Church Council

Meeting Minutes of May 20, 2010
Recorder: Andy Ellis

Present: Council members Bob Morse, Nancy MacLean, John McCall, Chris Keiter, Phil Whitney, Roger Addor, Debra Andrews, Elsa Peters, Chris Dow, Dave Allen, Matt Early, Sally Hinckley, and Andy Ellis. Guests: Margaret Thibodeau.

Chris Keiter opened the meeting at 6:30 p.m. and Andy read an opening prayer.

April Minutes were reviewed and accepted with a few small changes regarding the list of people that met with website vendors regarding our redesign proposal (see below). Also, there had been discussion in the April meeting about utilizing Constant Contact as a mass email service, but it was decided that we will wait to see how website redesign might address this capability before committing to Constant Contact.

Minister’s Time: Elsa discussed her plan to write a book, and the possibility of making time in her weekly schedule this summer to focus on writing. She may spend one day a week writing from a coffee shop but will be available for pastoral duties and will post some specific hours when she will be available in her church office.

John spoke of some personal news items, including his closing on a new condo in Dow’s Woods, and Ben’s impending return home from 5 months in Scotland. Also, John will not be attending the June Council meeting because it coincides with South Portland’s comprehensive planning committee meeting/workshop. John has been invited to attend this meeting and to participate in the vision process for the city, representing the religious community.

Fundraising Approvals: The Council approved a request from the Food Pantry for their “extras” sale and added it to the list of pre-approved annual fundraising activities. The Council suggested that outdated food should not be sold.

Request to Move Date of Homecoming Sunday: Margaret Thibodeau of the EG and F Team visited the meeting to discuss the possibility of moving the date of Homecoming Sunday from the 12th of Sept. to the 19th. The EG and F Team has had some difficulty in the past getting volunteers together to prepare for Homecoming Sunday and the start of Church School and thought that an extra week would be helpful to the organizing process. Chris will reach out to the Teams for feedback on whether they think that Homecoming Sunday is still effective as an opportunity for the congregation to learn about and sign up for different groups in the church, and if they would have an issue with changing the date. The Council did not have an issue with changing the date. There was some discussion about Sept. 12th being a Rally Day, instead. A decision on all this will be made at the June 17th Council meeting.

Church Vision Statement Update: The Council discussed some of the compiled results of the Vision Statement survey project and some of the suggestions of the subgroup (Elsa, Dave, Chris Dow, and Debra) that were created to showcase the most popular concepts and ideas. The Council discussed several aspects of these statements, noting that the word “God” did not appear in any of the suggestions. There was also some discussion of adding the word “open” into the statement to convey the idea that the congregation is open and affirming. It was decided that there would not be enough time between the Council meeting and the Annual Meeting of the congregation to decide on a statement and bring that to the congregation for meaningful review. The Council will continue to discuss and each member will bring a suggested version to the next Council meeting in June. Email them to Elsa ahead of time.

Volunteerism Ideas: The sub-group on volunteerism (Sally, Phil, and John) reported from their email conversations and suggested that it might be worthwhile to consider utilizing a nominating committee process again. Some Council members had served on the nominating committee prior to the change in governance structure, and thought it worked well. John suggested that one benefit of a nominating committee is “personalizing the ask.” Currently there are openings on several of the Teams that need to be filled, so it would appear that the current method of Teams finding their own members may not be working as well as originally hoped. Dave suggested that we should focus on volunteerism as well as nominating and find ways to help members (particularly new members) find ways to contribute to the life of the congregation. Phil offered to make some calls to members who have joined in the past year to see if there were ways that they would like to become more involved. Discussion of ways to encourage volunteerism will continue at the June meeting.

Website Redesign: Chris, John, Dana Wiggins, Aaron Scifres, and Guy Gledhill have been involved with the Website Redesign project. They have met with and reviewed two vendors who could do the work. The vendors and their proposals are very different from each other, but the end result of either one should be a dramatic improvement from where we are today. They are characterized as follows:
• A less established company; uses the open-source tool Wordpress; project cost of about $3,500 and annual costs of about $150; tool is less tightly integrated and we would need to fill in more of the content (we have people ready to help with this).
• A more established company; uses proprietary tool Aptuitiv; project cost of about $7,000 and annual costs of about $540; tool is more tightly integrated and we would need to fill in very little content
After some discussion, the Council approved going forward with the less expensive alternative, primarily due to the lower cost. Funding would come from a $2,000 contribution which has already been received, additional donations that will be requested, and the balance coming from the Loraine Merrill Cabinet fund.

Annual Meeting of Congregation: Chris, John and Elsa discussed order of items and speaking assignments for the meeting.

Maine Conference Annual Meeting: The meeting will take place June 11, 12, and 13 in Farmington. Our Church has a number of open spaces, and as of the discussion, only John, Andrea, and Elsa were planning to attend.


The meeting adjourned at 8:35 p.m.

Next Meeting: June 17, 2010
Opening/Recorder: Bob Morse