Maintaining Our Lifelines to Home

By Jeanne and Tom Lounsbury

We like to travel. We like to travel a lot in retirement. Travel and volunteering have been our biggest focuses since we retired. Staying connected with First Congregational Church has been an interesting and integral part of keeping our Colorado connections active. When we started on our travel journey, we didn’t think much about nurturing and maintaining our church connections. We didn’t realize how much church was a critical part of our lives when we are home during the year. We expected our church involvement to fall off and thought we would reconnect once we stopped traveling so much. But we found that our church family energetically welcomed us home each time we returned and encouraged participation.

Tom and I have been on committees through most of our time at FCC. When we retired seven years ago, I was on Stewardship that mostly meets late fall and early winter. That was easy to maintain with our months away as we always come home for that time. We also jumped in on some short-term projects around the church to stay connected.

Covid and a paradigm shift started early in 2020, which morphed into being able to be active in church from the privacy of your home… or in our case, our RV, wherever it may be. Between online church services and the Board and Committee meetings moving to Zoom, we ramped up our involvement in church. I moved over to Board of Management and Tom picked up three committees, which participation can be accomplished with Zoom and in-person involvement when we are home.

Additional changes at church include allowing board members to remain on their board beyond the 3-year term, Board leadership being divided between co-chairs and Boards and Committees and changing their rigid paradigm of membership expectations. We are not the only members who spend significant time away from Colorado but continue to be very active at FCC. These changes allow much more flexibility with church involvement, which we feel benefits us as well as the church.

Any time I think we are going to pull back from church due to our life changes (careers and kid’s activities keeping everyone super busy, kids going off to college, retirement focused on extensive travel), we become even more engaged with our church family. First Congregational Church is always there for us with each transition. As we grow with FCC, FCC grows and morphs with us allowing us to maintain our lifelines to this amazing community.

Dear God, thank you for a church like First Congregation Church of Boulder that adapts and moves forward with the times. Thank you to the community within FCC who facilitates those changes and accepts them in a welcoming and forward-thinking manner.