Check In & Prayer 3 members  were present. 2 contacted chair by email. No word from 2.

Approval of Minutes: they were approved.

Treasurer’s report nothing out of the ordinary. Suggestion made that we have a financial report in the next newsletter, and a fundraising appeal in the fall.

            Coordinator’s report Coordinator and treasurer  are working on application for Amazon Smile, which would allow us to receive funds from sales on their website. There is money pending already. Coordinator will promote it when it is complete.

Cruise: Coordinator contacted our travel agent Walt Shaffrick after the last meeting. Four couples are currently registered. He received emails from four other couples who are also interested, which would give us eight couples/sixteen people. The cruise is definitely on. Our membership is usually slow to sign up for events, so there may be more.

Coordinator worked with BR, volunteer web designed on how to use WordPress and updated the website.

He completed the Annual Report for the state of Illinois and sent it in along a $10 fee to keep our non-profit status.

He took some phone calls and emails, and met with a pastor who is new in recovery while he was in New York. It was wonderful to see how meaningful it was to this pastor and was a renewing experience for both. The new member sent the Coordinator  a thank you note. He is interested in cruise but money is an issue.

Coordinator reported on the development of recovery worship at his church. The church funded an intern, and they found one who is also in recovery, who will work with him on launching this service. It will probably begin at the first of the year. He has been doing some writing of literature for the group and has more yet to do. BR, who helps with the website said she’d love to come. Her husband is in the program, so I said if we do a cruise for laity they would certainly be welcome. Coordinator had suggested doing a joint cruise to “kick off” the new group but some of the pastors were reticent to do a joint cruise. It might be possible for this group to offer their own cruise and invite any FRLC members who are interested to join them, while still keeping our own events for our own membership.

                       

Old Business:

            E-newsletter and quarterly newsletter: The Editor reported that he is working on the next newsletter and will have it to the Coordinator shortly. It was suggested that we could include the financial report. Perhaps the coordinator could write up the story of his visit with a new member in New York for the next issue.

           Noon recovery meeting: Attendance has been down the last few weeks. This has happened in past summers also. Coordinator will send out the email reminders of the meeting.  

            LCMS relations possible mailing to DP’S (and bishops): LCMS board member had suggested that we consider doing another mailing to them as there has been a lot of turn over since the last one. The sense of those on the call today is that such mailings are a lot of work and money for minimal results. This idea was tabled.

            2015 Cruise plans: There is an agenda in the brochure, focusing on the 12 traditions. It looks good.

New Business:

            Exploring web conferencing for board meetings: Coordinator brought the idea up to the Board chair  after using the Webex service for training on the website. She contacted the Montana Synod “tech guru”, Colter McCarty, who suggested that if we have ten or less participants and are not sharing a lot of documents either Skype or Google Hangout should work for us. He said “Skype allows for up to 10 people to be on a video/audio call at once. Its a free service, but you can screen share if you want everyone to see the same thing at once. The only problem is that it is free, so you may not have the clearest video quality and the client can crash or stutter occasionally if someone’s connection is interrupted. Google Hangouts are the same, in that you can host 10 people, but it is all done within your browser, no need to download a separate client.”

We decided to try it for three board meetings and consider whether it would work for our recovery meetings. Coordinator and Chair will experiment with it before the next board meeting and send out the invitation to join.

Ideas for web page: Chair attended a Faith Formation workshop on using webpages for Christian Education and came home with several ideas for our Fellowship, which she discussed with BR. They are:

-use a screen shot with the back of heads and the quote “what I cannot do alone, we can do together”

-make a free Animoto video with the sound track introducing our Fellowship. We could use material from our preamble (the languages we share) and quotes from our book to have more a “live” feel about our group without violating anonymity. (note: Ed went to the website and played with it and had a video half done by the end of the meeting). If we don’t want the animated one, perhaps we could do a YouTube video with us talking about FRLC with our faces shadowed.  You can learn more about it playing the video on http://animoto.com/intro/animoto/31. If I can put together more samples to look at, I will send them later.

-we could do a link with a daily recovery devotion so people would have a reason to come back to the site. WordPress may not have the capacity to put it directly on our page, but we could at least link to one.

-we could link our Facebook group to our webpage. Since it is a closed group, they would get a link to request to join the group. BR needs access to administrator information to do this. Chair sent Editor a message. He like the idea, so she sent them each other’s contact information to work on it.

 

NEXT MEETING: WE DECIDED TO SKIP AUGUST AND ENCOURAGE EVERYONE TO THINK ABOUT THE ABOVE IDEAS AND MAKE A COMMITMENT TO ATTEND IN SEPTEMBER.

            THE SEPTEMBER MEETING WILL BE SEPTEMBER 2 (the day after Labor Day) at the usual time. PLEASE PUT IT ON YOUR CALENDAR NOW!!!!          

 

Don’t drink, go to meetings, and may the Lord be with you!

 

Next meeting: September 2, 2:00 pm MDT/3 pm CDT/1:00 pm PDT/4:00 pm EDT