SPECIAL NOTICE

Preparation for 4 August Church Family Meeting
As you will hopefully have noted by now, we have changed the date of our next church meeting from Sunday 28 July to Sunday 4 August. The meeting will be held at FBC following a shortened Sunday morning service. 
At this meeting we will present our proposed 2024/5 budget for members approval.  The detail of the budget, the full agenda, and the minutes of our last family meeting on 17 March will be sent out in the week commencing 22 July.
 
Call for General Business items
We will have a General Business section at the end of this meeting and would appreciate it if those wishing to raise an item could please send that to leaders@fbc.nz no later than Friday 26th July.  This is simply to ensure any preparatory work that might be needed to respond to the item raised can be done in advance, thus enabling as full a response as possible. 
As usual, we will also open the floor for General Business items on the day of the meeting. However, we will be trialling a few changes in this area.
In response to some valuable feedback received about helping to manage meeting length, we provide the following guidelines regarding General Business items.
 
Things to consider in relation to General Business items
We would ask that those who have questions/comments or feedback which relate to specific individual ministry areas please raise those directly with the relevant ministry team leader, or with Penny (as Executive Pastor) outside the family meeting rather than as a General Business item.
General Business matters in church family meetings are most appropriate when the topic is of interest/importance to the whole FBC church body.  For example, questions relating to vision and direction, our bi-cultural journey, or our values and whānau statements etc. 
We consider that most General Business items should be able to be thought through/identified well before the day of the meeting and thus are able to be raised with the leaders in advance by the 26 July date given. However we do know that things can arise after the deadline for raising General Business items has passed and this is why we do still allow appropriate/relevant items to be raised for consideration in the meeting itself.
 
Other changes
The intention is that a call for General Business items not raised by the 26th July will be made at the beginning of the 4 August meeting rather than at the end as has historically been the case. Any items raised in the meeting can either then be added to the General Business section of the agenda for discussion at the end of the meeting, or the question may be deferred or redirected to another channel for a response, at the Chairperson’s discretion.
In addition, we will be asking all those that wish to speak to come up on to the stage to do so through the microphone.  This is further to feedback received in relation to our recent (30 June) meeting which suggested many found it hard to hear people speaking from within the seating area of the church using the handheld mics.
We hope that this approach will enable our meetings to flow more smoothly and keep to better time!
 
Esther Calley - Meeting Chairperson