Draft Report Complete--Final Will Be Released in April

Hello FPC Members and Friends,

Happy news! The CSST has not only finished a solid draft of its report, we presented it to the Session this evening.

We're planning to revise it now that we have gotten some (very positive) feedback and then present the final report to the full congregation in April (after Easter).

The tentative idea is that we'll release the report, and then officially present it en masse followed by small group discussions.

The report, for those of you who are unaware, set out to get a clear sense of who the church is and how we see our vision and mission. All of this we're doing to help First Church search for and call a new Pastor.

We'll get more on the release of the report to you as details are set.

Peace,
CSST

Our Final Push...

Hello Everyone,

The Congregational Self-Study Team had another productive meeting last night. The most important conclusion to the evening was a task list that we have faith will bring us to a final report for the Session's February meeting (Feb. 28).

Most likely, this report will not be the end-all final, but a report that the Session will first digest and then use to ask us for more information or a deeper analysis.

What we give them in February will include information from the focus groups, the surveys, and other interviews and data sources. Therefore, this will not be a rough draft, but a final draft that may require some further development.

This has been a long process for the members of the CSST, and Charlotte Lohrenz (she's been wonderful in leading this important work), but we are carrying on, happy with the work we have accomplished.

Demographics...

Hello everyone,

The work of the Congregational Self-study continues. We know that we will have a report to Session by February, and that it might need editing into March.

That said, we had a great meeting last week with Stephany Crosby, a former First Church seminary intern, and current Interim Pastor at Bethesda Presbyterian.

It was great to catch up with her and to see where her life has led her.

She ran through maps of demographic data provided by a company that is contracted with the Washington Presbytery.

Not only was the information informative--it gave numbers and trends--it gave us a little hope. The Ballston-Virginia Square metro corridor is filled with people, according to the data, who are open to the idea of church life, but haven't made a committment to a church for any number of reasons.

The information was a little more complicated than that, but it seemed to offer evangelistic and new member opportunities for the church.

Just thought you'd want to know.

--the CSST Team

A little bit of irony...

isn't lost on us.

It's funny that the last post, originally published almost two weeks ago, spoke of the need for better communication, and then it took us weeks to get this blog up and running. That's not lost on us. Now that we have it up and running, though, we'll try to keep information coming to it.

Part of the communications upgrades, too, will be better use of the church's web site, at least that will be in our report to the Session. We have a pretty good looking site, but it's one we just don't turn to enough to help people enter into our community.

Communication!!

We need to communicate better. What? We said, WE NEED TO COMMUNICATE BETTER! Oooh. From updating and maintaining member databases, to helping people learn how they can get involved in the life of First Church, we need to better organize and disseminate information.

We’ll start, by telling Session this in our February report.

This was originally published in the bulletin on Jan. 6.

A Note from the CSST at the New Year

We First Churchers LOVE our music, our children’s education program, and our sermons (worship in general came out well).

Those were three programs that came up strong in just about every focus group. At the same time, we know that some programs, like adult education or the small groups, need some new life breathed into them. We’ll let Session know all about our programs in our report this February.

This originally ran in the bulletion near the first of the year.

A Pre-Christmas Note from the CSST

Guess what? We like each other; we like the connections that we have made at FPC Arlington. We’d like to strengthen those connections while we make new ones, especially inter-generationally.

That’s one of the initial findings of the CSST. We have all sorts of ideas for it, too, from photo walls to game nights. We’ll be including that in our report to Session in February.

This was originally published in the church bulletin just before Christmas.