Thank you to all who joined the Quarterly Meeting on January 31st! These one-hour meetings are a great opportunity to learn more about all that is happening at Skyline UCC. It is also an opportunity to reflect on how you can become more involved in the activities of the Church. All teams welcome new members. If you are interested in a Service Team or if you have ideas of your own, please reach out to one of the Chairs or let me or Pastor Laurie know.
This quarter, my personal goals are continued focus and support on safety (members, staff, preschool teachers, children and families). I am also facilitating the ad hoc group (Nancy Taylor, Becky Taylor and Pastor Laurie) who is developing the office manager position requirements and assisting Pastor Laurie with hiring Nancy Montier’s replacement. Lastly I plan to work with Council and volunteers on developing our long-term goals.
At the Quarterly Meetings, members and guests heard from Service Team Leaders:
Jane Medema for the Spiritual Life Team
[email protected] 510-263-9798,
Nancy Taylor for the Justice & Witness Team
[email protected] 510-325-4957, and
Catherine Kessler for the Green Team
[email protected] 510-499-8114)
Spiritual Life has several activities planned to help guide us through the Lenten period. Justice & Witness has planned several events (including a movie night) in recognition of Black History Month Green Team has been busy maintaining and beautifying our facilities and grounds.
Tom Manley provided the update on the church finances. The good news is that we are doing much better than originally budgeted primarily due to the preschool enrollment being steady and the preschool remaining open since March. We recently received notice that the first PPP Loan has been forgiven. That update will be shared at the next Quarterly Meeting in April.
We announced the retirement of Nancy Montier who has been our Office Manager for 8 years. Everyone will miss Nancy! Her kindness, creativity, commitment and flexibility to the evolving requirements of the position will be hard to replace.
We hope you are finding these quarterly updates valuable and informative. There is always a lot happening at Skyline UCC (please reference your weekly emails for details). I welcome any suggestions or recommendations of what you would like to hear at the next quarterly meeting.
Your Moderator, Carolyn Noble
One of the many aspects that I love about Skyline is our polity, rooted in a foundational tenet of Congregationalism: the priesthood of believers. That includes YOU! Together, we as a local church, have the right to decide what our faith community’s forms of worship and confessional statements are, who are officers are, how we administer our affairs, and what our ministries are. Given the insistence on independent local bodies, our structure continues to be important in many grassroots, social reform movements, abolition, temperance, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights, climate justice and the sanctuary movement. Skyline has, over these past fifty years, has been a powerful force, locally, and nationally, in these efforts as a progressive faith community.
This Sunday in worship, we will explore the powerful healing story in Mark’s gospel, about a man in the synagogue possessed by an unclean spirit. I look forward to wondering with you, about this “unclean spirit”. What are you longing for Jesus to name, to silence, and to call forth from you? From this faith community? From this country? What is It that needs healing, and forgiveness, to restore us to wholeness?
