Dear Volunteer Lay Pastors,

This year, marked by COVID-19, has certainly been a challenging year. In spite of all the craziness we are thankful that God has made His presence known in our conference and in our lives. We would like to take a moment and say THANK YOU for all you do in our conference and in your local congregation.

We are writing this letter to share some sad news and some good news.

Sad news first. Due to COVID-19 we are not going to hold another Lay Pastors Training in 2020. It is our hope that we will be able to return to our regular meetings in the near future. It will certainly be a blessing when we are able to meet together again.

Now for the good news, there is still a way for you to continue working towards your certification or renewing your certification. This way is through Adventist Learning Community (ALC) at www.adventistlearningcommunity.com. ALC is a website that we are using to track your progress in the lay pastor program. It is the same website we use to track the continuing education of our professional pastors.

For those who are looking to re-certify you will need to log 2.0 CEU’s by the end of 2021 to qualify for 2021 Lay Pastor certification. If you attended the February Lay Pastors Training that earned you 1.0 CEU, and you can log into ALC and ask for credit for that class. Whether you need 1 or 2 more CEU’s for this year you can get the rest of those credits via ALC taking online classes from the website and/or turning in a request for credit for the books that you have read that are ministry related. (For books you get 0.1 CEU for every hundred pages read)

About half of you have an ALC account already. For the rest of you, you will need to log in and create one. If you have any technical issues with this process, you can contact Pastor Case (adamcase@wi.adventist.org) directly and he will walk you through the process. We encourage you to sign up and start logging credits today.

God bless you,

Pastor Case