EVERYONE CAN CONTRIBUTE

TOGETHER IN CHRIST,
​WE grow, thrive and heal

Jesus said: “Therefore do not worry, … but strive first for the kingdom of God
and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matt. 6:31,33)


​Dear sisters and brothers in Christ, 
Grace, mercy and peace in the name of Jesus. Amen. 
I want to let you all know that you are going to be OK.
I want to reassure you that St. Paul’s is going to be OK.
I anchor this determined confidence on the rock of our faith, our Lord Jesus Christ. By the grace of God, I am confident that this community has the resources needed to not only survive this present disruption, but to thrive, grow and bring healing to our neighbors far and wide. Yet to live out the full potential of this vision requires each of us, from the oldest to the youngest, to work together to carry out the Christ’s mission, using the gifts, talents and abilities that the Spirit has already endowed us with.

Christ's mission is our mission
The mission of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church is to share the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed. We carry out this mission across two fronts. First, the good news is shared within the fellowship of members. Second, we share the good news as we serve our neighbors. Circumstances have considerably altered the conditions under which we live out this mission, but the mission God has charged us to carry out remains unchanged. We have made some preliminary changes to the way we function both in fellowship and outreach so that we can stay on mission while we respond to these new challenges.
    We assess our priorities and celebrate our successes according to how faithfully and effectively we carried out Christ’s mission. This ability to remain focused on mission while we adapt to changing conditions has shown the resilience of the St. Paul’s fellowship and its leadership. Staying mission-focused and tending to those gifts of the Spirit that foster resilience will be key to this community thriving, growing and healing. 

Mission-focused leadership at work
God has blessed this fellowship with talented and dedicated leadership. For some time now, our leadership team had been engaging the process of adapting to new conditions and responding to new challenges while staying focused on God’s mission, but since the dramatic and sweeping changes brought about by the advent of novel coronavirus this process has become the top priority of this community’s leaders.  

• The church council has increased the frequency of our meetings. The council convenes online every other week to assess our current situation and to plan, respond and prepare for what comes next. The council is currently studying how we might start to gather in-person for worship while remaining faithful to our goals of slowing the spread of the virus and protecting the vulnerable. Since not all of us will be willing or able to gather in person for some time, the council is planning with sensitivity to maintaining the unity of our fellowship and the accessibility of all in our worship. 
• Our servant ministry team is working hard to expand our capacity to serve our neighbors through our food pantry, responding not only to an increase in need, but adapting our offerings to better meet that need. We have increased the frequency of pick ups from Food Banks, strengthened our community partnerships, and started the process to make bulk purchases of food items through various distributors. 
• Our care team has been reaching out to members of the congregation to check in and offer connections and support.
• Our worship and music team has met to plan for ways to include more voices and faces in our weekly worship. 
• Our Sunday school teachers have organized Sunday school on Zoom, and are starting to talk about options for Vacation Bible School this summer. 
• Our finance team has met to realign and adjust our mission budget to better reflect our current financial situation (see below). 

As your pastor, it is my driving purpose to help you develop a deep and resilient faith so that you can enjoy and share in a life-giving, life-sustaining relationship with Jesus Christ. Outside of Saturday and Sunday worship, I have set up a variety of ways for us to connect to each other to encourage and strengthen each other in our faith in Christ. 

• Nightly bedtime prayers at 9:00 p.m. 
• Two weekly Bible studies: Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. and Thursday at 7:00 p.m. 
• One-on-one pastoral conversations on Zoom 
• Group meetings to share our stories and to help care and support each other. 

In addition to these, I am always available for you to reach by phone, text or e-mail. If you are feeling frightened, uncertain or overwhelmed, do not hesitate to contact me. I am here to help you develop a deep and resilient faith so that you can enjoy and share all the benefits that flow from a life-giving relationship with Jesus Christ. That’s why I get up and go to work each morning. 

Both within the fellowship and out in our community, St. Paul’s leaders and members are pouring themselves into the work of carrying out the mission Christ has entrusted into our care: to share the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed. Through their continued leadership and our continued participation, I am confident that God will empower us to thrive, grow and heal. I thank God for them! I thank God for the resources with which God has blessed us! I thank God for you! 

Our Financial Situation
First, let me thank you for your the inspiring way you continue to support this ministry. The commitment and generosity of this fellowship is simply amazing. I praise God that God has given you such warm and generous hearts. Thank you! 
    This pandemic has disrupted everything about our life together, including the budget we established at the beginning of the year. For the past few years, we have planned on about a third of our income coming from rent. Since we closed the ministry center to all gatherings, we have been unable to collect that rent, and we anticipate receiving very little income from this source until the fourth quarter of 2020, when it is our hope that the Ken Shirk Childcare Center will resume operations. Our financial team has adjusted our budgeted spending accordingly and will work to keep spending down in an attempt to close the gap, but even with modified spending this disruption in income has created a deficit in our 2020 budget that we believe will be close to $38,000. 
    Nevertheless, fear not! This is a time to act, not to engage in catastrophic thinking. By the grace of God, this fellowship is resourced for mission, and there are many options before us to help us change, adapt and overcome this disruption. Remember, we are called to share the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed, and we use the resources that we share and gather to sustain our work in that mission. We are currently able to sustain the mission, and we are confident that we will be able to thrive and grow in the years to come, but to live out the promise of this vision requires the participation and ongoing contribution of all our members. 

Community Meetings: Tuesday, May 26, at 7:00 p.m. and Wednesday, May 27, at 7:00 p.m. Please attend one of our community meetings on Zoom where we will examine the numbers, discuss our plans and share a vision for St. Paul’s future together. Look for the Zoom log in information in your e-mail. 

What Can You Do, Financially?
You can help close the budget gap for 2020 and lay the groundwork for a strong 2021. We also understand that some of you might be experiencing greater levels of financial stress than before. If that is the case, please look for ways that you can use gifts other than money to sustain the mission. Yet, for those of us whose income sources have remained stable, please consider these three ways you can act to sustain Christ’s mission here at St. Paul’s. 

• Increase your level of giving. As you rework your household budget or spending plan try to increase the amount you give to St. Paul’s each month. Start small, maybe a one percent increase in your monthly giving. Consider a large one-time gift, perhaps tithe (10 percent) or more from the stimulus money you receive from the federal government. As a bonus, provisions in the CARES Act provide incentives for increased giving at this time for those who itemize AND for those who take the standard deduction.
• Focus your giving on the Current Fund. The deficit that we see in our budget is only related to the current fund budget lines. Our two other budget lines: Local Mission and Building Fund are well resourced. Our Food Pantry has been blessed to be endowed with the funds needed to effectively respond to the increasing need.  We are grateful for the generosity of the people of St. Stephen, Edison, who included the work of the Food Pantry in their legacy plan, for the support local partners such as the Elks, Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, and St. Francis Episcopal Church, and for a grant from the New Jersey Pandemic Relief Fund. As a member of St. Paul’s, the best way to support the food pantry now is by donating food and redirecting your financial gift to the current fund. Remember, we only purchase food with food pantry designated dollars, we pay for space, staff and support out of our current budget. 
• Give your offering electronically … and make that gift a recurring gift. One way to decrease the risk of exposure to the virus is to cut down on the number of items our counter must handle each month. Electronic gifts cleanly transfer money to sustain our mission, and designating an electronic donation as a recurring gift allow you to make a plan to be generous and allows the technology to carry out your plan. 
• Ask for help. If you are experiencing financial distress, please talk to me as soon as possible. Not only are there resources available to help, but we can work together to develop a plan that will lessen the stress, ease the burden and turn your focus toward solutions and away from your problems. 

To give a gift or to set up a recurring gift, visit St. Paul’s Website: http://www.stpauls-edison.org/online-giving.html. To change a recurring gift, however, you will need to log into your account, delete the old recurring gift and set up a new one. It may take a little more time to make this adjustment, but it will be help us immensely.

What Else Can You Do?
In addition to increasing your financial commitment to the mission and ministry of St. Paul’s there are a number of other things you can do to share the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed. What’s more, these things are accessible to everyone. 

• Pray. In Lent, we focused our attention on the Lord’s Prayer. Make that prayer and contemplation of the essential things Jesus directs us to pray part of your daily life. It makes a perfect prayer to pray as you wash your hands. Use your worries and fears as motivation to turn to God in prayer. Jesus said that we cannot change anything by worry, but we can harness our worry to change fear into faith, worry into active love, and prayer is at its core the spirit-inspired conversation between God and God’s children. Finally, let me suggest two other prayers for this community to sink deeply in our hearts: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer and the mission-focused prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. These two prayers lead us to ask God to help us accept what we cannot change so we can focus our energy on what we can change and act to help others thrive, grow and heal. 
• Volunteer. There remain many ways you can participate in the life of this congregation.

• Even as you stay at home, you can serve as a reader in worship, and you can sing in the choir. Stefeny and I will work with you to record your voice reading or singing, or to record you playing your instrument. We can then assemble all the pieces and make them part of our Sunday worship.
• You can volunteer at the Food Pantry. You can serve on one of the teams that are working on organizing our community to thrive in a time such as this.
• You can help keep our grounds beautiful or mow the lawn or help tend our garden beds. You can organize Zoom meetings or hold Facebook live gatherings for various groups in the community. 

• Care for others. One of the things that makes St. Paul’s so special is the way that people in this fellowship love and care for one another. Please, remember to call your friends, and if you’re adventurous, use your directory to call those people in the fellowship you do not know as well. Check on neighbors while you work in your yard or walk through your neighborhood. You might even turn your exercise walks into prayer walks where you pray for people you see or meet in your neighborhood. 
• Invite your friends. It has never been easier to invite your friends to join in worship, study, prayer and fellowship at St. Paul’s, and because our meetings are online, your invitations don’t have to be limited to just this area. Invite friends and family from across the country and around the world into a relationship with Jesus Christ. 
• Take an emotional risk (while staying physically safe). For some of these ways of serving, you can participate by just responding to invitations and announcements that are included in e-mails and posted on social media, but let me also encourage you to take the initiative and follow the Spirit’s lead in your life. Take a risk to be the friend, the sister, the brother that so many people are longing to have. When you reach out to another person, you not only break through the loneliness of social isolation for that person, but for yourself as well. Be brave to be the answer to someone’s prayer today.

When we put God’s mission before our eyes, when we turn our fears and worries into prayers, and when the Spirit stirs us up to new and creative visions of God’s kingdom right here in our midst, there is no limit to the ways this fellowship will thrive, grow and be part of the healing of God’s world in Jesus’ name. God’s grace comes to us as a mission challenge to share the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed, in any and every situation, under all circumstances. 
    You are going to be OK. We are going to be OK … in fact, we’re going to thrive. By God’s grace this community will continue to share the good news of Jesus so that we and those we love and serve will grow, thrive and heal, as well.  On behalf of the St. Paul’s church council and leaders … 

Peace, 
Rev. James Krombholz, DMin, pastor