Dear Members and Visitors to Gaston Community Church:
At our Elders meeting Monday night we discussed an idea that we are interested in considering and possibly implementing. We wanted to get some thoughts and feedback from members and visitors to Gaston Community Church on this idea.
The idea is to move the worship service from 9:45 to 9:00am on Sunday mornings.
We would do this in late August if the Session makes final approval to do this, but we want to get input from you before we make a final decision. We want to be sure we have thought through all the related issues and you can help us with that.
The main reasons for considering this are:
1) To create a worship service time where our worship service can be more complete by enabling our worship leader and praise team to be a part of the end of our worship service. Our music leader, Andy Holland has to leave early because he goes to lead worship in another church after he leaves GCC on Sunday mornings. A change to 9:00 could make it possible for our music team and leader to participate at the end of the service.
2) If we ever decided to have some kind of modified Sunday School structure or instructional classes this would open up at time slot after worship to do that and we would still be concluded by 11:30 on Sunday mornings.
We still believe that our church is best served by being primarily a small group ministry church meeting in people's homes, but there are times where we are seeing that a communicants class, children's instructional class or new member's class or doctrine/theology type class and even a prayer and personal fellowship in the Lord with our church leaders could become helpful in the future.
3) This time change would also help the teen-age meeting that happens after worship to be concluded by 11:30, enabling families to be together for lunch, etc.
4) It creates a little more space of time between the dismissal from morning worship at church and the subsequent beginning of adult and youth small groups that happen on Sunday afternoons.
We know this idea could create some challenges for people with young children, and possibly teen-agers and others, but we also think it could improve the quality of ministry we do at Gaston Community Church.
Let us know your thoughts. We appreciate your input. The responses will be sent to the Session (our Elders at GCC). To respond, email at:
marktankersley2000@yahoo.com
Pastor Mark Tankersley, on behalf of the Session.
