Member Mission Newsletter #30 – Connections     

 

This month:  

STORIES
• Lilly’s Pastoral Excellence Project and member mission
• A grandmother’s home mission
• Small but strong in outreach
• Jim Wallis’ God in Politics for our missions in the wider world
• Loren Mead, member mission, searches, and start-ups
• A website describes their outreach

RESOURCES
• Appreciative Inquiry and member mission
• “The Global Banquet: Politics of Food – Challenging Corporate Control of the World’s Food System”
• Intergenerational learning starts the redevelopment of a congregation in decline and conflict between the generations
• More user-friendly Basic Tools on the web site
• Province 1 Seminar on “Evangelism Inside Out”
• When a mission goes badly

FOR MEDITATION
• From a commencement address
• The media and its message

 

 

 

 

John LeSueur works with the Lilly grant for pastoral excellence in the diocese of New Hampshire with coworkers in the dioceses of Maine and Vermont.  Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA coordinates the project.  John finds the various resources in member mission most useful to forward his overall objective of drawing people into the ministry of their baptism.

 

In late June, he opened a vestry retreat for the Church of the Transfiguration in Derry, NH with an introduction based on a seminar from Province 1 (see Resources below).  His objective was to develop strategies for goals set using appreciative inquiry the year before.  After the introduction, he used the resource on every part of congregational life supporting member mission (Basic Tools 17 from Making the Vision Work on the website) and asked, “What do you see the congregation doing to meet your mission statement and goals?”  After their response, he used the exercise on what each was doing now to make the world better in each of the six areas of daily life (Basic Tools 2).  Then he asked them to look again at how they were meeting their mission statement and goals.  Now they saw each was doing more than they had thought they were doing and they were already further along in meeting their mission statement and goals than they had imagined.  At that point, they went into developing strategies for their mission statement – “We are a Christian community empowering people to live into our baptismal vows” – and goals of financial ability to meet their mission, intentional welcome and incorporation, and spiritual growth for all members.

 

Reflecting on the session, John reports, “They loved it!”  Several members had come saying, ‘We never do enough outreach.’  When it was over, they said, ‘Gee, we’re doing a lot more outreach than we ever expected.’  It had changed the way they were seeing things.”  They are currently revising the strategies discussed and have already entered into a new era by remodeling the church for use by Head Start in September.   Another strategy that is being developed is small groups to support the daily ministries or missions of each member.  John pointed out along the way that, when we do our own ministries, the membership expands on its own.  And, more members mean more costs and, so, call for new ways in stewardship.

 

Of member mission itself, John says, “I want to get more of this out.  I am really excited about the work.  I like what it does and I like what it does with the people.  I also used it in a sermon last week and in a July newsletter to Faith Church in Merrimack, NH where I serve.  The people there in Merrimack are beginning to get it, too.”  
     Contact: The Rev. John T. LeSueur, 18 Gaita Dr., Derry, NH 03038; 603-216-2625; lesueurj@comcast.net

 

A grandmother’s home mission 

 Grandmother Marilyn Cole; Caroline and Charlie (8-year-old twins); Cole (a 3-year old);
Megan Kellogg, their mother; Cooper (1 1/2 years old); and Birdie, the dog.

Marilyn Cole vacationing in Willsboro, NY: “As a grandmother, I see God everywhere – in these little faces and all the things we do.  I see my husband, Ken [who died suddenly in 2001], in all their faces.  That he had such joy in them makes seeing them more special for me. . . God helps me in all I do with them giving me wisdom, strength, patience, and to be fun loving.  I try to teach them good values, what is important in life, and what life is about – being happy, responsible, a contributor to society – in all, good ways of living.”

Small but strong in outreach

 

Mary Lou Reynolds of St. Paul’s Church in Ogallala, NE (congregations average 20) used Lent to build up the missions of the members in the congregation’s outreach.  The members listed what they were doing to make life more loving and just in each of area of their daily lives (Basic Tools 2 from the Making the Vision Work on the website).  The last area of the activity – “my share in church life and outreach” – opened the door to look at what the congregation was doing in the community.  With the Congregational Church, members serve as Bingo helpers twice a month at the local nursing home and bring snacks and prizes.  Through her work as relief secretary for the Salvation Army, Mary Lou meets people in need.  Drawing on her background as a psychological social worker and school administrator, she is training a group of eight members of her own and other congregations to teach the skill sets that will help these people to overcome the life styles that keep them constantly in need.  Some of these skills are financial management, personal hygiene, completing a job application, how to interview for a job, and preparing resumes on a computer.  Next, she will teach working with women on how to cook from scratch rather to rely on prepared foods that may be selected unwisely.  Training, intermittent during the summer, resumes regular meetings on Wednesday nights.  In September, she also begins to move more heavily into teaching baptismal ministry with gifts discovery in October via “What am I doing?  What do I love to do?  What do I do well? and What challenges me?” 
     Contact: The Rev. Mary Lou Reynolds, St. Paul’s Church, 318 E. A Street, Ogallala, NE 69153; 308-284-3795; spec@megavision.com.

 

Jim Wallis’ God in Politics for our missions in the wider world

 

Jim Wallis’ book has a challenging subtitle: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (HarperCollins, 2005).  Like most congregations, St. John’s in Essex, NY (congregations average 25 in the winter and 65 in the summer), its members have strong convictions about faith and politics that cover the whole range of viewpoints.  How to discuss it together in a way that made room for all points of view was a challenge of its own.  By the third session in mid-June, we hit upon such a roomy method.  Each person selected a part of the reading assigned for that week which they wanted to discuss.  We began by listing each person’s selection with the page number.  Then, we worked our way through them letting the page numbers set the order of discussion.  The time allotted for each selection was determined by the total time available divided by the number of selections.  What could have been a “donnybrook” became a real sharing of quite diverse opinions.  Since our group averaged eight to ten, we could cover all the selections in the hour-long meeting.  Larger meetings could use the same procedure by dividing into work groups of eight or so.
     Contacts: The Rev. Eileen E. Weglarz and the Rev. A. Wayne Schwab, St. John’s Church, PO Box 262, Essex, NY 12936-0262; 518-963-7775; stjohnessex@westelcom.com.

 

Loren Mead, member mission, searches, and start-ups

 

Wayne:
Just got your new “mailing” [MMNews #29] and want to encourage you to keep on keeping on. . . it triggered something in me.  You may well know that Alban [worked hard] in the period ’75-’77, particularly, trying to focus on pastoral start-up skills and processes. . . the only way we KNEW worked in changing congregations was to work at the whole process of transition of clergy – from termination to start-up.  THAT was the crucial intervention time if you were going to change anything. . . At a time of changing pastors, TWO things get unfrozen – the pastor AND the congregation.  Both come to the new relationship potentially in a learning mode . . . In our work, we really focused mostly on the chance for the congregation to begin to evolve during this period.  I don't think we spent enough time working on helping the pastor evolve. . .
Keep on, brother.
Loren Mead (7/16/05)
[This fall, Loren and I will explore, with a diocese, the role member mission might take with both the congregation and the new pastor during the search and start-up times.  AWS]

 

A website describes their outreach

 

St. Luke’s in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho uses a website to draw you into their broad range of  community services.  Go to http://stlukescares.com/stlukes.shtml and browse through the various menus and their links to grasp the members’ commitment to make life better for all the people of all ages in Coeur d’Alene and its surrounding communities.  Just click on your interest for how to join in any of its current activities and to view pictures of the people it serves – at this time of writing, happy children.  In October 2004, the church moved beyond financial support to hands-on work with the local branch of St. Vincent de Paul, particularly with their program to combat chronic homelessness.  This work moved them to the diversity of service projects you now find listed in their minutes, notices, and online newsletter.  These include support of service men and women on active duty, highway cleanup, and helping less fortunate church members with home related chores and service.  Along with the writings of Bishop Wesley Frensdorff, the late Bishop of Nevada, they draw on excerpts from WTMATM to describe their resolve to live their faith in daily life.  A small group’s study of WTMATM in the summer and fall of 2004 led to holding up “corporate and private worship and Christian community [as] the ‘heartland’ of each Christian” (p. 1) and every Christian’s call to mission: “All of the baptized have two tasks wherever they are: one, to transform the world to accord with God's reign of love and justice; and two, to make known the one in whose name and by whose power we act, Jesus Christ” (p. 1).  Further, www.membermissionpress.org appears among the additional links for browsers.  Flash! St. Luke’s just received a $2,000 from the Kootenai Electric Trust, a local co-op, to be used for their work with St. Vincent de Paul.
     Contact: Robert S. Runkle, 5348 West Broken Tee Road, Rathdrum, ID 83858; h/208-687-5968; c/208-691-2499; Rsrunk@aol.com

 

  
RESOURCES

 

Appreciative Inquiry and member mission – Central to the eight principles of AI is the fifth: “The Positive Principle – Positive Questions lead to Positive Change” (Diana Whitney & Amanda Trosten-Bloom, The Power of Appreciative Inquiry, Berrett-Kohler, 2003, p. 54).  In the same positive spirit, member mission says build your life around where you see God at work to bring or to increase love and justice: “What has God been doing in (this area of my daily life)?”  Next, comes how to join God’s work there.  What could be more positive than starting with and becoming part of what God is already doing in each area of your life!  See Basic Tools 3A and 3B on the Making the Vision Work menu on the web site.

 

“The Global Banquet: Politics of Food – Challenging Corporate Control of the World’s Food System” – This two-part, 50-minute videotape explores the politics that threaten global food security, and demonstrates the destructive aspects of the corporate globalization of food. Produced to create public awareness, The Global Banquet shows how a handful of powerful corporations control the world’s food system, endangering the livelihoods of small farmers in the U.S. and developing countries. The program examines how corporate globalization of food supplies is contributing to mounting hunger worldwide, despite an overabundance of food. The perspectives of farmers, indigenous people, environmentalists, church groups and students working to change unjust free trade policies are included in the documentary.  Note the section on how 200 - 1,000 times more food value can come from a small farmer’s acre than from a corporation-owned acre.  Feeding the hungry is a problem of not just the corporations but every one of us in the “first world.”  To order a copy at $19.95, go to  http://www.maryknollmall.org/description2.cfm?ISBN=129; make sure you are on DVD/Videos tab; type in “The Global Banquet” on Search.

 

Intergenerational learning starts the redevelopment of a congregation in decline and conflict between the generations – Ruth Lawson Kirk tells how she was part of God’s restoration of St. Peter’s Church, Glenside, PA in her keynote address for the over 330 members of the Province 1 Conference on Stewardship, Evangelism, and Congregational Development in Westborough, MA, April 8-10, 2005.  She describes the learning itself in detail and the further steps in restoration pervaded by her genuine sharing of leadership.  The intergenerational learning continues – sometime in Advent, sometimes in Lent, this coming year on first Sundays.  Her 14-page address is available for $3.00 from Member Mission Press at membermission@aol.com.
     Contact: The Rev. Ruth L. Kirk, St. Peter’s Church, 654 N. Easton Rd., Glenside, PA 19038-4310; 215-887-1765; revruth654@aol.com.

 

More user-friendly Basic Tools on the web site – under Basic Tools on the Making the Vision Work menu, see:
Contents – By title; By category; Index
Basic Tools 3A – Hints for discovering your present daily missions
Basic Tools 3B – Worksheets for discovering each of your present daily missions
Basic Tools 10 – Building a team to help me in each of my daily missions
Basic Tools 17 – Congregational missions that support member missions

 

Province 1 Seminar on “Evangelism Inside Out” – part of an annual Conference on Stewardship, Evangelism, and Congregational Development, April 8-10, 2005 in Westborough, MA.  Putting evangelism inside of mission; seeing ourselves as missionaries; and weaving evangelism into congregational life made up an almost three-hour seminar.  A second 75-minute workshop, “Recruiting Partners for Mission,” practiced the evangelism possible as one built a team to help with any of one’s daily missions and talked of God while doing so.  The 31-pages of presentation are available for $5.00 from Member Mission Press at membermission@aol.com.
     Contact: The Rev. A. Wayne Schwab, Member Mission Press, POB 308, Essex, NY 12936; p/f 518-963-7541; membermission@aol.com.

 

When a mission goes badly and you ask where was God, see “Where was God?  Spiritual Questions of Sexually Abused Children” – Sewanee Theological Review (Christmas 2004), by Barbara Hughes.  Abused children are not the only ones who can despair of God’s help.  The questions we adults ask in adversity are the same questions children ask.  Hughes deals with both the questions and Christian responses to them most ably.  For a copy, call 1-800-722-1974 and ask for the STR office; or write STR, School of Theology, Sewanee, TN 37383-0001.

 

FOR MEDITATION

 

From a commencement address: “I told the  graduates what I suspect many speakers said this year, that the world and the church are changing more rapidly than we can comprehend.  I told them that some things are the same: the world and the church desperately need their energy, imagination, passion, impatience, intelligence and love.  And I told them that one of the great biblical themes is that God calls them and all of us to walk into the future without knowing exactly where we are headed, to let go of old securities and certainties and trust the God who promises to be with us wherever we go.”
(John M. Buchanan, “Into the Future,” The Christian Century, July 12, 2005, p. 3.)

 

The media and its message: “The primary message of the mass media, derived from this analysis of television's structure, use, and nature, is a message which inherently legitimizes: individualism and the centrality of individual desires; competition; the primacy of the visual sense; a world view which focuses relentlessly on the new, fast-paced, dramatic, and sensational; and the equation of information with entertainment.  This is not an exhaustive list, but it does provide a foundation on which to discuss the mass media’s relationship to the church.”
(Martha Smith Tatarnic, “The Mass Media and Faith: The Potentialities and Problems for the Church in our Television Culture,” The Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2005, p.457.)