FRLC Board Meeting Minutes
Thursday, March 5, 2019
1:00 pm MST/2:00 pm CST/12:00 pm PST/3:00 pm EST

Present: Tom, Bohdan, Melanie, Ed, Karen

Check In & Prayer and Approval of Minutes from Previous Meeting were skipped do to staggered arrival times.

Treasurer’s report: We have $326.66 in the FRLC membership account, the Center of Addiction & Faith account has $979.70, and the Addiction and Faith Conference has $9,865.45. A gift was given as seed money for the new ministry to the Conference account. Ed has a small office for this work, funded out of that seed money.

Coordinator’s report Not much progress has been made on the website yet. The 501C3 application is underway, and the board for the Center is nearly completed. One of the board members is Tim King, author of “Addiction Nation: What the Opioid Crisis Reveals about Us”.
He will also be the keynote speaker for next Addiction & Faith Conference. He is also involved with Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation and is encouraging them to collaborate with us. He has dates for next Conference and is working with the hotels. Hilton has offered us a better price, particularly on the food. They have a better menu also. It would be a nice venue and the space would work well. Ed is waiting to hear back from Doubletree as he has an established relationship with them but it doesn’t look like they can meet the food price. Food was 25% of the total bill at previous events.

The speakers for the A & F Conference are lined up. Tim King will speak the first night on “Addiction Nation, Everyone’s Problem.” The second day there will be one speaker and one break out session in morning with two breakout sessions in the afternoon. The morning speaker is Native American and will talk about addiction and race. The evening speaker will be Sonja Waters, an Episcopal priest, who wrote a book on Addiction and Pastoral Care, which will be the topic of her talk. She is in recovery and does some great theological moves in her reflection. The speaker on the final morning will be Kal Rissman, author of “Knowledge to Power: Understanding & Overcoming Addiction”. Yolanda, the woman who gave her testimony about the impact of our first conference will preach at the closing worship. Ed is pleased about the line up of speakers and feels like he has a great start on the event for February of 2021.

Last year there was a person from TLC who applied for many grants for the conference but didn’t get any of them funded. Ed has gotten her connected with a grants person from Interest Curve Global. He will coaching her on the smaller, easier grant applications and will work on the larger ones himself.

Drew Brooks, of Faith Partners invited Ed in on a project with Human and Health Services for the state of Louisiana. The Faith Partners model is struggling there in the African-American churches, with issues about clergy vulnerability and laity taking leadership in the church. This ties into the conversation about opening FRLC to clergy in recovery beyond the Lutheran church. Ed spoke with an FRLC member who thought that expanding would be great but there may be a need for affinity groups within the larger umbrella. Ed is thinking about the pros and cons of starting new stuff vs. changing what we already have. He is open to the Spirit and advice.

Tom had a question about how to access the format and materials for Conscious Contact. It is on the FRLC website. They are located under “The Lutheran Recovery Network” instead of “resources”. The Lutheran Recovery Network is an old name when we were working on developing a fellowship for laity in recovery. Melanie will try to move them over to “resources”. Karen noted that there aren’t references to codependence on the website, it was also noted that it focuses on alcohol not addiction. Ed would like to hire someone to redo FRLC website when he has the resources. In the meantime, we volunteers do what we can. A problem with the FRLC is that we haven’t done systemic sustained marketing. In the meantime, Melanie will ask Bea to update the “Save the Date” banner unless she can figure out how to do it herself, changing the dates to February 11-13, 2021. Ed will let Melanie know if the dates change.

The FRLC needs to make some decisions about the future. We plan to discuss this at our meeting in conjunction with the Rostered Ministers Gathering. Ed will develop a communication piece regarding the gathering, inviting FRLC members to come and help us envision the future. Melanie did a Facebook fundraiser to pay for a mailing, intending that it fund this mailing. She sent invitations to people who have had some connection with the A& F Conference and thinks it was helpful to have a specific purpose for the funds. Others may have Thrivent dollars to designate.