Dear Church Family,

The leadership team and pastoral staff have been meeting and praying about our summer schedule. Starting on Sunday, June 2, your church leadership has unanimously decided to introduce an exciting change that will be beneficial to the entire church body.

During this summer, we will have the opportunity to be together for worship. We view this as an EG-First Family reunion. Beginning on June 2, we are beginning what church leadership deems as a: “Summer Together”. We will have one Sunday school hour at 9 am and one service at 10:30 am. We will celebrate what God is doing together as a family. We will worship together as a family. We will use our gifts together as a family.

As Psalm 96 says, “Sing a new song to the Lord; let the whole earth sing to the Lord”. This excites me! Young people will learn old songs, senior saints will learn new songs. All to glorify God Almighty!

We also want to invite all folks to be part of the summer choir (rehearsal at 7:30 pm on Wednesdays until June 20 of which it will move to 7 pm). We will utilize the talents of all singers and musicians. We will wear nametags to get to know each other. The kids will have a kid’s sermon each week and we will use the Uprise Room and stream the service live for parents and kids who might have the wiggles or just need a break. We will hear from the Kidz Choir, the Ladies ensemble, pray for our youth and kids before their camp weeks, and commission the Ecuador Missions team along with celebrating the mission report Sunday. In short, we’ll do church together. And this leads us all to our 135th Anniversary Celebration on August 11 of which we will be inviting past members and staff, along with city representatives to join us for worship.

We know there will be concerns. Our leadership team has talked at length about some of those concerns and as worship leaders and pastors, we want to assure you that our services this summer will be planned with purpose. We will monitor sound levels intently. We will include worship leaders, instrumentalists, and singers from both services. We will include the kids, youth, and college students to read scripture each week. And most importantly, we will pray for each other as we get to know each other.

For 19 years, I served as the Youth Pastor of this great church. It was an honor and privilege. My only complaint is that I never got to know many of the people who attended the first service. There are so many great people in both services that we simply don’t know, and it really is a disservice to all to never get to know your church family. Every statistic in the world tells us that young people need connections outside their area of the church to build relationships that lead to being a part of the church after high school graduation. We need older people to spiritually adopt our kids. To cover them in prayer. To support them and care for them. We need younger people to be allowed to step up and lead. As 1 Timothy 4:12 says, “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.”

I’m excited about the opportunity to worship together this summer. I’m excited for our congregation to have the chance to apply what we discussed about unity in the church. A healthy church includes all of us making others more important than ourselves for the sake of the Gospel.

Additionally, for those who love hymns and traditional songs, on July 28, we will have an evening where we gather to sing those great songs. We will also be planning a night of worship for those who love contemporary and more modern Christian praise and worship music. I’m looking forward to both times together and hope to see you there!

Join our church leadership team in praying for this special summer as we rejoice that we have such a great church family. Take joy that we strive to put Jesus as the center of all. And as we march towards celebrating our 135th anniversary as a church, let’s be a church that is in tune with each other.

Blessings,

Matt Jackson

Senior Pastor