This past weekend our family had the opportunity to travel up to Columbus, Ohio to get some things set up for our new life there. While it was great to set up our home, hang out with some new friends, and get to know the neighborhood a bit, the highlight of the trip was getting to visit our new church congregation, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. While at St. Paul’s we got to meet the people who have been calling, emailing, and praying. It was a blessed time. During church we heard about the current financial state of the church, the current state of our school, and I got to speak with all the staff I will be working with next year. On the way back to North Carolina, Huong and I reflected a lot on the trip and the work we have been called to. All that work, which we are genuinely excited about, also lead us to identify many areas we can be praying for our church and school. I would like to share these areas here with you, my friends and family, hoping you will join us in praying these prayers and asking for God’s will to be done. Here are the areas we are praying for:
State of Our Church
Finances: The church is currently coming up around $1,000 short a week in the general offering. We even received a cutoff notice recently, which we ended up using emergency funds to pay. General funds include our pastor’s humble salary, building upkeep, and salaries of other church workers (not a bloated list of unnecessary positions; I promise).
Vicars: Our current Vicar and his wife return to school in July. We will be getting one more Vicar for next year, and we are praying that they may be a great help to our school situation described below.
State of Our School
Outgoing Leaders: Enrollment is good and we have been blessed to have had the same principal for the last 10 years. He & his wife, who was our kindergarten teacher, have accepted a call to a WELS Lutheran school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Please pray for the principal and his wife that they can find a home soon, and that they get through their goodbyes alright. There’s surely going to be a lot of wet eyes.
Incoming Teachers: We have looked throughout all the WELS schools in the USA to identify teachers that may be a good fit in Kindergarten or 1&2, but the teachers we’ve called to this point have all prayerfully returned their calls. This means they are choosing to remain where they currently are, and we are looking to fill two vacancies via new graduates. Since it is highly unlikely that we will fill both openings from graduates as their are twice as many vacancies as graduates, we may need to get creative on how we will fill our openings.
Returning Teachers: Please pray for our returning teachers. They are all quite young, but now have one more year of valuable experience under their belts. Please pray that their summers would be restful and that they would be able to take a good break void of school year stresses past or future.
Parting Thoughts: I know this is a lot of detailed information, but I wanted to share it with my friends and family here. Many regularly ask how you can pray for us, and here is your answer. Please know that all of this information is public and can be found on the WELS website, in our church bulletin, and it can be heard straight from the church’s mouth on Sundays. None of this is confidential information. Those that know me know I like to be direct and to the point. So here it is.
Huong and I certainly cherish your prayers as our family gets ready to serve the school and church community of Columbus, Ohio. If you’re ever in the area, please reach out and come visit. I’ll put some coffee on for ya.
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Keith
