What's Happening

In Fall 2025, Cascadia New Church members and friends met in a series of SWOT and Hoshin Planning workshops. We have identified specific goals to address the needs of our church community, and to ultimately strengthen and build our congregation. We have created two teams that are involved in executing tasks to achieve our first two goals.  

• The Marshalling Resources team, led by Mark Illing, is carrying out a survey to gauge what's working well, what's lacking or not working well, and what we can do to better serve our members and friends. We are also trying to learn what talents members have that they could share with our community. As of Fall 2026, that survey is near completion. Once finished, we will compile the results and share those with our congregation. We are also examining our church's financial status in detail. At the moment, that involves working with our central church offices in both the US and Canada to establish timely and transparent financial reporting, transfer of funds, and clarification about pastoral remuneration.

• The Children's Programming team, co-led by Shar Junge and Loisann Openshaw,  is currently reaching out to both parents and their children to determine how we can best serve our youth. We continue investigating how to develop and improve our programming for children of all ages. We have created a youth discussion group for tweens and teens, which we piloted online in Spring 2026 and again in person at our Cascadia Family Camp in July. Starting in Fall 2026, we have implemented monthly online youth discussions that correspond to our broader worship service themes. For young children (0-6 years), we have researched educational resources that parents can use when it's convenient for them. Those resources, which also correlate to our current worship services themes, are now available on our parent resources page.