Save the Dates

Some of you like to see that there is a real plan in place. This email is for you. I give you these dates while saying at the same time that the Lord is God and He is ultimately in charge. So these plans need to be held with open hands.

Those of us who are part of Sunnyside Downtown hope to have our first official worship service on Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010. That seems pretty far away but in order to start strong next April, the Sunnyside Downtown Launch Team should become a real group of people by October or November 2009.

The Launch Team will be made up of 60-80 (or more) of you who think God is calling you to the Sunnyside Downtown campus. As a Launch Team, we will begin to meet monthly, starting Sunday, September 27 at 12:45pm in the church basement over lunch. Other Launch Team meetings are scheduled for: October 25, November 22, December 6, January 24, and February 28. If you have any inkling that you may be part of this team, please enter the dates into your calendar now. Some of you who intend to stay at Sunnyside Grosvenor may like to participate in Launch Team meetings (especially the first one or two) to be prayerful and supportive (and eat good food). You are welcome!

What will the Launch Team do at these meetings? We will share meals together thanks to the hospitality of Ellen Kelly and team. We will consider our gifts and decide who God is enabling to do what. We will divide up responsibility for the downtown site (before it physically exists) and begin to take action, as needed, according to our gifts. We will build relationship with each other. We will take prayer walks downtown. An interested sub-group will confirm and secure our location. We will figure out how to best initiate relationship with and communicate our existence to the community downtown.

What will the Launch Team not do? We will not get people to do things that they have neither the gifts nor grace to do. My experience with missional teams is that when people do only what God asks them to do, when he calls them to do it, there is divine energy and inspiration (grace) for the task. The Launch Team experience should be a grace-filled experience, not a tough slog.

At present I’ve heard from 28 of you who have varying levels of interest in being part of Sunnyside Downtown. If any others would like to sit down for a coffee with me this summer I’ve cleared the weeks of July 20-24 and August 17-21 for one-on-one discernment conversations and prayer with you. (No worries! There is much freedom to both make decisions and reverse decisions about being part of the downtown site.) Just give a shout at kronberg@sympatico.ca. There is still time, particularly during the day, the week of July 20-24. The week in August is wide open.

When our staff meets in August we will begin to put some more dates on the calendar. We will look forward, even into 2011, and schedule ‘celebration’ dates. Those are times where we will be purposeful as the whole of Sunnyside Wesleyan Church, Grosvenor and Downtown sites, to notice and celebrate together what God has done. Also, we will be intentional about putting ‘church-wide connection’ events into our calendar in order to ensure that we have opportunity to gather as the whole community of Sunnyside Wesleyan Church many times throughout the year.

As always, please feel free to email me at kronberg@sympatico.ca with any of your opinions, input, or concerns. It is good to hear from you!