Dear friends,
 The visit of Rev. Richard Higginbottom on Sunday 3rd February was by all accounts a great success. For the sake of those who were not present what happened was that at a shorter than usual service Richard spoke about God's promise to Abraham that all peoples on the earth would be blessed through him. Initially we understood that Richard was going to discuss a questionnaire about the congregation which was mainly statistics but instead the discussion which was carried out in groups was to provide answers to the question "how can we bless people locally, nationally and internationally?" Around 65 people stayed for the lunch, after which Richard made a few comments about the findings of the questionnaire as discussed at the meeting in the manse the previous evening. The next meeting with Richard will be on 26th and 27th April, when some kind of summing up will be given. Meantime a congregational questionnaire will be given to members at church and a community audit will be carried out by the Outreach and Development Committee. You may be interested to know that based on attendance on three consecutive Sundays 6th, 13th and 20th February the average number of adults (16+) at Sunday worship is 70 with 6 young folk up 15. The number of adults attending at least once over the 3 weeks was 126. In order to complete the questionnaire I examined the membership figures for the last 15 years. What I discovered was that although the congregation is undoubtedly declining, the decline has been noticeably less since 2000. We can't rest on our laurels however because while the overall rate of losing members may have eased off we have not been adding to our numbers as much as in earlier years, Remember that whatever conclusions are highlighted as a result of the church consultancy any improvement in our capacity to be an effective congregation in terms of outreach will require effort on the part of us all.
Yours sincerely,
D. Cameron McPherson
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