From Donna Gustafson, your Director of Elders:

Hi. I want to tell you what the elders are up to, and invite you to help in this.

First let me introduce you to your elders: Michael Cleveland, Heidi Sims, Terry Bagwell, Sharon Steeler, and Susan Hicks.

Elders are spiritual leaders of the church, and we work to meet the spiritual needs of our Saguaro community. A couple things we do is the community prayer in the service, which we also have non-elders do. And when we’re not having to be so cautious due to covid, we do home visits, where we visit people unable to come to church that invite us, and we share communion and prayer with them.

Some new things we’ll be doing this year:

• We’ll start having an elder up at the table at the end of each service, to be able to answer questions, pray with someone needing prayer, welcome new members, and more.

• We’ll be starting some regular prayer gatherings, where everyone is invited to join, and pray together for needs both inside our church and outside of it.

• And there are more possibilities to be explored.

Now this is where you all come in. At Saguaro, we’ve been moving toward having only a few elected elders and having others in the church help with elder duties as well, like we’ve been doing with the Community Prayer. It’s a wonderful way of including others to serve. So today we are here to invite you to join us in serving our church with us, without having to be an elder. We need your help. You don’t have to have experience or special training; we’ll be teaching skills, or, if you know things already, you can share your experience.

So please join us! You’re invited to our elder meeting Sunday, February 13th at 1:00 here at church. Come and check it out and see if this fits for you. It’ll just be an hour so you’ll have plenty of time to get ready for the Super Bowl later that day! We hope you will join us!