Evangelism Team Meeting Minutes
April 13, 2004

In attendance were Yvonne Amrine, Carl Cleveland (observing), Dean Conklin, Dee Duncan, Lynda Fickling, Ken Fong (taking minutes), Laura Kuhl, Jerry McLeland, and Jim Wolff (presiding).

We reviewed feedback from the test marketing of the “morphed statement.”  The feedback was generally very positive.  We struggled for an extended time with the repetition of “life” and “grow”/”growing” in the statement.  We changed the second “life” to “faith journey” and left the grow/growing (since we couldn’t find a suitable synonym).  So we agreed on the following final statement to be used for our evangelism efforts:

 

Invitational     Relational     Missional

We welcome you to our Christian family, where we share life.  Wherever you are in your faith journey, you are accepted and encouraged to grow spiritually.  Join us in growing together toward full humanity through living the teachings of Jesus: Love, Acceptance, Justice and Hope.

 

We discussed a “tagline” – i.e., a soundbite version of the statement.  A suggestion was:

“St. Luke’s --- We share life --- Invitational  Relational  Missional.”  We did not conclude this discussion, however.

Special guest Yvonne Amrine, head of the Communications Team, reviewed how that team could help support the Evangelism Team’s efforts.

Laura Kuhl reviewed the suggestions for adding youth members to our team.  We agreed that we’d like to invite David Ashby and Emily Bauer.

Then we began the process of developing a plan for evangelism.  We brainstormed our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  (Some items appear in more than one category.)

STRENGTHS   Programs Location Facility capacity potential Staff	WEAKNESSES   Programs Apathy Stop the bleeding Identify audiences / needs Getting noticed Unknown leadership Giving – available $
OPPORTUNITIES   Increased competition Identify resources Demographic challenges	THREATS   Increased competition Economic downturn Unknown leadership

 

Laura also briefly reported that she has made some progress with John Thompson in getting demographic data.

Our next meeting will be Tuesday, April 20, at 7:00.  Our objective will be to continue with this planning and arrive at concrete steps to be taken.

ACTIONS:

Everyone:                              Build on the above SWOT analysis.  Each pick two strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and/or threats and put more details on them.  For example, you might pick “identify audience needs” and start listing what those might be, so that we can come up with actions to meet those needs.

Jim Wolff and Laura Kuhl:     Review our progress with the Executive Board and discuss beginning to use our statement in St. Luke’s literature

Laura Kuhl:                           Ask Martha Boon to invite David Ashby and Emily Bauer to join our team.

Laura Kuhl:                           Ask Sharon Oliver to provide a final (“pretty”) version of the statement and graphics