Over 100 attend Let’s Connect dinner for look at strategic planning and discipleship

More than 100 people attended the TTUMC Let's Connect dinner on Wednesday night, where they dined on Lupton's roast beef, got a description of upcoming discipleship classes and received a presentation from the Executive Team on the current state of strategic planning for the church.

After dinner, Pastor St. Clair described each discipleship class offering for the coming term and introduced teachers to applause. Everyone was encouraged to sign up for a Wednesday night discipleship class. In addition to Wednesday night classes, Sunday classes are being expanded as well, to five offerings. Cindy Kocher, chair of SPRT, introduced our newest staff member, Michele Stocker (pronounced "stow-ker"), who will be the staff person responsible for discipleship.

Then the Executive Team was brought forward and introduced, and Marilyn Swanson led a presentation of the current state of strategic planning for the church. The focus was on the Executive Team's recommendations for a reorganization of the church's core values and ministries.

The Executive Team is recommending that the church adopt as its values five statements that are modeled closely on the five essential practices of The Methodist Way, as championed by the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church.

In her presentation, Marilyn showed that the values modeled on the five practices statements cover the same ground as the current TTUMC values statements. The change is not great, but TTUMC would gain the advantage of having its values be in alignment with the Florida Conference.

Cindy Kocher explained that these same five values can be used to realign TTUMC ministries so that they would clearly support our new values. For each value group of ministries, a lay person would be assigned to lead the value area, and one or more staff persons would be assigned to support the ministries in that value area. Patina Ripkey would support the Worship area, Pastor David Smith would support the Hospitality area, Yvette Moore and Michele Stocker would support the Nurture area, Debbie Salinger would support the Mission area and Pastor St. Clair Moore would support the Stewardship area. 

In response to a question, Lay Leader Keven Woodard reported that laypersons to lead each value area are still in the process of being nominated and recruited by the Nominations and Leadership Committee.

The response to the presentation was overwhelmingly positive. Ed Nesman called the proposed reorganization "fantastic," and Andy Arace also provided an affirmation of the work done. Other questions included where the Boy Scouts would fall among the values (answer: in Mission) and whether the United Methodist Men and United Methodist Women were categorized correctly in Mission (answer: it was believed so).

Near the end of the meeting, Finance chair Jim Bransford reported to applause that the church only needs another $26,000 to be pledged to reach its goal of $140,000 for sanctuary renovation.