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Shenandoah Lutheran Ministries
Diaper Bank Near You in
P.O Box 132 , Toms Brook, Virginia 22660, USA
Our Mission
In response to Jesus’ Great Communion, members of SVLM, Inc. are called to spread the Good News of Christ Jesus, and to serve God, our congregations, and our community.
Our History
The current group of nine Lutheran congregations came to be because of a study done by the Virginia Synod. The Synod put together a task force, named the Valley Strategy Team, to look at the decline in attendance of Lutheran churches in the Shenandoah Valley and find ways to turn around this downward trend. This Strategy Team presented the findings of the task force by meeting with pastors and lay leaders in each of the Lutheran conferences in the Valley. These meetings were used to encourage each conference to explore ways to work together to turn around the declining trend.
The Central Valley Conference (Shenandoah County) met on April 28, 2007 at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Toms Brook. The Strategy Team invited every Lutheran church in the Central Valley Conference to send members from their counsel, other lay leaders or interested congregation members and their pastor to this meeting. After a day of hearing the results of the Strategy Team’s findings, small group discussions, and whole group brainstorming the nine congregations represented decided they wanted to join together and work to grow the Lutheran mission and ministry in Shenandoah County while helping one another find ways to grow our own congregations. Each of the nine original congregations chose a representative to serve on this new “team”. In addition, to representation from each congregation the Central Valley Conference Dean plus one pastor from one of the participating churches joined to the team in an advisory role, they had voice but no vote.
Thus the Cooperation in Mission Team was born. The CIM Team held an organizational meeting in May 2007. Our team has remained at nine congregations; we applied for, received a 501 C3 non-profit status in December 2009, and renamed the organization, Shenandoah Valley Lutheran Ministries, Inc.