Catalyst 2023-2024 Preview by Connie McNeill

Here at Second Baptist, we use a two-year budgeting cycle that we call our Catalyst Ministry Plan. We are nearing the end of our current plan and will begin a new ministry plan cycle in January 2023. This ministry plan will last for two years: 2023 and 2024. This means a couple of things for all of us:

— Starting in September, you’ll begin hearing more about Catalyst 2023-2024. Our emphasis is “Imagining Our Future Together.”

— In October, we’ll invite you to commit to what you will contribute financially to Catalyst 2023-2024.

— In November, we’ll vote to approve the Catalyst 2023-2024 Ministry Plan.

We are living in unprecedented times. We are at a five-hundred-year mark in church history (in the larger church, not just here at Second). We are also in the decade of the ‘20s, which has been marked by great change in most centuries. We find ourselves on the threshold of leaving a transformative time of a global pandemic and entering the new “new” in our lives.

We believe that this creates unprecedented opportunities to join the work of God. We believe the Spirit will help us imagine what our future can be and what that looks like as we do it together. We believe we will become aware of new pathways to work with God’s Spirit. We believe it is time for a fresh Spirit from God to move through us—each and every one of us.

Hopefully, this preview of Catalyst 2023-2024 will begin the work in you of discerning how God is leading you to participate in giving to support this work.

Someone asked recently if I thought people would be reluctant to commit this fall. I have continued to think about my answer to them, and I want to tell you what I said.

“If people will not let fear keep them from giving out of their faith, no, I don’t think they will be hesitant. If fear looms larger than faith, then yes.”

May we be people of faith and not fear.