We hope you had a great Christmas and end of 2016.

We had a joyful celebration with Michael and Bethany both back in Florida, and with Anne Marie’s parents visiting from their home near Tampa. The six of us went to church Christmas eve. (In the photo above, you can see Bethany in the second row, holding a candle while looking at her grandmother. Both are wearing red. Their grandfather, in a green shirt, is lighting Michael’s candle near the center of the
photo.)

On Christmas morning, we had breakfast together (below) before opening gifts.

We are looking forward to new opportunities in 2017. During December, I met with several co-workers to brainstorm about and plan our team’s future work. We’ve landed a plan to report the kinds of stories we used to report in the print magazine.

First, in early March, we expect to release our first issue of an email newsletter. That will combine different formats for stories. Some will look like what the magazine contained: feature stories, photo essays and articles to help readers’ faith grow. But there will also be videos and interactive items that we couldn’t show by print.

Second, we will add a print newsletter. It will likely overlap with the email newsletter, but may contain even more. Meanwhile, we are still editing stories for our website, Cru.org.

My focus the last two weeks has been writing a production calendar, listing dates and deadlines our team will use to produce stories for all three of these ways of communicating. ­It will only become more complex from here.

Thanks so much for praying for our team through this transition. Don’t stop. There is still a lot of planning and work to do as we move through 2017. We’ll keep you informed, and we plan to send you our new publications as they are developed. We’re grateful for your prayers and partnership with us.