The Epic, Pt. 44

The request in Elder Ramirez's letter of Oct. 30 that we provide a written statement "outlining all the issues at hand" left the Group bewildered, since we had already sent the conference several letters describing the problems in detail. After careful consideration the Group decided to keep this required statement brief and general. To our minds, all of the problems Takoma Park was facing stemmed from a single issue—failure to adhere to the Church Manual. Our statement could have gone on at great length about all of the problems resulting from this failure, but we believed that this was the heart of the matter, and that by mentioning it we were encompassing all of the resulting problems as well.

Our issue statement was emailed to Elder Ramirez by Elder B on December 12: "The issue is: The present governess structure of the Takoma Park SDA church is not in harmony with the church manual. This is notibly reflected in the absence of a church board as stipulated in the church manual."

Unfortunately, there were a couple of spelling errors in the issue statement that Elder B emailed to Elder Ramirez. The statement should have read, "The issue is: The present governance structure of the Takoma Park SDA church is not in harmony with the Church Manual. This is notably reflected in the absence of a church board as stipulated in the Church Manual." Much to our chagrin, Elder Ramirez chose to quote this statement with the typing errors intact in all subsequent meetings and correspondence until we made a point of correcting them some months later.

Timeline note: The holidays, schedule conflicts, and inclement weather all contributed to delay the first of the meetings specified by Elder Ramirez's Oct. 30 letter until early February 2009. We will return to this thread of the story when we reach it, but there were some significant local events which occurred in the meantime which we will be describing first.

Next: Mission and Vision

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