Sunday morning after church, our Merger team met online for our 4th session. To continue our conversation and discernment regarding the vision for our new unified ministry.
We continued the work of clarifying our vision as explained in Will Mancini's book GOD DREAMS.
In this book, he outlines that based on many years of guiding churches through this process, he has identified 12 "templates" which almost all churches fall into. These templates are sort of categories which help to refine our thinking and discussion.
We took our work from the last meeting and the material from the book and sought to identify both which of these templates describes where we are AND where we feel God is leading us as a unified ministry. You can read the section of the book here.
We decided on two templates:
Targeted Transformation - Your church’s vision is to identify a specific people, place, or thing (the wider Rock Hall Community) you want to see changed dramatically by the gospel.
Presence Manifestation - Your church’s vision is to welcome and experience God’s presence anticipating ripple effects far beyond the life of your congregation.
We discussed ways which these fit together and reflected who we are, as expressed in our current ministries and care for our community - and revealed what we see as the vital work of the church and our community's greatest need - spiritual development. Our group is in the process of discerning and "wordsmith-ing" and these ideas into language that accurately and clearly captures and communicates our vision.
We also discovered the need to have a name for this new ministry in order to help it become more tangible for us as a team and for our church members. We are beginning to pray through and discern this as well.
Understanding that vision is important to the direction of our merger, but only one of the elements we need to consider. In God Dreams, Mancini discusses how vision is one side of a frame through which we see our future. The other sides are our Values, our Ministry, and our Measures
In groups we worked through a process to identify and then refine a list of the things that we felt were most vital to us as a community of faith. We came up with a list of 8-10 things and over the next couple of weeks, we will be refining that list further so that it accurately captures the work of the whole group in 5-6 values. We will include descriptions to clarify our meaning of each value.
These values will then guide the the way we live out our vision. shaping our ministries.
We are scheduling to meet every two weeks immediately after church, next will be July 12th.
Present yesterday were: Carol K., Glenda D., Maria C., Debbie B., Dave K., Artie K., Elizabeth G. & Pastor Gary
Comments