with the Bible as statistics show that there is a growing Biblical illiteracy among church attendees. It is also interesting that Mennonite church USA and Canada have also identified a need for the denomination to encourage its churches to name the year 2013 as the “Year of the Bible”. One of the titles that caught my attention from Mennonite Church Canada was its theme for next year: “Dusting off the Ancient Book”.

We have discussed this as a pastoral team and Elders and while we think every year should be the year of the Bible, we thought that perhaps this year we could try something a little different in our worship planning. Perhaps by taking on the Mennonite Church USA challenge we can encourage our members to become more actively engaged with Scripture and model that as well for our younger generations. We would like to do this by planning our services around book studies beginning in September 2012.