FOR LENT
Sample member mission
Why not introduce the “spiritual athletes” who make up Lenten study groups to member mission? Find a mentor – or take on the role yourself – who will lead them through discerning their current daily missions. Mentors will find all the help they need on the website at membermissionpress.org > Making the Vision Work > Basic Tools. For discernment in a daily mission field each week, use:
Basic Tools 3A – Hints for discovering your present daily missions
Basic Tools 3B – Worksheets for discovering each of your present daily missions
Back them up with:
Basic Tools 2 – Reflecting on our six daily arenas
Basic Tools 3 – Our daily arenas as our daily mission fields
For some other options, see:
Basic Tools 4 – Discovering God's gifts for our missions
Basic Tools 5 – Congregational missions and member missions
Basic Tools 6 – Maslow on our daily missions
Basic Tools 10 – Building a team to help me in each of my daily missions
Basic Tools 11 – Teach a spirituality that empowers member mission
Another resource is a draft copy of Part One of A Workbook for When the Members are the Missionaries which presents all of the above – and more – in a document you can give to each participant. Request your copy from membermision@aol.com. [And, if you want to be a prepublicaton reader of final draft, let us know.]
For meditation – Ghandi’s seven deadly social sins
Politics without principle.
Wealth without risk.
Commerce without morality.
Pleasure without conscience.
Education without character.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Become more media-wise
Draw on these resources for study groups, preaching, newsletters, and the like. For study guides for children and youth from pre-Kindergarten through the 12th grade – and adults: go the Center for Media Literacy at www.medialit.org. Their “resources are selected that will enable educators to effectively teach - and students to learn - to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in all its forms.” For students and adults: go to the Media Education Foundation at www.mediaed.org for resources “to examine how global media conglomerates shape a highly restrictive set of corporate principles that are undermining the way we educate our young people and ourselves, and therefore our founding democratic principles of freedom, fairness and social justice.”
STORIES
Her home as a retreat center
Mary Beal offers her home for traditional retreats of silence, shared meals, and prayer.
Groups of two to three come Tuesday nights and leave Friday. She and her co-leader, a qualified spiritual director, build the retreats around the needs of the people. Note St. Francis under the candle (Mary and her co-leader are both third order Franciscans) and the cat (Mary loves them). Letters of appreciation speak of finding more help than expected; recovering oneself in a time of stress; and being “home” while changing communions. Mary comments: “God gives us awareness of God’s presence. And God helps me to let go.”
Contact: Mary Beal, 116 Sisco Street, PO Box 251, Westport, NY 12993; 518-9622950; marybeal@westelcom.com.
The Workbook working
Janice Ford, Lay Pastoral Associate at Trinity Church in Milford, MA attended the Province One Stewardship, Evangelism, and Congregational Development Conference last April. She went not knowing what to expect, but decided to sit in on the Member Mission workshops offered by Wayne Schwab. The workshop’s purpose was to get the church’s message “out into the world through the daily lives of the members – the members on mission.” She was hooked after the first session, and during a break, picked up a draft copy of A Workbook for When the Members are the Missionaries. Janice found member mission to be just what she thought Trinity could use. On return home, she pored through the work book and found it made “good, logical, sequential sense.” She shared it with the rector and they decided she might use her role as chaplain to the vestry to share it with them as well.
In May, the wardens called a special vestry meeting for Janice to explain what member mission was about. She had two hours to present it and how to proceed if they chose to use it. She used photocopies of some of the slides in PowerPoint that accompany the workbook, as well. Also, as suggested in the workbook, she offered some wording for a mission statement which they revised as follows: “In God’s name and led by the Holy Spirit, we support and equip one another to implement Jesus’ mission in baptism for all people in all places at all times.” They closed with plans for next steps.
Two to three weeks later, the wardens and Janice invited the other formal and informal leaders of the church to a meeting on June 14. Response was good and she presented to them most of what she had presented to the vestry. The road map for the congregation – another resource from the draft of the workbook – for specific steps to take came next. To complete it, they invited a broadly representative group from the church as a whole for that step. The group met twice in July and once in August. Initial steps chosen centered on where the congregation as a whole might go in the mission field of the church.
At that point, Janice entered seminary and was advised by her bishop to turn over full leadership in member mission to the wardens. Then, the rector accepted another call and left in December.
However, the wardens, Carol Cormier and Verna Kosiba, want to continue and have engaged a team of Wayne Schwab and John LeSueur for a Saturday session with the vestry followed by Sunday preaching and a presentation to the congregation on March 25 - 26. The vestry session will be four to five hours. The Sunday congregation at the second liturgy averages 140-160 including children. The session following it will last 30-45 minutes. Initial planning centers on the nine areas of church life that the vestry has organized itself around – worship, spiritual formation (for adults, youth, and children), outreach, evangelism, stewardship, pastoral care, fellowship, sacraments, and the physical plant. Next steps will help each of these areas of concern to find ways unique to them to support the members in their daily living as Christians from Monday to Saturday.
For example, evangelism wants to tell others about Trinity Church. Let it, rather, ask them to consider joining Jesus’ mission. Explore with them about some of the things they are doing to make life more loving or more just in the different areas of daily life. Then, talk of Trinity as a place for guidance and power in how to do those things better. For stewardship, survey members for what they want from Trinity to live better at home, at work, and in their local community. Their answers could structure the program for the coming year and, in turn, structure the budget. For pastoral care, visit lapsed members to hear about their daily lives and support them as seems fit – rather than, just, to get them back into church. Members will talk of the church with the lapsed – but, now, as a help for daily life rather than “a place people should be.” In worship, build the prayer time around the various mission fields week by week. These are just possibilities. During the actual weekend in March, concrete ways will be chosen to connect member mission with each of these nine areas of concern. The weekend may not cover all nine but will set a path to follow.
One interesting part of this Trinity, Milford story is how the congregation is continuing its work while in the search for a new rector. Church life and growth has not come to a halt but has kept moving. If the leaders want member mission, it will work!
Contacts: Janice Ford, 16 Crestview Drive, Mendon, MA 01756; 508-473-5838; ford55@comcast.net. Carol Cormier, 136 Clubhouse Lane, Northbridge, MA 01534; 508-234-3084; carol_cormier47@hotmail.com. Verna Kosiba, POB 633, Upton, MA 01568; 508-529-3081; vernakosiba@msn.com
Foreign aid and morals
Ruth was a US Agency for International Development worker advising in business development in Iraq. She became concerned when she saw a political appointee with almost no experience in development banking about to take advantage of a nonprofit US-based organization by funneling $25 million through that organization to create a bank with himself as its Chairman of the Board. The Bank, once formed, would have no government oversight, leaving the Chairman to use the funds as he wished. As a temporary political appointee, he was not accountable to the same ethics rules as most government employees. The nonprofit organization, despite threats which could have destroyed their reputation, did not accept the funds, forcing the political appointee to use his connections with very senior level government employees to “convince” the nonprofit to play along. Ruth managed to convene a meeting where the man’s obvious bad intentions were made clear to senior officials. They were able to rewrite his business plan to make the bank a genuine service to Iraqis, without harming the nonprofit or violating ethical standards. And fortunately, his temporary governmental duty came to a halt when the US government officially handed control over to the interim Iraqi government in 2004. The cost to Ruth of all this was the loss of a big grant to claim as funded through her work. For her, that was hardly a worry. As she puts it, it was following the general principle of doing “the moral and right thing. I see God in that principle.”
Contact: Anonymous
A specific of mission at work – hum-drum?
Dan drives for a septic tank service. He was given a call to a home he had never serviced before. His boss told him how to get there. As he thought about the directions, he came up with a shorter route. His worry was that he knew his boss would not like to be second-guessed. On one hand, the boss would never know it if he took a different route. On the other hand, his risk was that if he had a breakdown of some kind, his boss would learn he had taken a different route – one not advised by his boss – and, thereby anger his boss.
Some aspects of the mission issues involved: