A Message from our Leadership Team: Edgemont In-person Worship, February 21st, 2021

Good afternoon Edgemont Family!

This past Tuesday, February 9th, our leadership team met to discuss the pandemic situation in our community, the information provided by many of you in our questionnaire, and how we feel we should move forward with in-person, in-building worship. We decided that on February, 21st, 2021, we will resume in-person, in-building worship. With the situation improving in our community and more beginning to receive the vaccine, as well as the guidance provided by our questionnaire, we believe that we can begin worshiping in our sanctuary safely. Many of you indicated that you were not ready to come back to worship yet and that you wanted to wait for wider distribution of the vaccine; I want to affirm your choice to do that. We will still have our online worship service available for everyone not ready to come to the sanctuary yet.

Now for the particulars. Our worship service will begin at 10:00 a.m. on February 21st. We will start with just worship as we begin, with nursery available, and will build back in any classes as we go. Our prerecorded, online worship service will continue to be available at 11:00 a.m. on YouTube. As we come back, our in-person worship service will have preaching and music. On some of the music we will have a singer or two, but we will hold off on full congregational singing for a bit longer. We will continue to ask everyone who attends to wear a mask, sanitize hands as you enter the narthex, and keep social distancing by using the signs for which pews are open. We will be sanitizing the sanctuary before and after worship.

Along with the return of in-person worship, on February 17th from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. we will have a Drive-Thru Ash Wednesday Service. For that service, I will be at the sanctuary with a mask and gloves on. I will have our ashes and anointing oil mixture. You can drive through the path between the sanctuary and the education building. When you drive up, I will pray and I will take a q-tip, make a cross on your forehead or hand, and then throw that q-tip away before going to the next person. We hope you will join us for this special service. If you are not comfortable with an in-person service yet, we will also have a prerecorded service that will be uploaded to YouTube earlier in the day.

Finally, many of you have expressed an interest in an outdoor worship service as the weather improves. As we get into the month of March, we will work on making this a priority for our in-person worship experience.

Thank you all for what you continue to do to support the people and ministry of Edgemont UMC. Each one of you is a great blessing to our church and our community and we are thankful that God has called us to be together at Edgemont.

Edgemont Leadership Team and Pastor Henry

Tim Corley Lynne Rieff Susie Martin

Brenda Tease Will Reade Jennie Corley

Mitchell Moor Ronnie McNutt Betsy Rainer

Jason Howard Jeanne Childers Ted Danielowicz