In the past, if you wanted to order flowers to beautify our worship space, there were three ways you would sign up. You’d sign your name on the list on the white board in the Narthex, or you could fill out a form, or you could go online and make a donation. You were then expected to pay for the flowers during the week before they would arrive. All very simple, right?

Well, not exactly. In the same way you don’t want to see how sausage is made if you enjoy eating it, you had no idea the headache that system was for the administrative staff. You see, often people would pick the same dates. It was a real mess with people signing up for dates in three different places. Plus, on the whiteboard and online, we often didn’t know what the dedication was. Hardest for our bookkeeper, if you signed up on a form or the whiteboard, we had to figure out who had paid and not paid, and often even forgotten to pay. 

But now we have a much more efficient and accurate way for you to order your flowers and make sure you get the dates you want, and pay for them when you order them so we don’t have to bug you about them later. Click below to experience the new and improved flower ordering page on our website. No longer will you have to guess or sit and wonder if you actually got the dates you wanted – the page will only allow you to sign up for dates that are available! No longer will you have to put a reminder in your calendar, or endure the church office calling you, to make sure you pay for them – the system will ask you to put in your credit or debit card information. And there is also a box for you to write the dedication out so we make sure we get it right for you.

Now this new system will only be available online. But if that doesn’t work for you, you can still call the office and we will get you signed up for a date and then pay by check. This is the only way we can easily show you which dates are still available. Currently, there are only ten dates for flowers left for all of 2025. Sometime after Easter, we will open up dates for 2026 and let you know when those become available for sign ups. We hope you understand that this will greatly reduce staff time trying to coordinate dates, finding alternate dates for when more than one person asked for the same date, and finding out which payment went for which Sunday.

In the future, look for more changes to the Giving Portal so that there will be individual, specialized forms for each type of giving. The goal is to make the Giving page easier to navigate so that you don’t have to pick a fund or giving option from the dropdown menu then know what amount might be required. Also, we can now offer direct links and QR codes to different giving options. This is just the beginning of an ongoing project to update and improve our church website in general. Good communication is vital for us, and a big part of that is to make our website as user-friendly as possible. So in the coming days and months, watch for improvements that we think you will really appreciate. “We are blessed to have some very talented individuals among us in the church,” Pastor Bruce says, “and they are helping us to make the necessary improvements.”

For those of you who have signed up for flowers for this year and haven’t paid yet, we will repost the list of flower signups for 2025 and ask that when possible, please pay in advance so that we no longer have to track who has paid and for what Sunday. 

So if you’d like to see the first of these improvements in action, why not give our Easter flower giving page a test drive?