Mission and Service … Spring 2016
Our ABWM mission theme calls us to See the Beloved Community.
Romans 12:1-2 (The Message) tells us:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.
Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Society often seems to try to divide us from one another. News media and politicians play on our fears. Television shows and movies often rely on stereotypes to play on the viewers’ emotions. Entire neighborhoods are classified as “good” or “bad.”
The world would have us segregated, fearful, distrustful, suspicious.
Yet God calls us to something not only different—but transformative. We are transformed in our relationship with Jesus Christ, restored to right relationship with God. We are transformed in our relationships with one another. We transform our society as we take one another into our hearts and experience one another’s experiences as our own.
(The above was adapted from our ABWM national website.)
As we look around us and see the flowers opening, the leaves on trees emerging, birds singing and people getting out more often to enjoy the warmer weather, can we open our hearts to God’s call for us to reach out and transform the world with His love?
Can we reach out to others who may seem different, from us, outsiders, hopeless, lost and share ourselves with them? Can we share God’s love, encouragement and forgiveness?
In so doing we allow God to see us, melt us, mold us- really transform us- so that others may be transformed. In our busy world, can we fix our attention on God to quickly respond to His call as the passage from Romans tells us? If we take that step to be open to God and let Him really see us and use us, then He will bring out the best in us.
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2015-16 ABWM NYS Project Update
In our state we received $6,600 towards the national ABWM project to be more effective by creating new methods to reach out, engage, and communicate with our diverse constituency and to develop leader and member training and resources.
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New ABWM NYS Special Project for 2016-17
This year our project is a two-fold one for ABWM NYS.
Do we need a project for ourselves? YES!
Imagine a state convention with no workshops, music, Bible study leader, mission speaker, reports, insurance, program books. That’s only part of what the general fund supports.
Our president would not be able to represent NYS at national ABWM events.
There would be no mailings, no newsletters from officers, no Witness newsletter, no website, no auditing of our finances.
These are all financed by our General Fund. Giving to the fund has been down for the past few years and at one point was critically low.
Our goal for this part is $7,000.
All monies received above the $7,000 goal for the General Fund will go to our newly created ABWM NYS Conference/Retreat Scholarship Fund.
Have you ever wanted to go to our national ABWM conference or area retreat or maybe the ABWM NYS Convention, but funds were low? This will help enable women in our state to attend national, state, and area ABWM conventions, conferences and retreats by providing scholarships for them.
Our dream is to raise another $7,000 for this fund.
It’s time to move forward and get more women involved. This project can be the first step. Please download the 2016-17 ABWM of NYS project brochure here.
We are the next step. Reach out to others you never imagined and let God bring out the best in you.
The flyer for our new project is included in this issue of A Witness and is also available on our website.
If you need a speaker or workshop leader for a church or association event I am always willing to travel to your meeting. Please feel free to contact me by email at mjstrauss21(at)gmail.com
