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Dear saints,
This Sunday we will celebrate the fact that our wonderful ministry of clothing children with dignity, called Threads, is 20 years old! If you were in Ellis Hall for the forum last week you will have heard how Threads alongside our three other core ministries is an essential element of what it means to be the church in this place and how much our core ministries work synergistically and increasingly so in recent years.
How it all fits together has of course been the theme of our discernment work for the block from the beginning. Last week the executive director of Covenant Community, Christine Love, shared the news that Covenant is ready to begin a new chapter of life in its ministry. Over the past several years, Covenant has expanded its footprint considerably, now offering non-residential support on the road to recovery for thousands through the course of a year through an entity called Recovery Resources Atlanta, Midtown or RAAM for short. While that has expanded, so has the set of programs Covenant offers via the residential program and more is on the way. To facilitate that growth, Christine shared that while Covenant strongly desires to keep its non-residential work on our block into the future, they are looking to move the residential portion of their work to a new location off the block that will better allow them to expand their programmatic footprint.
Covenant's story is the story of All Saints' through the decades. Ministries are birthed, grow and change as we do with them. As we ask how all the pieces fit together on the block and off of it, this Sunday's forum will consider how we can resource those pieces with regard to our buildings and grounds and our financial life as a church.
At the final block forum, on October 27, we will share the various models of the block the steering committee has worked on over the summer in response to what you shared last spring in our months of listening work.
I encourage you to keep on tracking with all of this whether on the block on Sunday or online. The block steering committee and the vestry certainly want to hear your reflections on what you are hearing so they can consider all of that in working on a final master plan for the block which we hope to have ready to present in the new year.
And of course, please do continue to hold this discernment process in prayer as we seek together for the Lord, who has given us the will to do these things, to grant us the grace and power to perform them.
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