GLEN WAVERLEY UNITING CHURCH

MEETING OF THE CONGREGATION

To be held in the Church at 11:30am on Sunday 30th July 2023 - following the 10:00am Combined Worship service.

A printable version of this agenda and key documents will be attached here.

AGENDA (Draft - subject to change)

1. Welcome

2. Prayer

3. Confirmation of Minutes of Meeting held on 5th March 2023

The minutes of the November meeting of the congregation are at CongMeetingMinutes20230305

4. Reports and Recommendations

4.1. Ministry Team Report

Some good news about some of our programmes (for information)

4.2. Church Council Report

4.3. People and Culture Report

5. Congregational Outreach Projects

Discussion of how we want to proceed with congregational outreach projects this year.

Information from the chair.

There is currently no Congregation Outreach Project selection committee or Outreach Mission Group, so matters concerning outreach projects need to be directly considered at meetings of the congregation. I understand that action is taking place to establish a new Outreach Mission Group, so this may be only a temporary situation.

The March meeting of the congregation resolved to accept the 2021 proposed Congregational Outreach Projects for distributing the proceeds of this year's fete. However, since then the situation has changed with two of those projects being withdrawn and introduction of new rules for funding overseas projects.

From now on, directly supporting overseas projects requires compliance with the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profit Commission’s (ACNC) External Conduct Reporting Standards. This means that considerable due diligence investigation is needed on proposed projects and on projects during implementation. There is an associated set of special requirements for approval, record keeping, and reporting. See http://wiki.gwuc.org.au/gwuc/ACNCExternalConductReporting.

I have been advised that it is not viable with our current volunteers to take on the extra due diligence and reporting workload associated with direct funding of overseas projects. However, it remains an option to work with our overseas aid agency, Uniting World, to fund overseas projects. It might be possible to make suggestions to Uniting World concerning projects that they fund.

It will not be practical to consider specific projects proposed during the meeting without prior notice, because it is unfair to ask meeting attendees to make such decisions without sufficient time to consider the options. If anyone has specific projects that they would like the meeting to consider please contact JohnSnare before July 16th.

At the time of preparing this draft of the agenda, the status of the Friends of Ermera project was still being checked. Depending on the outcome, there may be an another proposed resolution concerning that project.

Proposed Resolution:

This meeting of the Congregation of the Glen Waverley Uniting Church resolves to distribute the proceeds of this years fete as follows: one third to our local welfare programme, one third to UCA Frontier Services, and one third to UCA Uniting World.

CongMeetingAgenda20230730