We are growing Westlake! We are no longer a small church. When churches grow change happens- Growing pains!!
Traditionally, pastors of yesterday’s small churches did all the hospital visits, care calls and everything in between.
When a church begins to grow it needs to find ways to serve its congregation as well as it did when it was small. How
do we do this? Well even Jesus knew he could not do this successfully by himself. He multiplied himself. That is how
the church began. Who is the church? When we talk about congregational care/ who is supposed to care for whom?
We all are supposed to care for each other. That is exactly what Jesus wants from us, to love one another…. we are
the church; we are supposed to do the work. We already do this pretty well here at WLCC we visit one another when
we are sick, we send cards, we pray, we call one another but what we don’t do is have an organized system of doing
so and when that happens every once in a while we drop the ball and miss someone.
We as a church don’t want anyone to feel forgotten so we have put a team together and this team is amazing… I was
talking to Cindy Hoch about this need. Cindy has made many of these visits single handedly. She had already taken a
course on this as did I, so we knew the importance of it. Cindy and I decided to reread the book we had and asked
Sherry Haase and Gary Sundstrum if they would like to do the same. I told them they could borrow our books, well if
you know these two you would know that they had ordered and read the books before I could even get them the ones
we had. They too saw the importance of this team. So, what is this team and how does it work? Chance is still the
head guy he will still make some visits he will deal with serious issues he will of course deal with any deaths and funerals. His title within this ministry is specialist. My title is the dispatcher. Sounds very unchurchy I know but when
you understand the purpose of it, it makes all the sense in the world. We are lacking communication in our current
way of doing things. Like I said, we care for one another we show love so well, and I believe that is why we are growing
at such a fast rate. But in spite of this love we may be missing someone here or there unintentionally. That is because
of the lack of communication. My job as dispatcher will be to make sure this doesn’t happen. I will be the one you let
know when someone is sick or you yourself are sick or in the hospital. You will let me know when you visited someone
if they want more visitors if they need anything? I will then find someone either on our team or outside of it to do just
that. When you have open communication, we hopefully will not miss a beat.
Our hope is that when one is in need they feel the love from the congregation not just a pastor. I would now like to
introduce the team Cindy Hoch, Sherry Haase and Gary S. are the lay ministers. Lay ministers? What does that
mean? Well to minister is to serve. We will be looking for more of you ministers out there to help us care for this
congregation. Rick warren tells a funny story, He said that his church had so many people to care for one another that
he, the pastor, was turned away from a hospital. His churches had 5 lay ministers show up to the hospital to visit one
of their members and the hospital told him that was the limit. He had too many great Lay ministers! That is exactly
what I see happening here.
If this is something that sounds interesting to you, if you feel you have the gift to care for others, please reach out to
one of us. Or if you feel you have a heart to help people heal from things, please reach out to one of us. When we
have our team completely formed, we will start doing some training and more learning so please reach out to any of us.
-Maggie Sholar