BOARD MEETING MINUTES: August 20, 2008
Minutes for Board Meeting of
Missionary Independent Spiritual Church
August 20, 2008, 6632 Covey Road, Forestville, CA 95436
5pm to 7:30pm PT
In attendance:
Fred Burke, catherine yronwode, nagasiva yronwode
0) Preface -- Board Member Replacement: Fred Burke
July 4, 2008 Board Member Replacement zmeeting, 6pm
Prior to the final ratification of the Articles of
Incorporation or Bylaws, and owing to social
events leading to an incompatability with MISC
operations, Ferne Aycock was replaced by
Fred Burke, substituted on the Articles of
Incorporation and Bylaws, and this was official
immediately. We thank Ferne for her help with
church organization and wish her well in her
future works. We welcome Fred Burke to our
board and look forward to working with him on
new developments for MISC and at his own site
in Joshua Tree, California, where he maintains
a small candle ministry much like ours. Fred's
experience with this form of spiritual ministry
makes him a perfect choice for board membership
at MISC. We are very glad to have him aboard.
1) MISC Invoicing
The Church now has its own candle report forms for
clients, separate from Lucky Mojo (our candle suplier)
rather than expressed as invoices made by Lucky Mojo. We
want to thank the folks at Lucky Mojo for allowing us
the use of their database during the formation period of
the church.
2) MISC Donations from yronwodes
The yronwodes (catherine and nagasiva) have donated
considerable typesetting, scanning, and editorial labour
to Winmore Publications of New York so that, in lieu of
payment for their services, outreach advertisements for
MISC will be run in a number of Winmore publications.
The ads are generic in nature and state that people may
call the church for counseling help.
3) May 2008 Workshops and Convocation Report
This year the first annual Church Convocation was
organized by church volunteer Robin York (thanks!) and
conducted at the Home of Truth (a New Thought church) in
Alameda, California on May 4th. The program included
diivination and hoodoo workshop classes for all those
who paid the admission fee. A Southern style chicken
dinner for all was catered by Robin York. At the
conclusion of the day, a Convocation service was led by
Doctor Christos Kioni.
See the appendix A on Workshop/Convocation Expenses for
details.
The expenses not covered by the admission fees collected
were paid by the yronwodes (totalling $892.68). We are
seriously doubtful at this time that we will wish to run
things the same way next year, given the expenditures
and cost of the facility (beautiful, but quite a
distance to travel).
4) Church Baptisms June 6, 2008
Baptisms and ordinations were held in the Russian River
in Forestville at Steel Head Beach in the afternoon on
a particularly warm and lovely day for the event.
Recorded as baptized that day were the following:
Baptisms
* catherine yronwode
* nagasiva yronwode
* Sienna Baratti
* Robin Petersen
* Mary Ann Powell
Ordinations:
* Reverend Mother Sienna Baratti
* Deacon Robin Petersen
It is a doctrine of our church that baptism is
unrestricted in that each person may be baptised as
often or on as many occasions as he or she desires,
provided that there are ordained persons present who
have an interest in performing the service.
5) CA Secretary of State Certifies MISC
On June 9, 2008 the CA Secretary of State certified
the MISC paperwork and set the stage for our non-profit
application to the US Attorney General by Sept, 2009.
6) Church Fan Fund Report
The 2nd Annual Church Fan was completed on 7/2/09 and
is available for purchase from the church or as a
thank you gift for donation, or as a free benefit of
having visited from afar. The first fans are still
in stock (2 boxes left) and just as beautiful as ever.
Plans are to create one each year as a part of
church operations.
7) Church Obtains its Own Phone Number
MISC now has its own unique phone, phone line and number
and is now paying its phone bills from donations.
The number is 707-887-7808. It was selected for its
symmetry and ease of recall. This phone is being
used to establish appointments for services within
the church such as readings and consultations, as
well as to function as an administrative contact
for all church business.
8) Cyber-Hymnal Committee
The church is starting a cyber-hymnal committee and its
aim is to establish a base hymnal book for the purpose
of acquainting all those who may get together for social
events to know the variants on melodies and lyrics and
become conversant with different church styles, as well
as the doctrines and motifs important to the church as a
whole. The aim is to presenty an inclusive online hymnal
that draws upon the websites already available online
which feature musical introduction to common hymns in
the form of MIDI files and/or lyrics.
9) Gospel Playlist Committee
Similar to the Hymnal Committee, the Gospel Playlist
Committee seeks to identify recorded gospel songs of
value to the church in our establishment of doctrinal
and traditional character, featuring a diversity of
representation as regards what will be included. Those
recordings available as public domain MP3 files (mostly
early 20th century recordings) will be featured online
for visitors to sample and download.
10) Amazon Book Sale Project (Affiliates Program) Started
We've begun an account with amazon.com/affiliates that
should make it possible for us to sell a variety of
religious and spiritual books online for a profit at
the same time as making plain what we feel are reliable
and valuable references. our account Tracking ID is
missiindepspi-20.
11) Gift Shop and Bookstore Committee
In association with the Amazon Book Sale Project and
the Fan Committee, there is also a committee for the
construction of a gift shop and bookstore which may
extend offline to the local physical locale of the
church itself.
12) Prospects for UISP as an Online Database
catherine discussed projects that she and Lara Hopkins
Rivera will be developing for the MISC Union of
Independent Spiritual Practioners (UISP) in the near
future:
Lara gave catherine a tour of her website and showed
catherine her wiki (a mediawiki software database
environment at www.grimmwold.com) which she maintains.
Due to catherine's familiarity with mediawiki software
from volunteering at wikipedia.org, she determined that,
rather than convert the MISC pages to mediawiki (from
HTML) she hoped that by the end of 2008 she could start
a wiki database under Lara's technical supervision,
hosted at Lara's server. She said that the advantage of
creating and maintaining the UISP site as a database
rather than as an HTML site is that it would not need to
be constantly re-written and updated, but would update
itself in real time as changes were made.
Lara indicated that she was willing to donate a certain
amount of hours to the development of the UISP website,
but would expect minimal monthly compensation if she
were to technically develop, maintain, and host the
site. Since UISP is projected to be an educational
outreach committee of the chuch, Lara's fees would be
underwritten by the dues paid by approved spiritual
practitioners for a yearly directory listing and would
thus not impinge on other chuch committee finances.
catherine said that she would investigate the
probability of spiritual practitioners paying a yearly
fee for such a directory listing. She will report again
on the site development as plans move forward.
13) Crystal Silence League Report
This committee has esentially been dormant, awaiting the
funds to implement the printing of the requisite
literature. No special fund-raising project has been
allocated for this committee, and the work is being
"held over" until such time as the UISP project is up
and running smoothly.
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