We invite all of you to attend our spring Heart of Texas Association meeting, to be held on Saturday, April 24th beginning at 10 am on Zoom. Worship, which begins the meeting, will be led by clergy from our South Texas cluster (Faith Church—that includes us!).
One major part of our business will be to help people understand our possible participation in a Unified Fitness Review Committee at the Conference level, which would transfer most of this extremely time-consuming work from our Association Committee on Ministry to the proposed Conference committee — if we decide to go in this direction. We already offered some explanation of this possibility earlier, but our aim at this meeting would be to help those who attend to understand the change more fully (as the process to make this change is fairly complex) and possibly vote to participate.
We also anticipate having up to three Ecclesiastical Councils. One, which has already been announced, will be to grant Rev. Amelia Fulbright, who is currently a Baptist minister, Privilege of Call in the United Church of Christ, meaning that, if approved, she would be able to search for a ministry call in the UCC and gain full ministerial standing with us. Our Committee on Ministry will be meeting in April with two other candidates.
If these candidates are approved, we will be announcing their Ecclesiastical Councils in advance of our Association Meeting. We also will be sending out the papers the ministry candidates have written to our churches to allow reading before the Meeting. It will be important to have a quorum of attendees from a majority of our churches to allow voting on our candidates We hope to finish midday and encourage you to join us.
Blessings in Christ,
Liz Nash, Association Minister
