Building Your Membership Profile

Since it began over 20 years ago, the ELCA has been committed to being a welcoming, diverse denomination, and its goal is for at least 10% of its membership to be persons of color or whose language is other than English. Each year, along with statistics about attendance and finance and educational programs, the ELCA asks congregations to report their racial/ethnic make-up in order to measure progress toward that goal.

In the past the GLC staff has estimated this information. But Gethsemane’s ethnic make-up has been changing and we believe that gathering this information in a more accurate, meaningful way will help us understand who we are as a congregation and be respectful of our diversity.

We now have a place in our membership database to record members’ race/ethnicity. We need each member to let us know how they identify themselves. You can do that by going to your Personal Profile in Access Gethsemane and choosing the Race/Ethnicity category that best describes you. Parents, please enter this information for your children as well. You can also check the rest of your information for accuracy, change the Newsletter Options to choose to get your newsletter by email , and complete the Attributes section of the Serving tab to tell us more about your interests and abilities. If you don’t have access to a computer you can contact Karen Eckenrode in the church office and she can record your information.