Meeting Presentation Style

There is a season for everything. April showers bring Mayflowers. This year we might say a May flood brought beautiful June flowers and June brings meetings and celebrations. We call these meetings Community Days. Every one comes to Aberdeen unless they are sick. We usually start with some sort of State of the Community address given by our President and we usually have some sort of financial report. So we know where the money is coming from and where it is going. It is customary to hear from our sponsored ministries. So we hear how things are going at the College and Avera Hospital system, which are long time sponsored ministries. We might hear from Rural ministry or the Hispanic ministry, which are more recent sponsored ministries. Then we hear from the various committees and teams. These committees and/or teams are the product of our Chapter, which is a big meeting of the sisters that takes place every 4 years. The most recent Chapter’s Committees consists of 1. Studying any need for changes in our formation of our leadership. 2. Studying Collaboration with other PBVM communities and 3. Living out our life with an eye on Consistent Ethic of Life. I enjoyed the last report the most. We were asked to voluntarily bring a display of some sort that showed how we were personally taking Consistent Ethic of Life seriously. We called this “Consistent Ethic of Life Fair”. We had 16 takers on that and the displays varied greatly. Sisters were given 3 minutes to tell about their display. Some showed a short video, some put their actions to word of a song, some wrote a poem, some had a power point display, others just told it like it is. It was interesting. We had Nature Awareness, Environment, Recycling, Collection of items for women with little resources, The future Church, Relationships, Reports on Depleted Uranium, Department of Peace, Capital punishment and scrape books of the May flood in Aberdeen. The three-day meeting ended with a missioning ceremony. Each sister was given a card which state what she is expected to do for the year and who she is to pray specially for during the year. Then the next day we celebrate Jubilee’s. This year we had 2 that are celebrating their 70th year. We had 3 that are celebrating their 50’s and the next week end we had 9 that are celebrating their 60’s. So June is basically gone with all this meeting and celebration. These regular yearly meetings help keep us on track and accomplish as much as we do considering our age. Maybe we should give a demonstration to the White house.