New Life’s vote, and merger next steps

Jan. 23, 2025

By Rev. Rick King

51 marked ballots. 41 Yes. 9 No. One abstention.

Those are the results of New Life’s vote taken last Sunday on forming a joint task force to develop a plan of union for New Life and Falcon Heights Churches to merge and form a new church.

It has seemed a long wait for this since mid-November, but after I heard the results late on Sunday, all of a sudden it became well worth waiting for. For our leaders and me here at Falcon Heights Church, this need for a vote seemed more like a detour than a part of the path God had laid out for us. But one thing others who have been through church mergers have said is: Be ready for surprises.

Future Search

How did we get here? Well, a year ago November, our Executive Board began a Future Search process, looking at the past three and a half years of experiences and what we learned; developing a clear picture of where we are at present, good and bad; and from those, developing five possible future scenarios. The board chose four of those to present at the January 2024 annual congregational meeting.

In the 90 days between last year’s annual meeting and a congregational working session April 20, small teams of people researched the pros and cons of each of these scenarios: “Live within our Means,” “A Center and Church Focused on Seniors,” “A Center and Church Focused on People with Disabilities,” and “Merger with Another Church.”

The FHC vote

Forty people attended the session on April 20, and by the end of that Saturday morning we saw remarkable coalescence around the merger option, which formed the basis of a vote at a special congregational meeting on May 18. We needed a quorum of 31; 56 people showed up, and the vote to pursue merger with New Life Church was unanimous.

There are plans. And then there’s what actually happens. We absolutely need to be good planners—but we also need to get good at pivoting, improvising, and actively waiting on God for guidance and the go-ahead. If we plan well, we’re better prepared to adjust to unforeseen happenings.

New Life’s decision process

That’s what we’ve been doing ever since September-October, when it became apparent to New Life’s leaders that, for whatever reason, their members were not all of the same mind when it came to merger with FHC. We speculated that it was unresolved grief at leaving their building, but it was also a need for more education about the nuts and bolts of the merger and why we were considering it in the first place.

It was with that in mind that our FHC leaders asked New Life’s leaders for a straw poll to indicate where the majority of New Lifers stood on the matter. That happened at a quarterly town hall meeting the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and the indications were that, while they had no people actively opposing the merger, there were people who felt they didn’t know enough yet about the merger itself to support it with confidence.

So New Life’s Session (their church’s board) engaged small groups of congregants in viewing each of the four short podcast-style videos Pastor Riz and I had made late last summer, which deal with four different aspects of the merger decision, as well as the FAQ sheet, which addresses common questions about the merger which you and New Life folks submitted.

Once this process concluded, New Life’s Session voted in December to call a special congregational meeting of their own Jan. 19 to vote on forming a task force with us to develop a merger plan. And that’s what the vote this past Sunday was about.

Come to FHC’s annual congregational meeting THIS Sunday and find out more!