Member Mission Newsletter #19    

Helpful hints:
 •  Begin with asking people what they are doing right now to make life better and you draw on their strengths rather than their weaknesses.
 •  Draw out the seldom-named but actual expectations of “church” that members and leaders really work from by asking, “What’s our church really here for?”  Encourage candor by sharing some of your own “secrets” from you past or present.

 

A place for member mission at a significant “table”

 

Member mission was part of an important strategy planning session, August 19-20, at the Episcopal Church Center.

 

General Convention of 2003 had called for strategies for the future of theological education (A-120) and for lifelong learning (B-024) to be presented at the next Convention in 2006.  At its June 2004 meeting, the Executive Council called for a task force to reconcile these two resolutions into a single proposal.  Donn Morgan, chair of Episcopal Seminary Deans as Dean of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and the Rt. Rev. Jim Kelsey, chair of the Standing Commission on Ministry Development, were asked to head a task force to begin this reconciliation of the two resolutions.  In phone calls to each co-chair, I raised the question of including a representative of the member mission vision on the task force.  I presented the vision as congregations seeing the daily living of their members as the real “delivery point” or “bottom line” of all they do and making the support of their members’ daily living one of their primary purposes if not their primary purpose.  I was invited to represent this approach on the task force.

 

Fourteen of us met and, with the aid of a consultant, formulated guidelines for the work of a strategy team, its funding, and its staffing to submit to Executive Council at its meeting in the Fall of this year.  A “collaboration space” on the Internet has been set up for the fourteen of us to continue our work together.

 

While the focus of this meeting was reconciling the two resolutions, it “opened the door” for member mission to continue to dialogue with a significant new direction for the Episcopal Church.                                                                                                             – AWS 

 

 

With the help of a practiced writer of manuals, a workbook is on the way that will make it easy for both individual members and for their congregations to implement the vision of WTMATM. 

 

The writer comments: “We are taking WTMATM as well as many of the materials contained on the website and condensing them into an easy to use, informative workbook.  By doing the step-by-step exercises in the workbook, both individuals and churches can formulate a plan for living the Christian life and mission while supporting others doing the same and then put it into action.  This takes all the guesswork out of how to proceed after reading the book or any other on leading a Christian life.  Individuals and congregations will finish the process with a custom-made plan of action for the work ahead as well as identifying what and who is needed to do this most critical work.”

 

Individual members will find:
• a workable – though, brief – theology
• an easy start in the specifics of daily missions
• a path for decision-making
• how to find helpers for our daily missions
• ways for both individual and group Bible-study and reflection

 

Congregational leaders will find:
• help in learning about systems
• ways to develop church-wide awareness and support

 

More resources

 

For open forums on the election (wider world mission):
• Ground rule: no one speaks a second time until everyone who wants to speak has been heard from.
• St. Boniface, Sarasota, FL, asks: “Please refrain from personal or critical comments about what previous speakers.”
• For an in depth study of how-to, see Brian McLaren’s “Scared to Talk Politics in Church? You don’t need to be partisan to be prophetic” in the September 2004 Sojourners at http://sojo.org/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0409&article=040910

 

For parents (home mission):
• No television in the bedroom for children.  Instead, say, “Let’s all have dinner as a family and, afterwards, we’ll watch television together.”
• For teens, phone only in the kitchen and your bedroom – a single mother of three teens came up with this brainy way to know what’s going on!