Christmas Eve Bixby Reception

You may have noticed that on Christmas Eve from 5:15-6:15 pm, that we are hosting a reception for those interested in the new Bixby location of Faith United Methodist Church. Some of the current launch team members will be there with cookies and punch. They invite you to consider joining them to help us successfully begin another location of our beloved congregation. We will need forty people to commit to helping this location invite the community. Those that participate will still hold their membership with us but they will be welcoming and inviting people to join this new expression of our values. Please invite anyone that you know in the South County area to gather with us for this reception.

We have had two significant things happen in the last week that have reminded me that the Holy Spirit is leading the way in this new location. The first is that the Conference New Faith Communities team wants to send us a church planting pastor to work on the Bixby plant full time. This person will be funded by the conference office for the first three years until a congregation can be built up to support their salary. The second wonderful thing to happen is that the Ghosey ‘s were in Kansas City and went to Church of the Resurrection where Rev. Adam Hamilton preaches. Lowell engaged Adam in conversation after the service and Adam offered to come to Tulsa to help us promote/launch this Bixby location. Adam was a Bixby native growing up and he wants to have a United Methodist church in the community again. Amazing!

We are asking those on the launch team to commit to a minimum of 2 years to help us become stable. Those people who join the launch team will help with hosting the community. We will need people who will coordinate greeters and train the volunteers in hospitality. We will need them to greet and welcome. We will need people who like numbers and spreadsheets to be trained on the rules for finances and how to bring in the offering. We will need people to run tech and sound for the worship service. We will need people to follow up our guests with an email, text or phone call expressing thanks and inviting to the next thing. We will need people to volunteer in the nursery and to host Kid’s Connection. We will need people to lead missions and outreach. And we will need people to sit in the chairs and help warm up the room with friendly faces. Please pray about if you would like to help lead this congregation and let one of us know if the answer is yes by attending the reception or emailing me if you will be out of town. Creating this team is the next step in our ability to move forward. Until the new location has grown enough to have it’s own youth and children’s ministries, we will be inviting those students to participate at our main campus in our wonderful programming on Wednesday nights.

Also we have need of a location in order to meet. Currently we are meeting on Saturday afternoons at the Bixby Library. Hopefully, we will outgrow this space soon. Please pray for God to reveal where we should begin. And if you know anyone who has property or a building in Bixby, let’s reach out and see if it might work for our needs. I am so excited to see what is next for this new location and I ask you to continue to pray for us all doing this important work. The world needs more churches like Faith. The world needs more wonderfully faithful people like you.

love,