2023: A Year of Transition
Transitions are simply just a part of life. Situations change and it’s important for each of us to always be willing to adjust accordingly to new findings and situations.
Heritage 21 Foundation is no different. Throughout 2020 – 2022, we anticipated that the Covid 19 pandemic could likely become a major factor impacting so many congregations throughout North America. It turns out that we were correct in this concern.
During the fall of 2022, we started noticing a major uptick with the number of struggling churches reaching out to Heritage 21 for assistance. It wasn’t coming from one area of the country, but instead coming from every region of the country, as well as coming from congregations located in rural, suburban, and urban areas. Church leaders were honestly assessing their situation and open to discussing options available. Some congregations just needed the right coaching to gain an opportunity for their renewal. Other churches recognized that their church life cycle was in the final days and therefore, they needed Heritage 21’s legal and real estate assistance for their congregation to repurpose their assets into other great ministries.
With the demand for services increasing, how should Heritage 21 respond? The Heritage 21 Board of Trustees unanimously determined that Heritage 21 needed to change many aspects of our organization in order to meet this expanded opportunity to serve God’s Kingdom. We needed to adjust and adapt to increase our bandwidth capacity to be prepared to serve even more churches. As a result, 2023 became a year of major transition for Heritage 21.
Here are just of few of the changes that Heritage 21 Foundation implemented during 2023:
- Expanding our Board of Trustees to increase Heritage 21 Foundation’s overall skillset capacity.
- Doug Peters named as Heritage 21’s first Executive Director and our first full-time employee.
- Engaged many brothers and sisters of faith to become Heritage 21 donor partners so that Heritage 21 Foundation could expand our capabilities to serve many more congregations needing our services.
- Shifted the Heritage 21 leadership model into a new management structure to increase our organizational bandwidth.
- Established strategic working relationships with key fellowship organizations to enable stronger fellowship collaboration in serving congregations.
- Expanded the number of our Heritage 21 ambassadors, so we could become a much stronger ministry partner for the churches of Christ fellowship.
- Significantly increased the number of churches being served by Heritage 21 during the year 2023.
Wow, what a year of transition for Heritage 21! We made all these changes to position ourselves for the future. We wanted to do all we could to expand the awareness of our mission and to position the Heritage 21 organization to serve even more churches for the future.
Heritage 21 Foundation is committed to become an even stronger partner for congregations throughout our church of Christ fellowship. Our mantra continues to be focused as a ministry to enable every church to either renew or repurpose, so that God’s Kingdom can continue to be replanted.