Good Morning Welcome Team,
we had a total of 117 adults yesterday! this is a significant uptick in our congregation which has been averaging about 80 people or so. It was great to be able to welcome them with all of you! thank you for your hard work!!
with Jen Ko and Hannah Song stepping down we are down to 7 people. If anyone else is thinking about stepping down, please know that you are ok to do so if you feel that is what you want to do, please don't stay because you feel obligated.
*** I WOULD APPRECIATE WHAT I WRITE BELOW THIS TO REMAIN WITH THE WELCOME TEAM ONLY ****
obviously, we need much more than 7 people to be able to effectively Welcome our new guests and current members. Yesterday, I had a 2.5 hour meeting with Yurie and Pastor John about the state of Welcome Team and to again broach the subject of merging.
Connection currently has 9 members and they are in discussions with 4 more people. Ideally, if we merged, then the Welcome/connections team would be 20 people allowing us to rotate at least every other week. Discussions are taking place, but no decisions have been made. Having Pastor John at the meeting was a great thing, I think he now sees that we can improve the way we do things.
When I first took over Welcome Team, we had 2 meetings that were meant to serve as a Fellowship and Listening Meetings. During those meetings you all shared that we are undermanned and we are limited in our roles to truly Welcome our visitors. WE as a group decided that it was ok for me to approach Yurie and Beckie Jung to discuss merging.
Personally, I think that the way we Welcome currently is flawed, we should all be one team, the awkward handoff that takes place, the lack of man power, ability to follow up/engage, etc will all be better if we merged. All of these points were explained and almost was pleading, Yurie is weighing options.
Yurie has also admitted that Connections has room for improvement, I feel that members of Welcome team can really assist in some of those areas
However, one thing that came up that was discouraging and hurtful was that Yurie mentioned to me that NOT all of you are FOR the merger. Yurie said that some of you had conversations with her that you didn't want to do Connections duties. I was under the impression from our meetings that we would be willing to do MORE work if we can have time off ie be ON every other week or every 3 weeks (ideally).
so where does that leave us.... random thoughts and possible solutions (in no particular order):
1. Do we need to have another meeting as a Team?
2. if merger doesn't go through then I will ask P john to allow Welcome team to recruit non church members
3. I would love to hear what you think about the Merger
4. once merger decision is finalized, I would like to revamp a few things on our team, ie badges, lanyards, procedural notes, etc
5. please pray for the discussions with Yurie and P John
6. I welcome any and all thoughts
7. I would like to offlead some of our duties like sign up sheets, offering (SOC can do it), ancillary things that we are doing that are not Welcoming related
Thank you again for all you do!!
Paul Kim