Feb 5, 2020
Dear Church Family,
This past Sunday we held our annual meeting to reflect on where we have seen God at work in 2019 and to talk about where God is leading us in 2020 and beyond. At the meeting, elders shared that we believe we need to do four things for us to clarify our identity and direction as a church community:
- We need to reframe our mission.
- We need to recast vision.
- We need to rearticulate our values.
- We need to change our church name.
For those of you who were not able to attend the meeting, I'd like to unpack how we prayerfully came to that decision.
Last July the elders began engaging in active listening so that we could better understand who we are and where we want to go as a church family. We listened to over 60 people to gather stories and comments. From those conversations, we generated a narrative of our current shared reality. In November we gathered with over 40 people from our community to process the narrative and get more feedback.
Since November, the elders have been working to name our deep longings as a community and to identify several high-level priorities that can help us move towards our deep longings. The deep longings we identified are as follows: to have deeper roots in the Trinitarian Christian faith, stronger bonds of connection with one another, and to actively engage in compassion and justice locally and globally. If you came to the group listening night I'm sure those three deep longings are not a surprise to you.
Read More
