Missing Persons
As part of our tradition in the United Methodist Church, we are supposed to annually go through our membership roll and find out who we’ve lost touch with. It’s important to us to keep in touch with everyone who calls themselves a member of our church so we can provide care and opportunities to grow together in our faith. As the community of God, we definitely want to know what’s happening in the lives of those connected to us!
Often, those we lose touch with have found another church to call home, but sometimes they have left for less than ideal reasons. Perhaps they turned a corner in their life where faith was no longer important to them. Maybe there was a conflict in the church that made them feel like this was no longer the right place for them. Or maybe they just drifted away and we didn’t do a good job of keeping up with them.
Because of that, we want to make every effort to reconnect with those we have lost touch with, to see if we can rekindle that connection. We hope to bring them back into our faith community so we can journey together into a deeper understanding about Christ.
As is our tradition in the United Methodist Church, each year during our annual church conference, we place the names of those we have lost touch with in our report in the hopes of doing just that – reconnecting with them. If we can contact them, we just make sure they would like to remain as a member of our church and see how we can help them out. If not, we lovingly let them go. If after three church conferences we cannot get in touch with them, we remove them from our membership roll. Of course, they are always welcome back, but it helps us to also have a better reflection of who we are and who is in our care.
Unfortunately, we haven’t done that in a long while and we’d like to correct that. We have a list of names of people we are hoping to contact and we will be listing them in our January newsletter, but just wanted to give you a heads up. If you know how we can contact them, by phone, email, or physical address – or all three – please let me or Jill Israels know right away and thank you!
If you’d like a copy of the list and you are a current member of our church, you can also contact Rev. Craig directly and he will email it to you.
