Trinity Together | April 2017

session summary

At our meeting on March 9, we were reminded of the Forum on Hospitality, which many of you and several folks from other churches attended on the March 17–18. For those interested, audios of the two main sessions are available here.

A congregational meeting has been scheduled for May 14. This will be your chance to meet the current Deacon candidates and vote on them. The Session approved minutes from our previous meeting and formally dismissed from membership a few couples who had moved and joined other churches.

Elder Tom Nolan presented his reasons for requesting for being granted inactive status. We deferred action for time to consider his request.

We approved the budget of $2.6 million for the coming year, with sincere thanks to Church Operations Director Jessica Robinson and the entire Finance Committee for their great work.

Pastor Joe Magri told us about the Charlottesville Church Planting Fellowship, a group formed to encourage church planting locally. We then heard from Tag Tuck, currently assistant pastor at Grace Community Church, about a planned church plant in the Pantops area.

Officer Development Ministry Team member Susan Prindle presented the list of Deacon candidates eligible to stand for election this year: Michael Crawley, Dan Silvers, Porter Wafler, and Guiming Xiao have all successfully completed the training. You can meet them at the meeting on May 14, if you haven’t already.

Also presented were the names of our first crop of Deacon Assistants. Lane Cowin, Sandra Johnson, Emily Massengill, Maggie Stein, and Ben Ward have all agreed to serve the church in this way. They will be commissioned in the near future.

We made some progress on agreeing on a sabbatical policy for church officers and populating a new Stewardship Committee.

The blessings of our Savior be with you all!

Have a question about our Session? Email session@trinitycville.org.

MEET elder john collmus

After graduating from Washington & Lee University and teaching for three years in Buena Vista, VA, John Collmus accepted a job teaching science at Heritage Christian School in Charlottesville and began work toward a master’s degree at UVA. His wife, Jacqui, had been part of a PCA church in Lexington, so upon their move here she was interested in trying out Trinity, which was then meeting at Jack Jouett Middle School. From the first Sunday John and Jacqui both knew they had found their church home. After three years teaching at Heritage, John moved to teach at Henley Middle School while he worked on a second graduate degree. In 1988 he became assistant headmaster for the Covenant School. By this time their first two children, Heather and JP, had been born and John was serving as a deacon at Trinity.

The next year John was nominated to serve as an elder. Since being ordained in 1990 he has served on each of the committees of the Session, taught Sunday school, and for the last five years has represented the Session on the commission overseeing the Hope Church plant. John has been active with our global missions program, serving on that committee and making short-term trips to visit Trinity missionaries in Central America and Africa. He also began leading groups of Covenant students on summer trips, and for the last ten years he has taken groups to Nicaragua to visit the growing work founded and led by Charles and Sarah Kaye.

In the early ‘90s John and Jacqui’s two youngest children, Laura and David, were born. All four of the Collmus children were active participants in the Trinity children’s and students’ programs. Heather is now the mother of three and married to a naval reservist who is preparing for the ministry at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. JP is a Navy pilot currently on deployment, married, and the father of a two-year-old. After teaching elementary school for several years in Central America, Laura is back in Charlottesville enjoying her work as a Spanish translator with Crutchfield. David is a Navy corpsman stationed at Fort Bragg, NC, where he is training in advanced combat medicine.

John helped develop the Bible curriculum at Covenant and six years ago left administration and returned exclusively to teaching as the 11^th grade Bible teacher. After all her children were launched Jacqui turned a long-time hobby into her successful business as an event florist. In addition to travel John enjoys carpentry and other projects such as landscaping, which he and Jacqui can do together.

John is encouraged by the growth he has seen in small groups at Trinity that focus on a variety of ministries, and he sees this as a strength on which we can continue to build. He is also enthusiastic about the gift-based mission teams, which he wants to see move forward to provide more opportunities for short-term service on the global mission field.

FINANCIAL UPDATE

BY BOB LUCK, CHAIR, FINANCE COMMITTEE

Donations to Trinity Are Steady

As we wrap up the first quarter of 2017, we are preparing our financial reports and tracking overall giving to Trinity in comparison to prior years. We have a 2017 giving target of $2.6 million—an increase of $100,000 over 2016.

The news is good. Through March 31, 2017, our income is tracking very closely with 2016 giving. We are thankful to see the congregation continuing to be faithful in supporting our shared work at Trinity. We have received $463,000 as of the end of March, which is about 1% ($6,000) more than at the same point in 2016. Thank you for making tithing to Trinity a priority in your weekly or monthly budgets.

We will continue to keep you updated as we move through the year together. We all need to grow our giving in 2017, and you should expect to see additional opportunities to learn about and engage in Christian stewardship during the coming months. We are grateful for you and all the ways that you represent God’s bountiful provision for Trinity—through giving of your time, your talents, and your treasure.

UPCOMING EVENTS