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By Jackie Christner
Since the beginning of May, Our First Congo Core Team members have been making calls to congregation members with the purposes of seeing how they are doing with this time of relative isolation, finding out how they are connecting to the church, what they miss about church, their reactions to how our church is handling on-line services and small group interactions, and suggestions they may have for improvement now and in the future. We hope we are building community while also gathering helpful information for the church.
We began by each team member choosing people to call. We are trying to vary the age groups that we contact to get a cross-section of members. We are enjoying the conversations, establishing new friendships and strengthening old ones. We have a list of questions that we agreed on to ask as well in order to gather and report information.
They are the following:
1. How are you doing? Is there anything you need?
2. What do you miss most about church?
3. How are you connecting with church programs and church members? (For families with children: What can the church be doing to help you maintain a faithful relationship with the church?)
4. What are some things the church is doing now that you really like and may want to see continued?
5. What suggestions do you have for other things the church could be doing now?
6. Other thoughts/comments.
We keep comments anonymous and record them on a mutual Google doc where we keep responses divided into categories: Families with young children; Families with older children/children not at home; Families or individuals without children, ages 19-39; Families without children, ages 40-60; Families or individuals without children, ages 61 and older.
We will continue our calls and information collecting until our September meeting. We will report our findings to our pastor and our Church Council.