A Stewardship Forum

Greetings from your new Stewardship team for 2012, Bob Urbach and Dick Grieve. We both feel blessed for the opportunity to help continue the important work and excellent results our congregation has achieved. Your generous support of money, time, talents, and caring has shown people God’s love in:

  • Our congregation...by singing in the choir, acolyting, teaching Sunday school, lay ministering, administering home communion, doing building maintenance, providing food services, serving on altar guild, being a Stephen minister
  • building homes with Habitat for Humanity, mentoring kids at Spangler Elementary, hospital visitations, supporting the OUR Center and the Inn Between, our Boy Scout troop
  • supporting Sky Ranch and the ELCA ministry at CU
  • Our country…annual missions to New Orleans
  • Our world…annual missions to Nicaragua, sending quilts to LWR, and funding LWR disaster relief where needed

Our theme “Blessed to be a Blessing” is particularly apt for our spirit of stewardship and our Lutheran life overall. Our Lutheran DNA recognizes that all we are and have, we have received from God. Having received these gifts dictates we give a portion back to further God’s work. This giving can be in the traditional forms of your money, your time and your talents.

Our stewardship team’s priority is to facilitate all three. We will coordinate the annual pledge drive in the fall and help guide the budgeting process for fiscal 2013. Our near-term focus will be to review the Time and Talent survey in the hopes we can make it even more effective for the individuals who want to get involved and the groups who need your help. If you ever have concerns or suggestions about how your resources are being managed or how the process can be improved please contact either one of us on Stewardship.

Faith in Action

Stories from across our Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

“A Vision for Peace”

It began one evening in 2003 in a candlelit room in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. A young woman named Leymah Gbowee gathered a group of 20 women and invited them to share their stories. They spoke of husbands and sons murdered, sisters and daughters raped and children dying from hunger—the brutal results of the country’s civil war that began in 1989. These women had mourned in silence until Leymah urged them to take action in the name of peace. Soon the group of 20 grew to thousands.

 

Known as “the women dressed in white,” the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace marched, prayed, picketed in silence and demanded meetings with the government and rebel leaders. With Leymah at the helm, their non-violent movement helped to successfully end Liberia’s 14-year civil war.

 

Leymah admits that she never believed her efforts would take her where she is today, including winning the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2011. She was simply trying to secure a future for her six children. “The one way I see us changing this world is by speaking up,” Leymah says. “It’s time to say to the evils of this world, go back to the shadows, because the good is taking light.”

 

The life-long member of the Lutheran Church in Liberia has been an inspiration to ELCA members since 2004 and a frequent speaker at ELCA events. Leymah was also a recipient of the ELCA International Leadership Development scholarship that supported her studies in peace building at Eastern Mennonite University in 2005.

 

“Providing opportunities for education and training are key ways in which we accompany our global companions in their efforts to expand their leadership and institutional capabilities,” says Tammy Jackson, director of the ELCA churchwide program. Says Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, “The ELCA has been blessed by Leymah’s voice.”