July Sabbath Offerings

1. The offering of Small Group Experience is our newest Zoom ministry. We announced this new program in Rock the Week on June 17th. A handy informational sheet can be found here. We're getting the ball rolling next Monday, June 22nd. Join us via Zoom at 6:55 p.m. to learn more at our Introduction and Covenant Building meeting. Click here on Monday night to launch the Zoom meeting.

2. Brother Talk is the name of the Zoom interviews with friends and members of Shadow Rock that lift up our core values of inclusion, justice, and spirituality. The link to this program can be found in the Sunday worship email, and may be found on other online platforms in the near future. Feel free to share these interviews with your friends and family. They are helping to initiate important discussions and encouraging new donors.

3. Worship Email and Links. This is our oldest outreach ministry and will continue to arrive in your email every Sunday morning during July.

4. Connections Count on Wednesday evenings at 7:00 p.m. is our sharing of joys, celebrations, and prayer concerns. At the end of our sharing time we enter a time of quiet and an attitude of prayer. This is a Zoom ministry is one of our most intimate connections, and the link is in always found in Rock The Week.

We hope you are blessed and encouraged by these offerings. However, we can only offer. To benefit from these offerings, and for you to contribute to the good and welfare of others, you must do your part and join.

Congregational Meeting Info

We will meet June 28th at 10:00 a.m. by way of a Zoom meeting. The Zoom invitation will be sent out to everyone next week and be made available by other internet platforms. The agenda will include financial and preschool updates. Also, we will vote for our governing board/foundation board and president. We will offer instructions in Rock the Week next Wednesday and feel free to contact Pastor Ken if you have questions.

A great deal of anxiety is related to our financial uncertainty. To ease some of that uncertainty and to fill in some of the gaps, I offer the following statement from our treasurer, Charlie Farmer.

“Shadow Rock has historically struggled year to year with its finances, but over time has built up a large asset base with the land, facilities, Preschool reserves and an estate gift as well as several restricted funds. For calendar year 2020 we passed a budget with $42.8K deficit and a $40K undefined fund raiser. But so far this year, we did not hire a financial assistant, furloughed the band, accompanist, nursery workers, etc. We then got a PPP loan of $144,955 from the federal government. The year end result for 2020 is unknown, but certainly will not be anywhere close to as bad as the original budget projections and could be positive if the Preschool opens and all the PPP is forgiven. We still need to decide what to do in the future since we cannot continue to have large deficit budgets.”

The Executive Council and Heidi Zinn have spent scores of hours navigating our old challenges in this new reality. They have been doing excellent work. I am grateful to them.

Reopening the Church and Preschool

We are witnessing a deluge of information and inconsistent leadership regarding the pandemic. We are determined to follow the guidelines of the infectious disease and pandemic scientists. We are also incorporating guidelines from the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

The first three considerations listed below are from the CDC guidelines for reopening childcare programs. We have adopted them and added to them.

· Will reopening be consistent with applicable state and local orders?

· Are you ready to protect children, employees, and other vulnerable populations at higher risk for severe illness?

· Are you able to screen children, employees, and other vulnerable populations upon arrival for symptoms and history of exposure?

· Is the infection rate decreasing consistently for 14 days?

When we can answer YES to all of these questions, then we will begin a phased reopening. If we answer NO to any one of these considerations, then we will not open. Please contact Pastor Ken if you have any questions.

Finally, I want to say how proud I am of you. We are enduring and thriving. We are loving and serving. We are supporting each other emotionally, spiritually, and financially. We are moving through the world promoting our values of inclusion, justice, and spirituality. If we keep doing this, we will emerge on the other side stronger with many lessons learned. Thank you for all you do.

Peace!

Pastor Ken