Hope

Today I am feeling hopeful.

God has promised that He will take care of us and I know that I can trust Him!

I am starting to realize how much I was getting stuck in a rut in my current job. There are so many possibilities out there to explore.

I am also starting to wonder if I have compromised too much of what I believe about what the Church should be and do, in order to be able to work within the institution. I have loved working at Chapel Hill, but there is much about the way this church operates that I don't think is either biblical or the best. However, I have pushed these thoughts aside whenever they came up over the last couple of years because some of these same ways of doing things were essential to the continuing existence of of my job position. And for that matter, pretty much any paid ministry position within the Church.

Lost Job

Today I met with Jerry Vogt, the Executive Pastor at Chapel Hill, and Terri Gurthrie, the head of the staff parish committee. At my last evaluation I had asked about the possibility of their increasing my hours and was told going in to this meeting that they were going to address that request. Instead of increasing my hours the staff parish committee has decided to eliminate my position as of May 1st, 2009 and fill the position by using volunteers. I was told this decision was not in any way because they were unhappy with my work. I believe it is mostly an economic decision.

Frankly I think they are crazy as Chapel Hill does not have a culture of volunteerism and I believe much of what I do will end up falling back on to Cheryl Ashley, our church secretary. However, this is their decision to make and theirs to deal with the consequences. I wish this was not happening but it is.

I write this for three reasons:
1. I need to debrief, and get this off my chest.
2. I believe in being open and transparent.
3. I am starting Job hunting and would ask all of you to keep me in mind and in your prayers.

Back to work on the CHMS

I have been (frantically) working on the online Church Management System for Chapel Hill again.
I decided to move this to a DotNetNuke back end so I had to move all the database tables and rebuild the Datasets and Business Logic Layer. We are doing an in-house photo directory at church and I REALLY want to be able to use this for the registration. The opportunity to get buy-in is just too great to pass up.

I just imported the families and individuals tables information from our Shelby database. So I am more or less back to where I was before sans groups.