Dear Church Family,
As promised, today begins our summer focus on the objectives of our staff for the 2026 year. We have begun collaborating, planning and working together to help these objectives move us closer to our collective goals. Every week, you will get a chance to see an interview with one of our amazing Directors about the objectives that they are working on and how we can come a long side to support them.
Pastor Rachel’s Objective: Transform our playground into a premier, safe, inclusive play environment that fosters growth for both our children’s ministry and church’s preschool.
Today, we begin with my objective and the Scripture I choose is one that you can commit to memory,
“Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength!” Nehemiah 8:10
When I think about joy on our campus, I always picture our playground. For 23 years, this playground between the sanctuary and our Asbury building is overflowing with joy! Yes, there is the occasional boo-boo, bump or scrap, but there is no grief in this place, only joy. As a mom of three kids, we are at playgrounds a lot, but our church’s playground is their favorite. I wanted to share some of the words I shared with our Leadership Council this past Sunday as we gathered together to make the important decision about which playground we will be building next.
A playground is a place of endless possibilities and a place where adventure is endless. This is how our 221 MSEE kids and 45 Children’s Ministry kids feel each time the get the chance to run out to our playground. It is place where adventure awaits. But as I have talked to parents both new and seasoned, this wasn’t only a place where children discovered themselves, but parents did too. Two moms grew closer as friends as they shared their lives, watching over their children as they played. A husband and wife took a breath and forgave each other as they talked through the fight they got in on the way to church in this space. And two dads shared vulnerably with each other about their life struggles and trusted each other enough in this place to ask advice. This playground for years, has been a place of transformation and a place of fellowship.
That fellowship became a major part of our discussion on Sunday about the playground vendor that our Trustees spent time researching and recommending to us. Your leaders had robust conversation around which playground will be best for the families present and future that will be a part of our church and school.
A lot of work has gone into these decisions and I want to thank each person that has made this a labor of love over the last six months of work. If you are unaware our playground needs replacing, it is falling apart in places and it is well used and very loved. If you, yourself have not gone up a ladder or down a slide recently, you wouldn’t know how rickety it really is, but we are now at the place where children could get hurt if we wait and the instability of the structure now means it is a liability. This is the WHY.
The WHY NOW is answered because the materials to replace our playground will keep rising in cost. We plan to demolish this current playground next summer on June 5, 2027 and install the new playground in time for our first MSEE students and Church Families by early August 2027.
I want to thank Ashley Finfrock and Amber Woodward who have made this a passion project; it has been a labor of love. For many hours each week they took field trips to other playgrounds, talked to our three vendors, went back and forth with the renderings of different designs and made changes and negotiations. They have also spent much of their time over these last six months looking into each company’s products to find individual playground pieces that could work with our needs. We have also done our version of field research as we have talked to MSEE teachers, Nursery workers, Church members and of course our children. What we learned very quickly is that a revitalized playground will cost far more than the initial $130,000 that we printed in the Rise Capital Initiative packets. This was an arbitrary number unfortunately that was not reflective of current products and the ultimate size of our playground.
But we have a plan and God has been faithful. We have the promised amount from the Rise Capital Initiative commitments, the $140,000 that MSEE raised in their 70th Anniversary fundraiser in April and funding sources because of the faithfulness of God through wise investments and generous people.
I wanted to end today’s devotion by inviting you to email me with your questions, your prayers and your ideas. This objective will take a whole year to accomplish, but we wanted to keep you informed right off the bat with news from those helping make this important decision. Pray for us as your pastors and a few lay leaders are gathered in Lakeland this week for the Florida United Methodist Annual Conference.
May you feel the joy of the Lord this week and please don’t hesitate to reach out to Pastor Rachel at racheld@fumcwp.org