Hi First Presbyterian Church,
It's time for our Mid-Week Meet-Up! In case you missed the latest news from Session, which I delivered during worship this past weekend, I'm including it for you here:
As you probably know, we began our search for a Director of Youth and Family Ministries (DYFM) in November of last year. In January, we were grateful to welcome Paula Dugan as our Interim DYFM while we continued the search for a permanent staff member. Since then, we have seen the ways Paula’s gifts have helped create an environment in which our children and their families feel welcomed, loved, and connected to our faith and this community. I’m happy to tell you that we are keeping Paula permanently! She is creative, energetic, warm and personable, and we are excited about all that God is going to do through her ministry with us in the years ahead.
I also wanted to let you know that our amazing Financial Administrator Maria DiGiambattista is going to be retiring at the end of March. Maria has been such a blessing to us for the last 8 years, but she has earned a well-deserved retirement.
With the addition of Paula and Maria’s coming retirement, the Session has been reconsidering our current staffing structure. Did you know that over the last 6 years, we have welcomed more than 110 new members into our congregation? Praise God! Our church is growing! That growth has not happened without much effort. Over the last year, our Session, our Vision Team, and the search committee that found us Paula, each (independently) concluded that we need more staff leadership to take us into the future.
To that end, we have begun searching for two new staff positions. One of these positions will replace the position Maria has held but will be expanded to “Church Administrator.” This position will focus on financial administration as well as human resources and the overall operations management of the church. We are bringing in David Strong, who was the former Church Administrator at Asbury First UMC, to consult with us for the next 18 weeks to help us evaluate our current situation and determine what we will need in the Church Administrator we eventually hire.
The other new staff position will work closely with Paula in both children’s and youth ministry but will focus directly on leading our youth ministry. We have hired a search firm to help us identify the best candidates for this new role. Until we hire that new person, Paula will continue to lead both our children’s and our youth ministry. After that, Paula will focus primarily on children’s ministry. She also will take on a new role as Director of Welcome or Director of Hospitality (we haven’t settled on the name yet). In this new role, Paula will help lead us into becoming a more welcoming congregation for people the moment they walk through our doors.
We have the funding to secure these two new positions, which should become sustainable long-term as we continue to grow our ministries and our congregation. We believe that these new developments will strengthen our church in multiple ways: It will help church leadership to better serve the spiritual needs of our congregation; it will better equip us all to be faithful ministers of the grace and love of Christ in our community; it will help us achieve our vision; it will help alleviate the heavy load that is on our current staff; and it will help us continue to grow as a church.
This is an exciting season in the life of First Presbyterian Church. Please continue to pray for our church as we faithfully seek to find the people God is calling to serve alongside us in leadership.
Peace,
Aaron