THANK YOU, NEW USHERS! As I close this year and this update, let me once again, extend the opportunity to serve your church family through becoming one of its many dedicated ushers.
Lisa Kern Librarian
is Ed Simon, your assistant head usher. His willingness to fill in at a moment’s notice and to also manage the staffing of all the services, even as the available ushers continued to decline, was unprecedented. THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HARD WORK, ED! Next would be our core group of crew chiefs that did a great job supporting our services this year, especially Mark Weeden, Jim Reid and Gary Lange. THANKS GUYS, FOR ALL YOUR DEDICATED SERVICE TO OUR CHURCH FAMILY! Those individuals who stepped up to be ushers this year also deserve a huge thank you. In more normal times, we find people who are willing to become ushers and for that we are thankful, but to volunteer to usher in this challenging year really speaks to your willingness to serve.
As I’m sure many of the other reports will say, not much happened in the library this year, at least on my part. We did a few curbside exchanges, and families took advantage of times to check out books by appointment. Joan Hutcheson, a dear senior citizen who reads a few books a week at least, has visited by appointment, several times giving us at least some check out history for the year (130 since quarantine!) but of course if you can’t open the library, you don’t end up with too much to report! Obviously, the best time for College Church to check out books is on a Sunday morning when you’re here, and I’d like to believe that as you’re reading this, we will have been given permission to open the doors. But still there’s maintenance to be done, and Paul Murphy never missed a beat. Every Saturday Paul takes books off the shelf and improves the records we have about the content of each book, giving us a more accurate and searchable data base—every single Saturday (except for the three months we were not allowed to be in there at all) and some Thursdays as well. He has handled and worked with almost every book at this writing! That’s over 10,000 titles! And Linda, his wife, often joins him on Saturdays to shelve the few books that get returned, and does other shelf clean up and organization. Though you will not notice their work when you finally get to visit the College Church Library 41
