Dear Church Family,
We need your input and support for our UMC Monroe Ministry Action Plan (MAP) which will help define the next steps for our church family’s mission, priorities, and initiatives to deepen our faith and relationships with God and one another. God guides us to encourage each other through worship as well as other opportunities to learn, serve, and grow together.
Thanks to those who were able to participate in our worship service last Sunday (07/19/26) when Patti and Sheryl gave us an overview of how all UMC churches are being encouraged to reevaluate their actions to ensure they are best meeting the evolving needs of our faith community. Our UMC Monroe church council has prepared a draft mission, goals and proposed initiatives for the church family to review, give feedback, and help to prioritize based on your gifts and interests. Our success will be dependent on listening to needs, targeting specific actions and engaging everyone’s unique talents to achieve our goals… and constantly reviewing and revising as needed.
Sheryl highlighted that Faith is a “team sport” and challenged everyone who was part of Sunday’s service to sign up for one or more MAP initiatives where they feel called to support so we can begin defining the specifics and putting plans into action. Thanks to all those who’ve already signed up and we encourage others to engage with us as we develop and execute our UMC Monroe MAP. Check out the following August Monday night sessions.
How can you get engaged? Listen to the replay of Sunday’s service on YouTube here. You may be especially interested in the youth message (13:35), readings (18:18), and “Faith is our Future” message (22:13). We’ve also attached the slides that were presented for your reference … then pick a couple of areas where you feel called to play a role on the team and let Patti or Sheryl know where you are interested.
We will be scheduling “idea sessions” over the next 60 days to start gathering and prioritizing ideas where people want to participate and form teams and plans to execute some of those ides based on people’s engagement. We have scheduled the initial sessions for Mondays in August at 7pm via zoom in order to reach a broad group of people during the busy summer months, but you can reach out to Sheryl or Patti anytime if you have ideas/gifts but are unable to make one of the sessions.
Based on initial feedback and Sunday’s signups, the first MAP idea sessions will be focused on the following areas (see below) where we expect many people will want to be involved. The purpose of these initial sessions will be to document needs/roles and prepare lists of people who want to engage in specific areas to support the plans. We fully expect follow up discussions to further discuss and modify as needed, but we also want to execute quickly vs. spending lots of time planning without taking action.
MAP Ideas Session Schedule:
* Laity Worship Support – Monday, August 3 at 7:00 pm
* Care Circle – Monday, August 10 at 7:00 pm
* Small Groups (Social/Support gatherings, Bible Studies, Christian-topics, Youth, any other ideas) – Monday, August 17 at 7:00 pm
(NOTE: Links to the zoom sessions can be found on our church website under the new icon “Ministry Action Plan (MAP) zoom link” or here.)
After these initial MAP idea sessions, we will hold sessions within 60 days (likely in September) for additional areas (perhaps with smaller teams initially) to focus on:
* Welcome Team
* Hands-On Missions
* Safety Planning
… but don’t wait if you have a good idea or want to get started sooner.
Again, our goal is to have everyone on our faith team find their gifts and interests so we can work together as pieces of God’s puzzle to make an impact on our community and the world. Let’s get started… Are you in? Thanks!
For more information, please contact Sheryl or Patti E.
Pastor Chuck
2026.07.19 UMC Monroe Ministry ACTION Plan (MAP) Church slides