ORDER OF SERVICES

ROME: Song Leader: James Taylor Sermonette: Wil Young Sermon: Bill Cowan

CHATTANOOGA: Song Leader: Allen Dance Sermonette: Jeff Clowdus Sermon: Bill Cowan

Sunset: 5:53 PM

CHURCHWIDE NEWS: From the President... On Tuesday this week, Roy Holladay came to the home office and spent the entire day with us. His ability to participate in our weekly Tuesday management meeting and to have extended discussion about church matters made us very happy. Before Roy's stroke on October 10, he had a number of projects that he was energetically working on. One is an MMS research project in which various ministers volunteered to research what the Church has published on various topics such as sacred names, military service, spiritual gifts, voting, tithing and many more. We obviously have far more written on multitudinous subjects than is contained in our Fundamental Beliefs. We will be asking those volunteers to consolidate this information and to write additional articles (where needed) to make these resources more easily available to our ministry and members. Another major project is ongoing training and mentoring of future ministers. We have various methods that we currently use, but we want to streamline them into an integrated program of not only training pastoral candidates, but also providing guidance to the mentor pastors themselves to ensure that they cover the necessary skills a minister will need. A third item that we discussed with Roy was the regional pastor structure in the United States. For over 5 years now, we have been operating with three regions. Vernon Hargrove is soon moving to Oregon from Ohio and will no longer fill that role. Vern has served very diligently as regional pastor of the Central region for the past five years. We felt that this was a good time to rethink the structure of our regions, their number and the role of the regional pastor. With only three regional pastors covering the entire United States, the regions were very large and their personal connection to the pastors and elders was somewhat unwieldy. Roy, Chris Rowland and I came to the realization that now may be a good time to restructure. We hold seven ministerial conferences around the country, so why not let those geographic areas define our new regions? New regions for Ministerial and Member Services So, this week we sent notification of this to our ministry, spelling out this new configuration. The new regions are as follows: Northwest, Southwest, North Central, South Central, Northeast, Southeast and Cincinnati. Steve Nutzman will continue as regional pastor for the Northwest region and Ken Martin will continue as regional pastor for the Southeast region. For the Cincinnati region, we have a large concentration of elders located at or near the home office, so we will be assigning that oversight directly to the Ministerial and Member Services department at the home office. Chris Rowland will serve as regional pastor for that region until a new Operation Manager is appointed. For the four remaining regions, we would like to give these opportunities to pastors, former pastors or retired pastors serving in each region. What does a regional pastor do? Some of the key features of this position are that it is NOT a line function between Ministerial and Member Services and the field ministry. All ministers will continue to communicate directly with the home office; however, there are key functions that the regional pastor can do: - Develop a team concept as a facilitator. - Consult, advise, answer questions, encourage. - Help mediate conflict that is delegated to him. - Advise Ministerial and Member Services. Be a friend and co-worker to each minister in the region and not as one in "authority" over the region. We have sent out an e-mail message to solicit input from all elders in those four regions (North Central, Northeast, Southwest and South Central) to request their nominations for pastors who could fulfill the duties of a regional pastor. After considering their input, the final decision will be made by MMS in consultation with the President. We will seek God's guidance in those decisions, contact the men selected, and then announce the four new regional pastors.-Victor Kubik