What makes EUMC Unique?

Greatest Strength

The Visioning team, in conjunction with congregational responses, have determined the following four as Elma United Methodist Church's greatest strengths:


people - friendly, family open people
pastoral leadership
outreach & financial assets

Greatest Weakness

The second of our questions is 'What is Elma United Methodist Church's greatest weakness?'

We thought about changing the word weakness, but this word most directly gets at what we are looking for. Our prayer is that you won't be discouraged by the question, but you will give just as much thought and prayer to your response. It is easy and comfortable to look at strengths, a little more challenging to look at weaknesses. This work is vital, however, to fostering a vision.

Our Greatest Strength

Over the next several weeks the Vision Team will be asking a series of question to help us as we continue our work. You are invited to respond through this blog or on the bulletin board outside of the Fellowship Hall. We will remind you to make this response mid-week via e-prayer. Please consider just a single word or few words as a response. Our first question to you is:

What is Elma UMCs greatest strength?

Gaining Momentum!

As the Visioning process at EUMC gains momentum, it is apparent that more and more of our business, outreach, ministry, service, and financial elements will be wrapped into the philosophies that are developed. Already the Church Sign Committee has taken pause in it's efforts to be assured that their actions are in concordance with the Vision. I encourage all to share thoughts and ideas with the Visioning Team; a "Three C" plan will provide a sustainable product: Collaborative, Comprehensive, and Collective. The excitement is growing!

Off and Running

We are off and running! Already meeting twice, we have explored the church's history--it's past and present reality. Before we can possibly move forward we have to understand who we have been and who we are. We also have looked at the census facts and general church statistics to get a picture of how things are within our town and across the denomination. Our homework was to dig in to these statistics and each to bring back different ideas/plans for visioning.

Our second meeting focused on what process we wanted to use for visioning. We continued to talk about the past and what all of that data was indicating about our area today. We discussed what surprised us most in regards to the church's history and the census data and we talked about what these facts tell us about the population we serve and need to be serving now. As we narrowed in on how we would go about visioning sharing our homework results, we decided to once again assign homework related to the questions that we wanted to use as the jumping off point for our visioning. A series of questions were shared with each of us asked to consider which are the questions we should/need to ask.

All of this has been biblically based and surrounded in prayer. We remain deeply committed to making this a spiritually centered reality and not just a business plan. Keep following us!

The Vision Team--
Pastor Daven, Keith Zimmerman, Scott Zimmerman, Bev Hornung, Hannah Schuetz, Matt Thormahlen, Dick DeLisle, Tracey Wright