Board Updates

Board Announcements
 
Last weekend on Saturday our Great Lakes Regional representative, Greg Coles conducted board/leadership training at Ada Unity. Representatives from UGR, Ada and Muskegon Unity attended. Lisa White, Sarah Edgington, Kate Perlmutter and I represented UGR. For various reasons our other board members were unable to attend.
 
On Sunday, many of you attended or listened on-line to Greg’s message of applying love and patience to change. Things happen in God’s time, and we need to hold space for ourselves and others to work through these changes and the feelings they engender. Though applicable to our own personal changes/transitions, the merger and those potential changes were front and center for us. Our interactions continued for those present at the Ada church with a Spiritual Listening Circle in the afternoon. Though some of us have mixed feelings associated with a merger with the Ada Church, most of us in the circle expressed positivity regarding the merger itself.
 
Greg arranged a meeting Thursday evening with the senior members of the Ada and Walker boards to help define our next steps. Do we merge? Under what circumstances? AND how do we manage our mixed emotions?  What came out of this is a plan to define what a merger would look like, what an approximate timeline would be, and have our congregations vote on whether to merge.
 
We discovered that Ada is now contractually obligated to buy the Cascade church. They have delayed the purchase decision to the point they could be sued if they don’t close very soon. Our path forward if we decide to merge is almost assuredly the Cascade location. Our executive boards (both churches) would like to have both congregations conduct a merge vote in the next month. If both congregations vote to merge, then a joint team representing both congregations will plan the renovation of the Cascade church. This delay in planning the renovation will necessitate that both churches merge sometime this winter at our Walker site till the Cascade renovations are complete.