My (Im)perfect Mom, Imagining God, and a Lot of Details (not in that order)
Heads Up – this email has several important pieces of information in it, both about this Sunday and about longer range matters. If possible, take the time to read the whole thing.
Summer Finances: Justin (our Leadership Team Finance Person) updated our team on Wednesday evening about the current state of our finances and I wanted to pass that along to you. As you know, in summer our attendance goes down, and so does our giving. But our expenses don’t vary much, so that’s a challenge. In dollars and sense terms, we should have about $10,000 in the bank heading into summer if we don’t want to run out before people return in September. We’re at about half that, so we need to raise around $5000 by July 1st.. If giving is part of how you sustain The Table, now would be a good time to act. As always, a huge shout out to the Leadership Team and in particular to Justin for their care and attention to this part of our life together.
Kids Table on Mothers Day: Between the unforeseen and previous commitments, we don’t have anyone to lead the Kid’s Table crew this Sunday. Short version – it’ll be a parent co-op for one week only, so if you bring your littles please keep that in mind. Kids are always welcome to stay in the “big people” gathering, of course. You know best.
Defining The Table: We’ve been talking in our gatherings this past while about what we can do to help people that are looking for this kind of community (what kind of community is this anyway?) find their way to The Table. General consensus – The Table can be a bit hard to define. As we’ve had these conversations, it has seemed to me that the best way to describe a place like The Table is to have the people that comprise the community talk about what it is to them. A while back we constructed a “word cloud” about this, which we will put up on our web site. I’ve included it below for inspiration, but I think we might benefit by augmenting it somewhat. So…if you want other people to get a glimpse of what your experience of The Table is like, this is your chance. Write a sentence (or a few) that basically says, “To me, The Table is….:”, and email it to me. Sign it in whatever way you are comfortable having put up online. If that’s your full name, your first name, your initials, your “X” – you decide. Since I have no idea what the response to this will be, I don’ t want to make any promises about what will appear on the website and what won’t, but I can tell you that my personal goal would be to have everyone that took the time to respond be represented.
Summer Venues: More to follow on this, but for now be aware that we will be at Creative Manitoba for the rest of May, then on to the castle at the U of W for most of June. Since some alternative venues are necessary (Fringe takes over our space at Creative), our goal as a Leadership Team is to try to do this in “chunks” so we’re not somewhere different every week. It looks like we’ll be back at Creative in August, but watch this space for the details.