(The following was a letter sent out to New England Methodists after the close of this year’s Annual Conference)

Good Evening All!

 I trust that all of you have made it through the weekend. If you are receiving this email, odds are that you either participated in, volunteered for, or step up for a participant in this past Friday’s inaugural Miles for Mission: 5K at Gordon College. By way of this letter, I would like to thank you for your support, as the race was an incredible success and I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you all.

We had well over 60 participants in Friday’s event and raised a significant amount for Imagine No Malaria.  The pics from the event are posted and can be accessed via the link on the web site or http://www.flickr.com/photos/milesformission/.   Winners have also been posted to the site (http://milesformission.org) (Alongwith a couple of “honorable mentions”  )

After all expenses are considered, we are estimating that we have raised approximately $3,100 for the cause. A full accounting will be posted on the milesformission.org website as soon as we finalize the last wave of expenses and giving.   For those that are still interested, we have t-shirts for sale and can collect donations on line for Imagine No Malaria or next year’s race (see the giving tab or contact me directly at pastorscott2007@yahoo.com)

In addition to raising funds, we learned a lot about how to run this event more successfully next year. It looks like our biggest challenge for this past year was a course that, at times, wasn’t posted as clearly as we would have hoped. We will certainly correct for that next year. Beyond that, we had smaller challenges that hopefully we can work out for 2012. We welcome any commentary on how to make this even better (and you can contact me directly at the email below or feel free to leave a comment).

I would also like to take this opportunity and thank our sponsors; Road ID (www.roadid.com) for Bib printing, and various race day supplies, Fit4Faith.org (for the purchase of our online presence), and Great Beginnings, LLC (For the purchase of all water, and post race refreshments). We encourage you to check out their websites and thank them directly for their support of this great event. As we begin planning for 2012, please keep in mind those organizations in your community, that might want to support this event.

As of this morning, the final results and photographs have been posted online at milesformission.org and we invite you to take a look! While there we encourage you to subscribe to the site, by clicking on the “sign me up” button on our website. This will keep you in the loop as we plan for upcoming events, and more. We also have a facebook site that is growing day by day.

With all this said, I offer my thanks for all who helped make this event so successful.  A special thanks goes to Arnie, Ruth, Dan,Tricia and Shin who helped on Race Day.   As I said at the race start: what started as a passing comment, developed a life all its own.  Without the help of those fine individuals, I would have had a breakdown right there on the quad.

Although it was a fund raising opportunity for the conference, the stories shared with me were the most moving part of the day. Learning of how many of you, in order to prepare for this event, became refocused on embracing a better and healthier lifestyle was beyond encouraging. Hearing how much those small steps have made a difference truly made everything worthwhile.

That said, I thank you all again! God Bless you all, and Keep Moving!

Pastor Scott Masters

Asbury Church – Chesterfield, NH